A just-released study shows that animals found in the US food supply are harmed by the consumption of feed containing genetically modified corn and soy.

It’s enough to make anyone paying attention to the genetically modified food debate sit up and take notice.

And it did, but it also brought another issue to light: the growing influence that funding ties are having over scientific studies and the journals they are published in. 

The research results were striking, showing that the weight of the uterus in pigs fed genetically modified foods was on average 25% higher than in the control group of pigs. Also, the level of severe inflammation in stomachs was markedly higher in pigs fed on the genetically modified food diet.  These animals were 2.6 times more likely to get severe stomach inflammation than control pigs.  While 22% of male pigs and 42% of female pigs on the genetically modified food diet had this condition, when these pigs were compared to pigs on the control diet, it was found that male pigs were actually more strongly affected.  While female pigs were 2.2 times more likely to get severe stomach inflammation when on the GM diet, males were 4 times more likely. 

According to the researchers, these findings are both biologically significant and statistically significant. The research was conducted by collaborating investigators from two continents and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Organic Systems.

Yes, the Journal of Organic Systems.  A look at the journal’s sponsors shows that the Organic Federation of Australia sponsors the journal.

Why is this important? Journals and their editors have a lot of power in science – power that provides opportunities for abuse. The life science industry knows this, and has increasingly moved to influence and control science publishing.  In 2009, the scientific publishing giant Elsevier was found to have invented an entire medical journal, complete with editorial board, in order to publish papers promoting the products of the pharmaceutical manufacturer Merck.

And in early 2013 the scientific journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology editorial board acquired a new “Associate Editor for biotechnology”, Richard E. Goodman. According to Independent Science News, Richard E. Goodman is professor at the Food Allergy Research and Resource Program, University of Nebraska. But he is also a former Monsanto employee, the company whose products were recently challenged in a scientific study published in this journal, who worked for the company between 1997 and 2004. While at Monsanto he assessed the allergenicity of the company’s GM crops and published papers on its behalf on allergenicity and safety issues relating to GM food (Goodman and Leach 2004).

So with eyes wide open to how these journals are being used, what did the pig study in the Organic journal find? The feeding study lasted more than five months and was conducted in the US.  168 newly-weaned pigs in a commercial piggery were fed either a typical diet incorporating GM soy and corn (2), or else (in the control group) an equivalent non-GM diet.  The pigs were reared under identical housing and feeding conditions.  They were slaughtered over 5 months later, at their usual slaughter age, after eating the diets for their entire commercial lifespan.  They were then autopsied by qualified veterinarians who worked “blind” - they were not informed which pigs were fed on the GM diet and which were from the control group. The research was undertaken because farmers have for some years been reporting reproductive and digestive problems in pigs fed on a diet containing GM soy and corn (3). 

Farmers have seen a reduced ability to conceive and higher rates of miscarriage in piggeries where sows have been fed on a GM diet, and a reduction in the number of piglets born if boars were used for conception rather than artificial insemination.  There is also evidence of a higher rates of intestinal problems in pigs fed a GM diet, including inflammation of the stomach and small intestine, stomach ulcers, a thinning of intestinal walls and an increase in haemorrhagic bowel disease, where a pig can rapidly “bleed-out” from its bowel and die. The new study lends scientific credibility to anecdotal evidence from farmers and veterinarians, who have for some years reported reproductive and digestive problems in pigs fed on a diet containing GM soy and corn. The study seemed significant for four reasons:

1. Results were found in real on-farm conditions, not in a laboratory
2. Pigs were used and pigs end up in our food supply.
3. Pigs have a similar digestive system to people
4. The animals were fed a mixture of crops that contained three genetically modified genes and genetically modified proteins, relatively new to the food supply.

No food regulator anywhere in the world requires a safety assessment for the possible toxic effects of mixtures. Regulators simply assume that they can’t happen.

In other words, we are eating these foods in combination without an understanding of what their synergistic toxicity might be.

The study also aimed to address the concern of farmers who had found increased production costs and escalating antibiotic use when feeding genetically modified food crops to their animals.

But if these foods were introduced into our food supply in the 1990s, why are we only just now conducting the studies?  Shouldn’t they have been conducted before these products came to market? And what is the concern?

According to Michael Hansen, PhD, a senior scientist at the Consumers Union,  in testimony on H1936, an Act relative to Genetically Engineered Food; H2037, an Act to establish guidelines for genetically engineered food; and H2093, an Act relative to the labeling of food before the Joint Committee on Public Health in Boston, MA, said, “There is global agreement that genetic engineering is different than conventional breeding and that safety assessments should be completed for all GE foods prior to marketing.  The human safety problems that may arise include introduction of new allergens or increased levels of naturally occurring allergens, of plant toxins, and changes in nutrition.  There may also be unintended effects.”

So how did the US, the FDA, allow these ingredients into our food supply while the rest of the world exercised such precaution?  And while correlation is not causation, does it explain the 400% increase we have seen in the number of children with allergies?

Without labels on these foods, there is no way to know.

The United States, unlike all other developed countries, does not require safety testing for genetically modified plants now found in our food supply (although it does require an assessment for genetically modified animals).  The US Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) original policy on genetically engineered (or GM, for genetically modified) plants, developed more than twenty years ago,[1] says that companies may go through a “voluntary safety consultation.”  But, in the end, FDA says it is up to the companies to determine safety of any GE food.  To date, there have been some 97 “voluntary safety consultations.”

But that was twenty years ago.  So what has happened lately?

It turns out that just last June, the American Medical Association’s House on Delegates voted to change its policy on “bioengineered” foods to one that states:  “Our AMA supports mandatory pre-market systematic safety assessments of bioengineered foods and encourages: (a) development and validation of additional techniques for the detection and/or assessment of unintended effects; (b) continued use of methods to detect substantive changes in nutrient or toxicant levels in bioengineered foods as part of a substantial equivalence evaluation; (c) development and use of alternative transformation technologies to avoid utilization of antibiotic resistance markers that code for clinically relevant antibiotics, where feasible; and (d) that priority should be given to basic research in food allergenicity to support the development of improved methods for identifying potential allergens.”[2]

According to Hansen’s testimony, one big problem with safety assessments of genetically modified plants now found in our food supply is that there have been virtually no long-term animal feeding studies, with most feeding studies being of 90 days or shorter.  A carefully designed meta-analysis of 19 published studies involving mammals fed this new, genetically modified corn or soy found damage in the kidney, liver and bone marrow, which could be potential indicators for the onset of chronic diseases.[3]  However, no animal tests are obligatory for any of the genetically modified plants now found in our food supply cultivated on a large scale in the US.

Do other countries do it this way?  Or are we the only ones who take the approach: Shoot first, ask questions later?

It looks like we are one of the only developed countries to do it this way, as over 60 countries around the world either banned or labeled these ingredients in the food supply so that consumers can make an informed choice.

Both the French Food Safety Agency (ANSES) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) have concluded that such long-term safety assessment should be done on genetically modified foods.

So where are those studies? A long-term (two year) feeding study published in October, 2012 found that females rats fed the genetically modified corn died 2-3 times more quickly, and developed mammary tumors more often than controls who ate non-GE corn, while male rats fed the GE corn have liver and kidney problems at higher rate than controls, and more large tumors than rats fed non-GE corn.[4]

The study was terrible PR for the chemical and biotech industries whose shareholders rely on these products to drive profitability and was quickly criticized by the scientific community for the way in which the study was conducted. The design of the study had flaws, but perhaps it’s most significant contribution to this dialogue was that it raised the awareness of how few long-term independent studies have been conducted.

The result? It had countries around the world calling for more independent studies and science.

With the news of the US pig study, now we have another one.

The sample size was not small.  This one involved US pigs fed a combination of genetically modified corn and genetically modified soy, fed to animals in our food supply and used in our processed foods, has found evidence of adverse health effects.  This study involved a large sample size (168 pigs) of pigs raised in a commercial US piggery, and fed commercially available soy and corn for 22.7 weeks (the normal lifespan of commercial pig from weaning to slaughter) was designed “to compare the effects of eating either a mixed genetically modified soy and genetically modified corn diet, or an equivalent diet with non- genetically modified ingredients.”[5]  The study found that the uteri of genetically modified food-fed pigs was significantly larger (weighed 25% more) than those non- genetically modified food-fed pigs.  In addition, the rate of severe stomach inflammation was more than 2.5-fold higher, on average, for genetically modified food -fed pigs compared to non- genetically modified food -fed pigs (32% vs 12%, respectively).

It hit the males harder. For male pigs, the rate of severe stomach inflammation was four times higher for genetically modified food -fed males to non- genetically modified food fed males, and for females, the rate was more than 2-fold higher.  As the authors conclude “The results indicate that it would be prudent for genetically modified crops that are destined for human food and animal feed, including stacked genetically modified crops, to undergo long-term animal feeding studies preferably before commercial planting, particularly for toxicological and reproductive effects.”[6]

You would think that this had already happened before such widespread introduction into the US food supply without so much as a label. But it hasn’t, so scientists here in the US, as well as farmers, join scientists around the world calling for more independent, long-term studies.

And we need them, because a further look into this study by Mark Lynas, a climate change author who recently became an advocate for these products suggests that “if you look at the data they present (and the data presentation is at least a step better than Seralini) there are obvious problems. Clearly all the animals were in very poor health – weaner mortality is reported as 13% and 14% in GM-fed and non-GM fed groups, which they claim is “within expected rates for US commercial piggeries”, a vague statement intended to justify what seem to have been inadequate husbandry standards.

This picture is even more stark in the data presented in Table 3. 15% of non-GM fed pigs had heart abnormalities, while only 6% of GM-fed pigs did so.

He highlights that close to 60% of both sets of pigs were suffering from pneumonia at the time of slaughter, calling the study “propaganda dressed up as science.”

The problem is that this is increasingly the case on both sides of the GMO aisle, with conflicts of interests on both sides of the issue.

There is virtually no independent safety testing of these crops in the US due to intellectual property right problems.  When farmers buy genetically modified seed in the US (seeds that have been hardwired to withstand increasing doses of the chemicals sold by the company engineering them), they invariably must sign a product stewardship agreement which forbids them from giving such seeds to researchers.[7]  Since researchers must get permission from the biotech companies before they can do research, the result is a scarcity of independent research.  Scientists have even been threatened with legal action if they revealed information obtained via freedom-of-information.[8]

In early 2009 26 public sector scientists in the US took the unprecedented step of writing to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) protesting that “as a result of restricted access, no truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical questions regarding the technology.”[9]  As a result, the editors of Scientific American published a perspective stating that “we also believe food safety and environmental protection depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny. Agricultural technology companies should therefore immediately remove the restriction on research from their end-user agreements.”  We concur and believe that only truly independent safety tests will give us an answer about the safety of genetically modified foods.  In the meantime, it’s crucial that genetically modified foods be labeled, so that if people experience negative effects, they and their doctors can identify them.

Correlation is not causation, but with the skyrocketing rates of food allergies now seen in the US population, studies showing an increased risk of developing allergies after moving to the United States and the fact that few independent, long-term studies have been conducted due to the intellectual property protections enjoyed by these companies, it’s not only consumers who have a basic right to know what they are eating but parents who also have a basic right to know what is in the foods they are feeding their children.

To learn how to get involved with the labeling of genetically engineered foods in the United States, please visit Just Label It.  

Follow Robyn on Twitter @unhealthytruth and on Facebook.  She is a former financial analyst and author.

Fifteen year ago, if someone had suggested that I'd be writing this column, I'd have asked what planet they were on.

I was working as a financial analyst that covered the food industry.  My day to day consisted of meeting with management teams, taking factory and store tours and cranking out reports on companies like Kroger, Safeway, Costco and Whole Foods.  I wasn't a foodie, and I couldn't cook.

My job included crunching the numbers, learning business models and evaluating the costs of production and distribution of our food supply.

Thank goodness.

Because today, that experience has served a greater purpose: the ability to look at the current state of our food system, the financial engineering of the science behind it and the economically motivated decisions that food industry executives make to meet their fiduciary duty to drive shareholder return and sheds light on how these decision are affecting the health of our families.

And it's becoming increasingly obvious that we've got a broken economic model at work in our food system.  Farmers are rewarded with taxpayer funded resources called subsidies for growing crops in a chemically-intensive, genetically and financially engineered kind of way to drive shareholder return for the chemical companies.  While on the other hand, farmers that are growing things organically, which means by law without the use of synthetic pesticides and crops genetically engineered to require increasing doses of toxic weed killer, have to pay fees to prove that their crops are safe, then fees to label those crops with the "USDA Organic" seal and then they don't receive the same crop insurance and marketing assistance programs that the other farmers do.

Add to that the fact that American companies formulate their products one way for eaters over seas, without the use of artificial colors, genetically engineered ingredients, high fructose corn syrup, and it's enough to get anyone going.  But the fact of the matter is that what we have to label as "organic food" here in the United States is more or less called "food" in other countries.  Because overseas, it's the products that contain all of the novel ingredients like, genetically engineered ones, that have to be labeled.

So what's a consumer to do?  Learn the Big 8.  These are the ingredients which, by law and according to our very own United States Department of Agriculture, are not allowed into the production of foods that are made organically:

Most people that follow food issues had their eyes on California last night.  Voters in the state were going to the polls to determine if the United States would finally join countries around the world and label ingredients recently introduced into our food that have been genetically engineered to produce their own insecticidal toxins, ingredients that are now regulated by the EPA as pesticides.

The legislation had the opportunity to impact all of us.  California recently voted on labeling an ingredient found in sodas, due to its potential link to cancer.  But rather than label it, soda companies decided to reformulate their products and they removed the ingredient in products around the country.  The same fate could happen with these genetically engineered ingredients if they were labeled - companies might simply want to opt out rather than carry any liability that a label might cause.

So the question put to California voters was essentially: should ingredients, now regulated as pesticides, be labeled in our food?

But it wasn't exactly framed that way.  And in the months leading up to the election, a tsunami of money poured into the state from chemical and pesticide companies from around the world.  These corporations selling the products, both the genetically engineered ingredients and the chemicals used on them, didn't feel it was neccessary to label these ingredients, they didn't want to cause alarm.

And with polling results in, they won in the California voting booth.

But did they win on the national stage?

Because rather than consider this "the end" of the issue, perhaps it should be seen as the beginning of a long-overdue dialogue in the United States, a dialogue that the industry spent $45 million dollars to try to keep from having.

Any grocery store shopper knows that a lot gets labeled: orange juice has to be labeled if it comes from concentrate, allergens are labeled, fat content, too.  But we have not yet joined over 50 countries around the world and called for the labeling of ingredients that have been engineered by the chemical companies to withstand increasing doses of their chemicals.

A recent Wall Street Journal poll asked: Do you think genetically engineered foods should be labeled?  87% said yes.

This is not a party issue, it is an American one.

And as more of us are waking up to the fact that the United States remains one of the only developed countries in the world to have failed to label these ingredients in our food supply, the question now seems to be: Is now the time to label genetically engineered foods, foods whose genetic makeup has been hardwired to withstand increasing doses of toxic chemicals or to produce insecticides within the plant itself.

The chemical companies that are both making the foods and selling the chemicals required to grow them often claim that their products are needed to feed the world.

It's an emotional argument.  Powerful, too, and does a lot to drive shareholder return.  But in light of the fact that 2 billion people are overweight or obese and 1 billion are hungry, according to the USDA, 40 percent of the food we produce is never eaten.

Is a food shortage really the problem?  Or is it a shortage in earnings visibility that has these companies quietly pushing their products on us, spending $45 million to make sure that they don't have to label them for fear that labels might lead Americans to join eaters in other countries and  opt out?

"The world is hungry because of politics and economics, not because we can't grow food" a farmer from Australia recently said.  And if you go wide, beyond the consumers and farmers, and dig into the politics of food, you realize how complicated and politically, economically and finanicially loaded the issue has become.

The companies engineering these crops to withstand their chemicals  say they are safe.  They've conducted their own research because the FDA has not.

It's not the first time that ingredients with the potential to cause harm have been marketed this way.  Doctors marketed cigarettes to our grandmothers.  Like the tobacco industry, the pesticide and chemical industries fund research, protected under intellectual property law that is not subject to peer review, and then present it as evidence that their products are safe.  That's their job, to market their products so that they can drive shareholder return.  But what about the rest of us, the world's 7 billion stakeholders in the food supply - those of us, not known by the names given to our portfolios, but those of us simply called "eaters"?

A researcher with the National Council for Scientific and Technical Research and director of the Molecular Embryology Laboratory said,"The noteworthy thing is that there are no studies of embryos on the world level and none where (the chemical routinely doused on these genetically engineered crops) glyphosate is injected into embryos.”

We don't know what these foods are doing to our children.  And while correlation is not causation, from 1992-2007, there was a9.4% increase in childhood cancers in the United States.  Children in the United States where cancer is now the leading cause of death by disease in kids under the age of fifteen also have skyrocketing rates of food allergies and have earned the title "Generation Rx".

Is it the new, genetically engineered ingredients in the food?  We'd have no idea, since there are no labels.

That's hard to hear, especially for those of us that dismissed concerns around genetically engineered foods as some hippy, fringy, purist thing.  It can be so hard to hear that when industry claims there is "no evidence of harm", you almost want to believe them.  But if you think about it, without labels, there simply is no evidence.  And "no evidence of harm" is not the same as "evidence of no harm."

Labels are needed to prove a direct cause and effect. And while we don't yet have them, mounting hospitalization records, record drug sales and an increasingly allergic, diabetic, cancer-stricken and obese population in which 46 children are diagnosed with cancer every day might suggest that we should take a closer look and introduce labeling here in the United States as a conservative measure to protect the heath of our citizens, the way the health of citizens in every country in the European Union, Australia, Japan, Russia and China are protected (to name a few).

And while in the face of record amounts of campaign spending money by the chemical, pesticide and junk food companies, the labeling initiative was defeated in California, what that campaign started was a long-overdue national dialogue.  This is not "the end" of anything but the beginning of a national discussion.

It brought an awareness to the fact that the FDA does not require pre-market safety testing of these foods, that no long-term human, prenatal or pediatric studies have been conducted and that Americans remain one of the only developed countries in the world whose citizens have not been give the liberty of labels in order to make an informed choice about the foods that we are eating.

States matter.  To get a feel for just how much take a look at the first seat belt law which was introduced by a state in 1984, in no time, others followed.  And today, in the absence of any federal seat belt law, it speaks to the important role that states play in protecting the health of their populations by using preventative measures to protect citizens from potential harm.

So what can Americans do next?  Keep up the pressure at the state level.  Begin a dialogue.  Find a friend who cares about this as much as you do.  Join the national movement that is calling on the FDA to address the issue on behalf of all Americans.  A 53 to 47% loss is not something to bury heads over given that the opposition flooded the campaign with $45 million in marketing, but rather something for which to keep heads up, looking forward, as we focus on the FDA and work to address this at the national level.

The health of our country and our economy are dependent on the heath of Americans.  41% of Americans are now expected to get cancer and there is a growing burden that disease is placing on our economy.  Labeling these new ingredients in our food supply, ingredients that are now regulated by the EPA as "pesticides,"  just might prove to be one of the smartest economic measures of our time.

To learn more about genetically engineered foods and the pesticides being routinely applied to them, please visit one of the following sites, known for their independent research:

• Just Label It
  
• Our Right to Know

I wrote this about a year ago for a friend, but as Hurricane Sandy hurls towards loved ones on the East Coast, heaving her winds, these words still ring true today.

As unprecedented storms, epic heat waves and floods continue to hit, as well as the wild temperature fluctuations, drought and scorched and infertile grounds, it is beginning to feel like our planet is sick, with a growing list of conditions.

Much like our children.

And just as our increasingly allergic and asthmatic kids have trouble breathing or are covered in dry patches, running fevers or launching inflammatory responses to things they have ingested, the Earth appears to be having an allergic reaction of her own.

We have poured fossil fuel over her skin, filled her airways with pollution and poisoned her water with everything from oil to agrichemicals to pharmaceutical drugs. 

Is it any wonder that her health appears to be failing, her waters swirling and her airways struggling?

If the Earth were a child that was this sick, what would this condition be called?

Perhaps it could be called "climate fever." She is running hot and cold with all kinds of conditions, upheavals and reactions that have the potential to cause tremendous harm.

And her "fever" affects all of us. Families, friends, farmers.  

Is it short-term? How long will it last?  

The fact of the matter is that dirty air, water, soil, climate.....they affect all of us.  They don't care what we think or what side of the aisle we are on...and neither do storms like this one.

How would we treat this Earth if she were our own sick child?   

So with the image of that child in mind, perhaps we should consider a new approach. And rather than "fight global warming" and get into "he said/she said" debates, arguing over how sick this child really is or who is to blame, perhaps it's time that we simply care for our planet as a mother might care for a child.

And rather than the routine dousing of her skin with toxic pesticides and agrichemicals, we might consider reducing her exposure to these chemicals and cultivate an approach to agriculture that isn't chemically or fossil fuel dependent, like the one recently recommended by the United Nations.

And rather than continuing to inject her with IV-like instruments used to extract the very oil and fossil fuel that is harming her, we could consider building clean energy sources and alternative energy infrastructures to give her the means with which to grow and thrive without the risk of toxicity.

We could call on our collective talents and insights to lend to the healing of her condition.

And rather than focus on what short-term economic advantages can be obtained through the extraction of her resources, recognize that we need to care for her as if our wellbeing depended on it.   

Because it does.  

And while new data shows that countries like China are contributing more than the United States and Canada combined to climate pollution, we have the extraordinary opportunity to embrace a moral authority, to design and create new energy systems that will not only serve us economically and financially but also resourcefully and sustainably for generations to come.  

A child won't remain healthy living on dirty air, dirty water or dirty food.  Our planet is no different. 

And while these changes won't happen overnight, if we leverage our collective talents, we can begin making them, because we're a pretty resilient source of renewable energy ourselves, and in the words of George Eliot, "it is never too late to be what you might have been."

In the absence of any federal labeling law, California is trying to become the first state to label genetically engineered ingredients in foods.  This could impact the county, as they represent the largest state economy in the US and the 8th largest in the world.

How could this affect all of us?  When legislation was proposed in California for Coke and Pepsi to label a caramel color in their sodas as potentially carcinogenic, rather than do so, the soda giants reformulated their products....across the country.

If this legislation (Proposition 37) passes in California, as Jillian Michaels, Danny DeVito, Dave Matthews and others are urging in this public service announcement, the food industry might very well decide to reformulate their products here in the US for all of us, in order to avoid the liability that these labels might carry, removing GMOs from their products and replacing them with alternatives, much like what they have done in over 40 countries around the world, like all European countries, the UK, China, Australia, Japan and India, where GMOs are already labeled.

If you have friends or family in California, please share this important message, as we all have the right to know what we are eating, and what happens in California has the potential to impact all of us.

 To learn more about this proposition and its ability to impact all of us, please visit California's Right to Know

If you eat and pay taxes, you might want to know about “The Farm Bill.”

Remember the bailout that we funded for the banks?  Well, the same thing is happening in our food system.

And today, seventy leading chefs, authors, food policy experts, nutritionists, CEOs, and environment and health organizations sent an open letter to Members of Congress urging lawmakers to modernize the Farm Bill and make nutritious and healthy foods more affordable to all Americans.

According to a July 2011 poll , 78% of Americans want healthy food to be more affordable.  Not surprising when you consider the rates of diseases like diabetes, asthma and cancer that we are seeing in the health of our loved ones.

If you are one of the countless Americans who has ever stopped to wonder why fresh fruit is so expensive and processed and packaged food is so cheap, it’s largely because of the “Farm Bill” and the way that we currently allocate our taxpayer resources in our national food budget.

How it stands right now is that as taxpayers, we are writing checks and that money is being used as taxpayer funded payments called “subsidies” to support the growing of corn and soy, crops used to make our processed foods. Few of the dollars that we send in are used to support other foods in any meaningful way.  In other words, our current system keeps the foods that use these ingredients, mainly the cheap processed foods, cheap, while making everything else seem expensive.

Can you imagine if  instead of funding the junk food, we funded other foods?  Like apples and carrots for example?  We could afford to carry them in schools, at home and in hospitals. Our food companies would use more of them in their products, as they’d be cheaper to source, and we would benefit from the nutritional differences.

Sound too good to be true?  It is, right now.

And some might argue (and they do) that we need our current subsidy system to avoid mass starvation.  How else are we going to feed the world?  But interestingly, just this week, according to the World Health Organization and Business Week, there is so much extra food floating around the globe that not only is it increasing rates of obesity, but we also waste a third of what is produced, it’s simply thrown away. As a result, obesity is a far greater threat facing the globe than starvation, and malnutrition is affecting both.

In other words, we have subsidized a food system that is making us fat, sick and undernourished.

Some food corporations and production groups, especially those who grow soy and corn believe that these handouts are necessary to guarantee stable prices, a food supply and to protect food crops from steep price declines.  Apparently, they may not be aware that the global banks and Wall Street can wreak havoc on food prices by trading what are known as “collateralized commodity obligations” in which they bundle up a whole bunch of these assets in order to profit off of the trades. But how could they be aware of these derivatives?  They are hardly regulated.

But back to the "Farm Bill," the bill would also provide an estimated $9 billion a year to continue a long-standing insurance program that benefits only farmers of commodity crops.  In other words, farmers are paid to buy and grow corn and soy.  They won’t get the same level of insurance if they grow something else, like apples, carrots or tomatoes.  In the current system, with the subsidies and insurance promises, the system only pays farmers to keep growing corn and soy crops.  There is no safety net if they choose to grow anything else.  Who can blame them?  Times are tough.

Which is why today’s letter to Congress is so important.  It calls for an end to this lopsided allocation of taxpayer resources and our lopsided funding of the food system and asks for an end to the bailout of Big Ag that allocates $140 billion to companies engineering corn and soybean seeds from which so many of the ingredients now found in our fake, fast and processed foods are derived.  Right now, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, “about one-third of the subsidies awarded under (last year’s) program went to just 4% of farmers.”

According to the letter sent to Congress today, Americans "are deeply concerned that it would continue to give away subsidies worth tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to the largest commodity crop growers, insurance companies, and agribusinesses even as it drastically underfunds programs to promote the health and food security of all Americans”.

Mass starvation?  It seems that mass malnutrition in an increasingly obese world in which too much food is being produced, thrown away and wasted seems more likely.

It also seems that the Farm Bill, this taxpayer funded piece of legislation, “is out of step with the nation’s priorities and what the American public expects and wants from our food and farm policy.”

And while this funding of the status quo might be good for the chemical companies and for those whose products have to be purchased  by our nation’s farmers in order to grow these two crops, it doesn’t seem to be benefiting the millions of stakeholders in the food supply, nor the farmers themselves, nor the growing number of obese and overweight Americans who rely on cheap, processed foods to feed their families in quite the same way.

A better "Farm Bill" would fund a diverse and healthy food system, especially in light of the fact that a growing number of us and our national economy are being impacted by obesity, diabetes, cancer, allergies and autism, diseases and conditions that are increasingly being shown to have a link to diet and nutrition.

So while you may not have heard of the “Farm Bill” until recently, this Senate bill is arguably one of the most important pieces of legislation Congress will consider this year, and it is set to go to the floor in the coming week.

And if you haven’t heard about it, you’re not alone.  But “unless we – meaning all of us who eat and pay taxes – demand Congress fundamentally change the way it writes the next farm bill, I can guarantee the interests of agribusiness will once again come out on top,” said Ken Cook, president and co-founder of EWG. “We have a real opportunity to compel members of Congress to work on behalf of our health and the environment if they hear from all of us now.  Eaters - it's time to get in the game."

Let’s go, America.  Game on.

CALL TO ACTION: The Farm Bill—the most important legislation when it comes to your food- is about to be voted on in the US Senate. Now is the time to stand up and fix our broken food system. Together, we can create a food system and a Farm Bill that is fairer, healthier and more sustainable for all Americans http://tiny.cc/ff26ew

Health care. You couldn't pick a more loaded political topic (OK, maybe oil) which is absolutely fascinating.  Especially in light of the escalating rates of diseases in our country.  

Because the bottom line is that unfortunately, we are growing sicker by the year and in increasing need of a thriving health care system to address these conditions.

No one wants to admit these things, and yet the Centers for Disease Control continues to release alarming statistics: from cancer being the leading cause of death by disease in children under the age of fifteen, to the escalating rates of asthma, to the increased hospitalizations related to food allergic reactions.  It's not just our health that is coming under pressure, our medical system is, too. 

It's something that I recently addressed as a keynote to a healthcare conference in Boston (with a short interview highlighting some stats below). 

But rather than careen into the darkness, let's not stop and pause for a moment to reflect on the state of our health and our healthcare system.  Let's dialogue, based on the principals of Joseph Schumpeter and that of creative disruption, and take a hard and honest look at the existing model in order to revolutionize the design of a new one.  

No other nation on the planet spends as much as we do on medical care.  As a matter of fact, no one spends more than 12% of their total economy, their GDP, on health care costs.

But according to TIME Magazine, "the most striking aspect of America's medical system remains how much of an outlier it is in the advanced industrial world."

What do we spend?  17%.  So 17 cents of every dollar floating around in our economy is spent in the medical system.  Sure, that's a great model if you are a company in the medical system capturing those expenditures, it drives shareholder return.  But what about the impact that these costs have on our families, corporations and ultimately our economy?

Well, let's take a look.

The fact of the matter is that we do worse than most other countries on almost every measure of health outcomes.  We lag behind countries like Bosnia and South Korea in terms of life expectancy at birth, as well as show elevated levels of infant mortality and depressed levels of patient satisfaction.  

In other words, we're not healthy and we're not happy with the system we've got.

As TIME Magazine writes "Put simply, we have the most expensive, least efficient system of any rich country on the planet.  Costs remain high on every level."

But just because this is the system that we've inherited (consider it a prototype), it doesn't mean that it has to be the system we continue to embrace going forward.  We had the fax machine for a while.  It worked, but then we developed new technologies, smarter, better, more efficient prototypes.  We can do the same thing here.

The landscape in front of us is wide open.  And we know that America's got talent, creativity and a fierce entrepreneurial spirit with which it can drive change.  It's those characteristics upon which our country was founded.

So lend your talent.  Put some skin in the game. Whatever you want to call it.

Let's bring food into the health care equation and let's figure this out.  Because we've got too much at stake, as a country, as an economy and as citizens both at home and in the global marketplace.

When I first heard the term "organic" several years ago, I dismissed it. It connoted a "status" and conjured up two different images: lifestyles of the rich and famous or perhaps some alternative, hippie thing.

I was wrong.

The term "organic" actually refers to the way agricultural products are grown and processed and legally details the permitted use (or not) of certain ingredients in these foods.

The details are that the U.S. Congress adopted the Organic Foods Production Act (OFPA) in 1990 as part of the 1990 Farm Bill which was then followed with the National Organic Program final rule published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The standards include a national list of approved synthetic and prohibited non-synthetic substances for organic production which means that organically produced foods also must be produced without the use of:

• antibiotics
• artificial growth hormones
• high fructose corn syrup
• artificial dyes (made from coal tar and petrochemicals)
• artificial sweeteners derived from chemicals
• synthetically created chemical pesticide and fertilizers
• genetically engineered proteins and ingredients
• sewage sludge
• irradiation

Wow, who knew that conventional, non-organic food could contain these ingredients?  Not many of us, since sewage sludge and artificial growth hormones aren't on the label.

What about cloning animals or those genetically engineered salmon, hard-wired to double their weight? Those would be considered inconsistent with organic practices, too, because of the laboratory intervention required.

In other words, what we call "organic food,"  our grandmothers would have simply called "food."  Because a lot of these new ingredients didn't exist when we were younger, having only been created in laboratories, patented and then introduced into our foods in the last few decades.

LOOK FOR THE SEAL

Products labeled “100% Organic” and carrying the “USDA Organic” seal adhere to a strict legal standard: national organic standards require that organic growers and handlers be certified by third-party state or private agencies or other organizations that are accredited by USDA. Anyone who knowingly sells or mislabels as organic a product that was not produced and handled in accordance with the regulations can be subject to a civil penalty of up to $10,000 per violation.

WHY ORGANICS COST MORE

Admittedly, the high price of organic food can irritate anyone.  But the scrutiny that these foods undergo is enormous and expensive, driving prices at the cash register and for those producing them on the farm.  Why the costs?  Because the cost structure on our food supply offers taxpayer-funded resources called subsidies to the farmers using genetically engineered seeds and saturating crops in insecticides and weed killers, while charging the organic farmers fees to prove that their crops are safe.

That's like getting fined to wear your seat belt.

In other words, it's an un-level playing field right now.  And if we were all sitting down as a national family at our national dinner table, I don't think that any of us would want to be using our resources this way.  Wouldn't we rather have the organic food be the one that we fund, making it cheaper, more affordable and more accessible to all Americans?

But right now, it's not.  So should you choose to opt out of our conventional, chemically-intensive food production system and try something organic, you'll be joining a growing segment of the population and are not alone.

WHERE TO START?  Hop on over to Prevention, where I've written more.....

Source: The Organic Trade Association (OTA) and Organic Trade Association’s 2007 Manufacturer Survey (Because USDA does not yet do comprehensive market studies of organic sales, as it does for conventional U.S. agriculture.)