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Science can prove damage caused by genetically modified food

Dear editor, Recent coverage of Comox council described well the remarks of Coun. Tom Grant.

Dear editor,

Recent coverage of Comox council described well the remarks of Coun. Tom Grant.

However, it failed to address the seriousness of the issue as Coun. Grant dismissed the concerns I expressed.

This issue is not about what Mr Grant’s sister thinks of Dr. Vrain. A better question should be: What could be the motivation of hundreds of scientists all over the world who publish their studies showing harm from a diet of engineered corn or soy in mice and rats.

Why do they keep doing that ?

This is not about me; I am only the messenger. This is about a large body of internationally publicly funded science that says that mice and rats are damaged when eating engineered corn or soy laced with RoundUp herbicide.

Coun. Grant’s point is that genetic engineering technology has evolved. And a new technology has been invented to inject genes in a foreign genome with a good degree of precision.

But none of the engineered crops have been engineered this way.   All the transgenic crops released today contain transgenic bacterial and viral DNA constructs that have been inserted at random, using outdated technology.

And that makes them potentially dangerous because new misformed proteins are created in the process. The experts of the FDA in the U.S. knew that in 1996 when they opposed their director’s decision to green-light the commercialization of this technology without any testing.

So in that manner Mr. Grant and his sister stand corrected.

The old One Gene One protein hypothesis, predicts one protein from each gene.  That’s what the engineered crops are expected to do.

But now Mr. Grant’s sister says that the new paradigm uncovered in 2002 — not in 1999 as Mr. Grant seemed to imply, with the completion of the Human Genome project, changed everything.

The Human Genome project gave us the next paradigm in Modern Molecular Genetics. That a genome is an ecosystem with a great deal of self regulatory activity.

In other words, if you disturb the ecosystem some genes might shut down, others act out. You may get more than one protein produced, in fact the new dogma says you should expect many more. Some of them can be allergenic or cause chronic toxicity stress.

Recent research also shows that the pesticide that must be applied to express the engineered trait — the RoundUp herbicide distributed by Monsanto, is directly toxic to most life forms and particularly to bacteria.

Did you know that RoundUp is patented as an antibiotic?

I said in my address to council that, according to a recent report, most of our chronic degenerative diseases that have been on the increase in the last 20 years can be attributed to the effect of RoundUp residues in our food and water.

Gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility, cancer and Alzheimer’s disease — and the science is there to prove it.

Dr. Thierry Vrain,

Comox Valley