Genetically Modified Food: Do You Know What Your Child is Eating?

Impact

Do you know what Vitamin A Palmitate is?

I'm assuming that you may not know it by name, but you know what it's in. Vitamin A Palmitate is a synthetic chemical that is designed to fortify foods that have lost Vitamin A through processing wear and tear. Sounds harmless enough, right? Well it would be if it wasn't for the fact that the Livestrong Foundation quotes it as being, "fat-soluble and can accumulate to toxic levels in your body. Too much Vitamin A Palmitate can be acutely toxic, too, and cause various symptoms such as headache, nausea or vomiting ... Adverse health effects such as birth defects, liver abnormalities and reduced bone mineral density may result from taking too much vitamin A. So before taking any vitamin A supplement, consult your physician or other health care provider." The problem with Vitamin A Palmitate is that many of us aren't given a chance to consult a doctor about taking it, as it's being given to us everyday in products like: eggs, cheese, and, of course, milk! Every single day milk is given to children throughout the entire nation, at home, at school, under the premise of it being "healthy" but according to Dr. Bart Clarke of the Mayo Clinic, drinking too much Vitamin A enriched milk can actually weaken bones instead of fortifying them. And the trail of hidden poisons doesn't end with milk.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) are in almost every single food that can be bought at a grocery store. Many of those GMOs have been linked to obesity and onset Type II Diabetes. While some GMOs are helpful, others very harmful, but every single one has been made in a laboratory. Unless you purchase a food that says 100% Organic on the front of it, there is a good chance that your food was made by scientists, not farmers.

Farmers, today aren't producing edible food anymore, they are producing corn, corn that has been altered at the molecular level. How much corn? Forty percent of the world's corn is grown in the United States, and despite what you may believe, we consume most of it here. Nearly everything in a grocery store is a corn based product. From Coca-Cola to yogurt to Baby Formula, corn is used under the guise of high fructose corn syrup in virtually everything you eat. So when you couple the GMOs and corn your average meal may be as natural as the computer I am typing on.

In the documentary Food, Inc. (which is like An Inconvenient Truth, only about food and is a million times more watchable) an undercover film team filmed your food being processed and the result was not pretty. Chicken are now grown, instead of raised, and with every plant pruning is not only allowed but encouraged. The average Tyson chicken grows twice as fast as a normal chicken and is more than double its size. Spoiled slaughterhouse cattle beef is given a bath in ammonia (which you may recall as being toxic) before it is mixed back in with the "good" beef for sale. Conditions and Standards at slaughterhouses have become so lax that 90% of all slaughterhouse beef contain fecal matter in them. Let me rephrase that, nine out of ten burgers that you have ever eaten in your life had poop on them. Yeah, it's that bad.

Food lobbyists rarely make the news, what with the NRA being so popular at the moment. However food corporations are very persuasive when it comes to keeping Americans in the dark when it comes to telling the what they are eating. Very few laws exist concerning GMOs and when they are in effect, the companies have always managed to find away to undermine them. For example, it is illegal for a food product to claim to be 100% organic if they aren't, however there is nothing to stop them from slapping an "organic" sticker on the product without any reparations. When SB-63, a Californian bill which would have made it mandatory for food's containing GMOs of cloned animals to be labeled on the package, was vetoed by the, then, Governator Schwarzenegger it proved that certain members of government were completely and utterly fine with allowing companies to lie to US citizens about what was in their food. The Governator endorsed the food companies, claiming that there was nothing wrong with the foods and that we (food watchdogs) needed to calm down, and embrace the future of synthetic American food. 

It is extraordinarily hard to avoid GMOs inside of the U.S. since companies aren't required to label their products as having been injected with a GMO, so the three best things you can do to avoid GMOs are: 1) Move to Europe, seriously, every food being sold in the European Union is required to reveal whether or not they contain GMOs. 2) Don't eat fast food ... duh. 3) Use this handy-dandy list of alternative non-GMO foods while shopping. It really difficult and it may not seem worth it to avoid these silent poisons, but your body will thank you and so will your children.