Saturday, July 4, 2015

15 MILL LBS/YEAR FOOD COLORING MADE FROM PETROLEUM WILL BE ELIMINATED FROM GM CEREALS

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General Mills To Eliminate Artificial Colors and Flavors From All Cereals

June 23, 2015 | Posted in Rundown, Writers | 0 Comments

ABC Action News has just reported General Mills’ groundbreaking announcement that they are voluntarily removing harmful food dyes and artificial flavors from their entire cereal line – even Trix and Lucky Charms.
This is not to say that the brightly colored breakfast grains will become lackluster – it’s always been possible to naturally color food. There was never any need to subject consumers to 15 million pounds of carcinogenic petroleum byproducts (coal tar derivatives) per year.
The company is the first major cereal company to replace those artificial ingredients with fruits, vegetables and spices.
“We wanted to make sure they were still fun vibrant colors that we are providing and the fruity flavor that kids expect,” Kate Gallager, General Mills cereal developer, told Good Morning America.
Gallager provided an exclusive look at General Mills’ top secret cereal lab where they tried hundreds of natural ingredients like tomatoes, purple carrots and spices like turmeric for colors.
By this coming January, the company said 75 percent of its cereals will be without those artificial ingredients, likely including Trix and Reese’s Puffs; and by the end of 2016, the company hopes to cover 90 percent of the cereal brands.
General Mills says Lucky Charms’ marshmallows will prove to be the most difficult and might not become naturally colored until 2017. GM said they were making changes for health reasons and that over 60 percent of their cereals either were already free of dyes or have made the transition.
The FDA still holds that artificial colors are not harmful to the nervous system of children and do not lead to hyperactivity. The European Union disagrees – prior to banning them, they made sure ingredients displayed warnings to parents. Even if the FDA will stalwartly defend the unnecessary ingredients, there is ample proof of artificial colors linked to ADHD, allergies and cancer. The FDA should recall (no pun intended) that the artificial colors approved as safe in previous decades had to be pulled from the market for the dangerous harmful health effects.
Artificial flavors are synthetic, mainly chemically derived additives that fall under a broad spectrum of ingredients. Some individuals are sensitive to certain artificial ingredients but may have to avoid all products that contain artificial flavorings since the labels are non-specific. If the body does not recognize the components, such chemical flavorings can take up receptor sites and place heavier burdens on the liver and pancreas which need to need to exhaust more enzymes to break them down.
In recent years, GM eliminated most GMOs from most of their Cheerios line because of consumer demand. Whenever a giant food company makes great strides to please consumers, it never hurts to thank them.

Heather Callaghan is a natural health blogger and food freedom activist. You can see her work at NaturalBlaze.com and ActivistPost.com. Like at Facebook.

This article can be republished from this site in part or in full, leaving all links intact, giving full attribution including bio, under Creative Commons license.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=uUdmM4A4emQ

Tuesday, June 30, 2015

BIG AG LOBBYISTS ARE 92% OF TTIP "NEGOTIATING" MONEY AND PRESSURE

Agribusiness is the biggest lobbyist on the EU-US trade deal, new research reveals

No sector has lobbied the European Commission more during the preparation phase for the negotiations on the proposed EU-US trade deal (TTIP) than the agribusiness sector, according to data published today by Corporate Europe Observatory in a series of research-based infographics. Food multinationals, agri-traders and seed producers have had more contacts with the Commission’s trade department (DG Trade) than lobbyists from the pharmaceutical, chemical, financial and car industry put together.
The infographics reveal a dramatic business-bias in the Commission’s consultation policy around this giant trade deal. Of the 560 lobby encounters that DG Trade held to prepare the negotiations, 520 (92 per cent) were with business lobbyists, while only 26 (four per cent) were with public interest groups. So, for every encounter with a trade union or consumer group, there were 20 with companies and industry federations. The data covers contributions to the Commission’s public consultations, public stakeholder meetings and lobby meetings behind closed doors.

Pia Eberhardt, trade campaigner with Corporate Europe Observatory said: “DG Trade actively involved business lobbyists in drawing up the EU position for TTIP while keeping 'pesky' trade unionists and other public interest groups at bay. The result is a big-business-first agenda for the negotiations which endangers many achievements that people in Europe have long struggled for, from food safety rules to environmental protection.”

While the European Commission has claimed publicly that the trade deal will not threaten European rules on food and environmental safety, an analysis of the key tools and principles in the negotiations, also published today, shows that TTIP could lead to precisely that.
Nina Holland, agribusiness campaigner with Corporate Europe Observatory said: “Agribusiness lobbies such as the pesticide industry have strongly pushed their agenda via the TTIP negotiations with the aim of undermining current EU food regulations. Trade tools such as “mutual recognition” and “regulatory co-operation” are likely to lead to an erosion of food safety standards in the long run. The industry is also trying to use TTIP to derail important EU initiatives such as the one to deal with endocrine disrupting chemicals.”
The infographics also shine a light on other economic sectors that were lobbying actively in the preparatory phase of the TTIP negotiations, including telecommunications and IT, auto industry, engineering, as well as the chemical sector.
Overall, the data suggest that the agenda-setting for TTIP has been largely driven by businesses with headquarters in the US, Germany and the UK and by industry lobby groups organised on the EU level such as the European employers’ federation BusinessEurope and the European Services Forum, a lobby outfit of large services companies such as Deutsche Bank and TheCity UK. Companies from Greece and large parts of Eastern Europe were entirely absent from the corporate lobby push for TTIP, suggesting that businesses in the poorer EU countries have little to gain from this trade deal.
The data also reveals that more than 30 per cent (94 out of 269) of the private sector interest groups that have lobbied DG Trade on TTIP are absent from the EU’s Transparency Register, among them large companies such as Walmart, Walt Disney, General Motors, France Telecom and Maersk. Some of the industry associations lobbying hardest for TTIP such as the US Chamber of Commerce and the Transatlantic Business Council are also lobbying under the radar of the lobby register.
Link to infographics: "Who lobbies most on TTIP?"
Link to "TTIP: A lose-lose deal for food and farming"
Source:  http://corporateeurope.org/pressreleases/2014/07/agribusiness-biggest-lobbyist-eu-us-trade-deal-new-research-reveals

Monday, June 29, 2015

CALIFORNIA SEED FREEDOM DAY STATEWIDE PROTEST


EARTH IS NOT A MACHINE: GMO SEED PATENTS ARE REDUCTIONIST ANTI-SCIENCE FRAGMENTATION

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Stupidity and Intelligence: Science, GMOs and Our Food

How industrial-scale farming is actually becoming anti-science.
The intelligence of both human farmers and the natural world itself, writes Dr. Shiva, "is being thwarted by the false construction of the living Earth as dead matter, to be exploited limitlessly for human control, domination and greed." (Photo: fossen_42/flickr/cc)
"Science" is derived from the scire – "to know".
Each of us should know what we are eating, how it was produced, what impact it has on our health.
"Agroecology, not the mechanistic and blind paradigm of industrial agriculture, is the truly scientific approach to food production."
The knowledge we need for growing food is knowledge of biodiversity and living seed, of living soil and the soil food web, of interaction between different species in the agroecosystem and of different seasons. Farmers have been the experts in these fields, as have ecological scientists who study the evolution of microorganisms, plants and animals, the ecological web and the soil food web.
In industrial agriculture the knowledge of living systems is totally missing since industrial agriculture was externally driven by using war chemicals as inputs for agriculture. Soil was defined as an empty container for holding synthetic fertilizers, plants were defined as machines running on external inputs. This meant substituting the ecological functions and services that nature and farmers can provide through renewal of soil fertility, pest and weed control, and seed improvement. But it also implied ignorance of the destruction of the functions by the toxic chemicals applied to agriculture.
This complex knowledge of interacting, self-organizing, self-maintaining, self-renewing and self-evolving systems that farmers have had is now being confirmed through the latest in ecology. At the agricultural systems level, agroecology, not the mechanistic and blind paradigm of industrial agriculture, is the truly scientific approach to food production.
At the level of organisms, epigenetics and the new knowledge that cells are in constant communication with each other is leading to the emergence of a new paradigm of life as communication and intelligence. Living systems are not dead matter, assembled like a machine. 

Yet in recent times only one kind of knowledge, the Mechanistic Reductionist paradigm based on seeing the world as a machine, and reduction of a system its parts, has been elevated to the status of science.
The emerging sciences of complexity and connectedness expose the oceans of ignorance in which the mechanistic fundamentalism is steeped. Because living systems are self-organized complexity—and not machines— knowledge of a small fragmented part in isolation of its relationships with the rest of the system, translates into not-knowing.
This epistemic violence is now being combined with the violence of corporate interests to viciously attack all scientific traditions, including those that have evolved from within Western Science and transcended the mechanistic world view.
Industrial-scale farming, in this way, is actually becoming anti-science.
No where is this more evident than in how reductionism has  been used to colonise the seed. Seed is self organized intelligence – it reproduces, it multiplies, and it constantly evolves. Farmers, specially women, have combined their intelligence with the intelligence of the seed, and through breeding as co-creation, they have domesticated wild plants, increased diversity to adapt to diverse climates and cultures. Additionally, they have improved both nutrition and taste as well as increased resilience, which is the evolutionary potential of the seed. Seeds have been improved on the basis of ecological and social criteria.
The rhetoric for taking over food systems and seed supply is always based on "Improved Seed." But what is not mentioned is that industrial seeds are only "improved" in the context of higher dependence on chemicals, and more control by corporations.
The latest in the anti-scientific discourse of industrial agriculture is by reducing everything to "GMOs."
Genetic Engineering is used to redefine seed as a corporate "invention" to claim patents and collect royalties. Farmers suicides in the cotton belt of India are directly related to the extraction of super-profits from farmers as royalty. And this is illegal since Monsanto never had a patent on Bt cotton.
It is claimed the GMOs will increase food production but the technology does not increase yields.
It is claimed that genetic engineering is a precise technology. This is false for four primary reasons. First, genetic engineering is based on the false assumption that one gene gives rise to one trait. Second, it is so imprecise that antibiotic resistance marker genes have to be added to even know if the gene was actually introduced in the cell of the plant and genes from virulent viruses have to be added to promote the trait being introduced. Third, because the genes come from unrelated organisms, and include bacterial and viral genes, there are unknown impacts on the organism and the ecosystem in which it is introduced. This is why there are multidisciplinary sciences involved in Biosafety, and an international UN law to regulate GMOs for their Biosafety impact called the Cartagena Protocol to the Convention on the Conservation of Biodiversity.
"It is precisely on the denial of intelligence of humans and other species that the edifice of mechanistic reductionism is based."
Fourth, the anti-scientific claim that GMOs are accurate and selection and conventional breeding are inaccurate ignores the intelligence of plants and of farmers which is at play in evolution. In fact, the emergence of antibiotic resistance indicates the intelligence of bacteria to evolve under the pressure  of antibiotics. Bacteria, as intelligent beings, are remaking themselves in response to antibiotics. The emergence of superpests resistant to Bt toxin in plants, and superweeds resistant to Roundup with the spread of Roundup Ready GMOs indicates the intelligence of insects and plants to remake themselves under the pressure of toxins associated with GMOs which are designed to kill them. But it is precisely on the denial of intelligence of humans and other species that the edifice of mechanistic reductionism is based.
"Intelligence" is based on the Latin inter legere – "to choose". From the slime mold and bacteria, to plants and animals, including humans, intelligence is the choice we make to evolve in order to respond to changing contexts. Life is a cognitive system, with communication constantly taking place in a network on non-separable patterns of relationship. Living beings innovate all the time to deal with environmental challenges that face them. As evolutionary biologist Richard Lewontin says, "The characteristic of a living object is that it reacts to external stimuli rather than being passively propelled by them. An organisms life is constant mid-course corrections."
As a species, we as humans are falling behind the slime mold and bacteria to make an intelligent response to the environmental threats we face. And our intelligence is being thwarted by the false construction of the living Earth as dead matter, to be exploited limitlessly for human control, domination and greed.
The mid-course correction we need is to move beyond the mechanistic paradigm, and beyond exploitation which is manipulating not just living organisms, but knowledge itself.
It is claimed that the Bt toxin in GMOs degrades, but it has been found to survive in the blood of pregnant women and fetuses. It is claimed that Roundup and Roundup Ready crops are safe for humans because humans do not have the shikimate pathway. This is outright violence against science. Ninety percent of the genetic information in our body is not human but bacterial.

Out of the 600 trillion cells in our body only 6 trillion are human, the rest are bacterial. And bacteria have the shikimate pathway. The bacteria in our gut are being killed by Roundup leading to serious disease epidemics, from increasing intestinal disorders to neurological problems such as the increase in occurrence of autism and Alzheimers. The soil, the gut and our brain are one interconnected biome – violence to one part triggers violence in the entire inter-related system. The US Centers for Disease Control data shows that on current trends one in two children in the US could be autistic in a few decades. It is not an intelligent species that destroys its own future because of a distorted and manipulated definition of science.
As Einstein had observed: "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe."
Dr. Vandana Shiva is a philosopher, environmental activist and eco feminist. She is the founder/director of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. She is author of numerous books including, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis; Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply; Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability, and Peace; and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. Shiva has also served as an adviser to governments in India and abroad as well as NGOs, including the International Forum on Globalization, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization and the Third World Network. She has received numerous awards, including 1993 Right Livelihood Award (Alternative Nobel Prize) and the 2010 Sydney Peace Prize.
Source:  http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/06/29/stupidity-and-intelligence-science-gmos-and-our-food