Outlawing Vitamins and Contaminating the Food Supply with GMOs

There are powerful men seeking to destroy the basic foundations of our liberty. They have been quite successful in their plans so far. They are disrupting the family, corrupting our governments, destroying morality, and attacking religious faith and religious freedom. Their objective is to "eliminate liberty -- economic, political and religious -- and establish in its place the most widespread and complete totalitarian system ever to oppress mankind... With enough study, it is possible to learn the goals of these power brokers from their own documents. Their goal is worldwide control with themselves in charge. They fully intend to control all governments, control the money, control the military, control the courts, destroy all religions except those that actually teach evil rather than good, and control access to food and medicine. - Liberty Lost, F. Gregory Anderson, Circa 1993

Congress Decides Herbal Supplements are Bad

May 25, 2010

New York Times - Nearly all of the herbal dietary supplements tested in a Congressional investigation contained trace amounts of lead and other contaminants, and some supplement sellers made illegal claims that their products can cure cancer and other diseases, investigators found.

The levels of heavy metals — including mercury, cadmium and arsenic — did not exceed thresholds considered dangerous, the investigators found. However, 16 of the 40 supplements tested contained pesticide residues that appeared to exceed legal limits, the investigators found. In some cases, the government has not set allowable levels of these pesticides because of a paucity of scientific research.

Investigators found at least nine products that made apparently illegal health claims, including a product containing ginkgo biloba that was labeled as a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease and a product containing ginseng labeled as a treatment to prevent diabetes and cancer. They also described a salesperson at a supplement specialty store who claimed that a garlic supplement could be taken instead of blood pressure medication.

Any product that claims to treat, cure, prevent or mitigate a disease is considered a drug and must go through strict regulatory reviews.

The report, which was prepared by the Government Accountability Office, was provided to The New York Times and will be made public at a Senate hearing on Wednesday. Its release comes two weeks before the Senate is scheduled to begin debate on a landmark food safety bill that is expected to substantially increase the federal government’s authority over food manufacturers.

But it is uncertain how tough the bill will be on supplement manufacturers, and it has been the subject of fierce lobbying. Capitol Hill staff members familiar with the process said the bill was unlikely to include provisions opposed by supplement manufacturers.

Dr. Joshua M. Sharfstein, principal deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said in an interview that he was not concerned about the safety of the supplements tested by the G.A.O. investigators. But Dr. Sharfstein noted that the agency had recently announced a recall of Vita Breath, a dietary supplement that it said might contain hazardous levels of lead.

Steve Mister, president of the Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association representing the dietary supplement industry, said it was not surprising that herbal supplements contained trace amounts of heavy metals, because these are routinely found in soil and plants.

“I don’t think this should be of concern to consumers,” Mr. Mister said.

Senator Herb Kohl, a Wisconsin Democrat who will preside over Wednesday’s hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging, said that while improvements had been made in recent years in the oversight of supplements,

“The F.D.A. needs the authority and tools to ensure that dietary supplements are as safe and effective as is widely perceived by the Americans who take them.”

Among the witnesses at the hearing will be Dr. Tod Cooperman, president of ConsumerLab.com, a company that has tested over 2,000 dietary supplements made by more than 300 manufacturers and has found that one in four have quality problems. According to Dr. Cooperman’s written testimony, the most common problems are supplements that lack adequate quantities of the indicated ingredients and those contaminated with heavy metals.

Travis T. Tygart, chief executive of the United States Anti-Doping Agency, wrote a letter to the committee saying that some athletes have been rendered ineligible for international competitions because they took supplements that contained steroids not listed on the products’ labels. There are thousands of supplements available for sale that contain steroids or other harmful ingredients, he wrote.

“The F.D.A. is operating in a regulatory environment that is simply too burdensome to allow for effective post-market regulation of these products,” Mr. Tygart wrote.

Half of the nation’s adult population takes vitamin supplements regularly, and about a quarter take herbal supplements at least occasionally. Annual sales are about $25 billion a year, and the growing popularity has led to an increasing number of imported supplements spiked with illegal drugs.

In 1994, Congress passed legislation that allowed supplement makers to sell products without first getting approval from the F.D.A. for their ingredients or for basic health claims. But scientific organizations have warned repeatedly since then that the F.D.A. should do more to ensure that the supplements are safe and that their health claims are substantiated.

In recent years, a vast majority of supplement suppliers have located overseas — principally in China. Nearly all of the vitamin C and many other supplements consumed in the United States are made from ingredients made in Chinese plants. Those plants are almost never inspected by the F.D.A. because the agency is not required to do so, has little money to do so and does not view the plants as particularly risky.

Mr. Mister said supplement sellers tested ingredients before using them, but he agreed that testing could not ensure quality. He called on Congress to provide the F.D.A. with more money to inspect foreign and domestic supplement plants.

“I think you’ll see more and more inspections,” Mr. Mister said.

He said that a few companies made illegal health claims for their supplements, but that the industry was trying to police those.

“I occasionally see these late-night commercials with health claims that make my blood boil,” he said.

Dr. Sharfstein said the F.D.A. had increased enforcement actions against supplements spiked with prescription drugs like Viagra. And he said the agency had taken action against supplement makers that made broad health claims.

“We don’t want people to think they’re treating a disease with something that hasn’t been proven to do that,” he said.

The food safety bill expected to be introduced next month in the Senate is likely to mandate that supplement makers register annually with the F.D.A. and allow the agency to recall supplements suspected of being dangerous.

But a House provision that would require manufacturers to create plans to safely manufacture their products and a proposal made in February by Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, to restrict supplements to ingredients approved by the F.D.A. will not be included, staff members said.

Congressman Waxman Sneaks Anti-vitamin Amendment into Wall Street Reform Bill

April 30, 2010

Natural News - Of all the sneaky tactics practiced in Washington D.C., this recent action by Congressman Henry Waxman (D-CA) is one of the most insidious: While no one was looking, he injected amendment language into the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2009 (H.R. 4173) that would expand the powers of the FTC (not the FDA, but the FTC) to terrorize nutritional supplement companies by greatly expanding the power of the FTC to make its own laws that target dietary supplement companies.

Congressman Henry Waxman wants to give the FTC even more powers by allowing the FTC to write its own laws without Congressional approval.

This is a little-known secret about the FTC and the nutritional supplements business: The FTC routinely targets nutritional supplement companies that are merely telling the truth about their products. Some companies are threatened by merely linking to published scientific studies about their products.

For example, here’s an important article that describes how to FDA criminally extorts money out of supplement companies.

The FTC does much the same thing. They target a particular company that’s having success in the natural products marketplace, then they accuse that company of “inferring” that their products have some health benefit. From there, the FTC demands that the company engage in paying a massive fine to the FTC, which the FTC calls “consumer redress” even though none of the money actually goes to the consumers.

If you try to fight the FTC, they haul you into their own special “FTC courts,” which are not public courts where you have the benefit of a jury, but rather they are courts where the judges are actually FTC employees and you have no rights. You are essentially guilty until proven innocent, and virtually no one has been found innocent by the FTC.

If the King says you’re guilty, then you’re guilty

The FTC also forces you to sign a “consent decree” which involves you admitting to committing crimes that you have actually never committed. These crimes include the “criminal misrepresentation of a product” by, for example, explaining that walnuts help support healthy cholesterol levels or that cherries ease symptoms of inflammation.

Using these methods, the FTC has extorted tens of millions of dollars out of nutritional supplement companies. More importantly, it has terrorized the industry and put several companies out of business, denying the American public access to products that could improve their health and prevent disease.

Waxman wants the FTC to have even more power over your vitamins

Now Congressman Henry Waxman wants to give the FTC even more powers by allowing the FTC to write its own laws without Congressional approval. This would allow a rogue agency to simply invent any new law it wants, such as requiring nutritional supplement companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars “proving” the efficacy of a vitamin before they can sell it.

This will allow the FTC to utterly circumvent DSHEA — the law passed in 1994 that provides basic protections to vitamin and supplement manufacturers. This will result in an FTC war on vitamins and supplements that would no doubt see this rogue agency attempting to destroy the entire industry and imprison the founders and executives of all the top supplement manufacturers.

This is how bad things have become in America today: The criminal CEOs of drug companies are allowed to commit felony crimes, engage in routine price fixing fraud and fix their research with fraudulent clinical trials, yet the FTC and FDA do nothing. But when an honest nutritional supplement company says something like, “Walnuts are good for your heart,” they get threatened with imprisonment or have their entire life savings stolen away from them by the FTC through a series of “fines.”

Your help is urgently needed to halt this madness

Join NaturalNews.com and the Alliance for Natural Health to protest this deceptive action by Henry Waxman — a lifelong opponent of natural medicine who is trying to covertly inject this expansion of FTC powers into the Finance Reform Bill.

Click here to sign the online petition now.

Killing the Food Supply: The Dangers of Genetically Modified Food

Many experts say the U.S. government does more to promote global acceptance of biotech crops than to protect the public from possible harmful consequences... A common complaint is that the U.S. government conducts no independent testing of these biotech crops before they are approved, and does little to track their consequences after. The developers of these crop technologies, including Monsanto and its chief rival DuPont, tightly curtail independent scientists from conducting their own studies. Because the companies patent their genetic alterations, outsiders are barred from testing the biotech seeds without company approvals. Unlike several other countries, including France, Japan and Germany, the United States has never passed a law for regulating genetically modified crop technologies. Rather, the government has tried to incorporate regulation into laws already in existence before biotech crops were developed. The result is a system that treats a genetically modified fish as a drug subject to Federal Drug Administration oversight, and a herbicide-tolerant corn seed as a potential "pest" that needs to be regulated by USDA's Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) before its sale to farmers. - Are Regulators Dropping the Ball on Biocrops?, Reuters, April 13, 2010

May 10, 2010

Anthony Gucciardi - Genetically modified food has entered the food supply through secrecy and deception. Some claimed that genetically modifying the food supply could even put an end to world hunger.

At first glance, genetic modification really does look like a great idea. It allows for larger crops, enhanced growing seasons, and even bigger animals. The truth of the matter is that genetically modified food has been shown to sterilize the population, lead to infant mortality, and exacerbate the usage of pesticides on a global scale.

The world is quickly realizing that there is no benefit to consuming and producing genetically modified food. The consumers are speaking out, and their voice is being heard. Food free of genetically modified ingredients is the fastest growing retail brand.

As the information surrounding GM (genetically modified) food rose to the mainstream media, the people began to anger. They were looking for someone to blame for allowing this atrocity occur, and they had to look no farther than Monsanto.

The Monsanto corporation is a multinational agricultural biotechnology corporation. It is responsible for producing and selling genetically engineered seeds. These are the seeds that yield genetically modified crops.

Monsanto has such a grip on the industry, that it produces 90% of the United State’s genetically engineered seeds. This is the same company responsible for the development of bovine growth hormone, which incited mass controversy over its effects. It was determined by many health experts to be extremely dangerous, with many linking it to cancer and other life-threatening conditions.

Numerous studies have proven genetically modified foods to be an extreme health hazard, but one must only look at how it is created to realize how unsafe GM food really is.

The following is an excerpt from Blind Health: Forbes Magazine Declares Monsanto Company of the Year, an article I authored that exposes GM foods. The article was featured on multiple top news websites.

The bioengineering process itself is quite ridiculous. Billions are spent each year to genetically modify the food supply, tainting it with genetically modified frankenfood. Genetically modifying foods requires one to tamper with the very genetic coding of the crop and/or seed. The process entails the transfer of genes from one organism to another, such as taking particular genes from a pig and transferring them to a tomato. Not only does this defile nature, but it leads to a host of health problems.

Due to the complexity of a living organism’s genetic structure, it is impossible to track the long-term results of consuming genetically modified food. Introducing new genes into even the most simple bacterium may cause an array of issues, highlighting the complexity of even the simplest organisms. Introducing new genes to highly complex organisms such as animals or crops is even riskier.

When introducing the gene to its new host, it is essentially impossible to predict the reaction. The genetic intelligence of the host could be disrupted with the introduction of the new gene, creating an adverse reaction. There is truly no way of knowing the long-term effect genetically modified food, as there are too many variables. There is simply no room for science when Monsanto is involved.

What the world is beginning to see is a swift call to action against not only genetic modification of the food supply, but against the contamination of our food supply worldwide. The people are beginning to demand that high fructose corn syrup be taken out of their food, and that aspartame be removed from products like diet soda and chewing gum. Big corporations love to push such food abominations upon us, but sooner or later the citizens demand action.

India has recently begun to recognize the dangers of genetically modified food, calling for a multitude of scientific studies to determine whether or not the food poses a threat. The people of India had been calling for a change that the government was forced to recognize. “Public sentiment is negative. It is my duty to adopt a cautious, precautionary, principle-based approach,” said Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh.

Even in the United States, Monsanto is currently under investigation by seven states. Since so many concerned citizens are demanding something to be done about genetically modified, the government of your nation is forced to respond.

Through activism and spreading the word, genetically modified food can easily be made a sad mistake of the past.

Bayer Admits GMO Contamination Out of Control

The real threat to the planet is not global-warming but the contamination of our food supply.

April 15, 2010

NaturalNews - Drug and chemical giant Bayer AG has admitted that there is no way to stop the uncontrolled spread of its genetically modified crops.

"Even the best practices can't guarantee perfection," said Mark Ferguson, the company's defense lawyer in a recent trial.

Two Missouri farmers sued Bayer for contaminating their crop with modified genes from an experimental strain of rice engineered to be resistant to the company's Liberty-brand herbicide. The contamination occurred in 2006, during an open field test of the new rice, which was not approved for human consumption. According to the plaintiffs' lawyer, Don Downing, genetic material from the unapproved rice contaminated more than 30 percent of all rice cropland in the United States.

"Bayer was supposed to be careful," Downing said. "Bayer was not careful and that rice did escape into our commercial rice supplies."

The plaintiffs alleged that in addition to contaminating their fields, Bayer further harmed them financially by undermining their export market. When the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced the widespread rice contamination, important export markets were closed to U.S. producers. A report from Greenpeace International estimates the financial damage of the contamination at between $741 million and $1.3 billion.

Bayer claimed that there was no possible way it could have prevented the contamination, insisting that it followed not only the law but also the best industry practices. The jury disagreed, finding Bayer guilty of carelessness in handling the genetically modified crops. The company was ordered to pay farmers Kenneth Bell and Johnny Hunter $2 million.

"This is a huge victory, not only for Kenny and me, but for every farmer in America who was harmed by Bayer's LibertyLink rice contamination," Hunter said.

According to Hunter, the company got "the wake-up call they deserved."

Bayer is still being sued by more than 1,000 other farmers from Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.