The Dangers of GMOs and Glyphosate with Jeffrey Smith: Rational Wellness Podcast 305
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Jeffrey Smith discusses The Dangers of GMOs and Glyphosate with Dr. Ben Weitz.
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Podcast Highlights
2:27 Jeffrey Smith has been dedicated to speaking out about the potential dangers of genetically modified organisms since he heard a lecture 27 years ago by a genetic engineer who was blowing the whistle on Monsanto that was about to release its first genetically modified crops into our food supply. Jeffrey runs the ResponsibleTechnology.org website and if you go to ResponsibleTechnology.org/takeaction before May 21 you can take action and add your voice to the discussion in the U.S. Department of Agriculture about how to regulate genetically modified organisms so we can prevent an apocalypse. Now Jeffrey is also speaking up about the dangers of GMO 2.0, which is the subject of the documentary Don’t Let the Gene Out of the Bottle, which is a 16-minute film, which happens to be at the website above.
6:26 GMO Foods. Traditional GMO foods have a gene from another species transferred into that plant, but we now have have GMO 2.0, which utilizes the new gene editing tools to knock out genes or gut the genome in a place or two and hoping that when the thing gets reattached, it either adds what you want in or leaves out what you want and doesn’t bring anything in extra that you don’t want. This involves a lot of wishful thinking and obviously a lot could go wrong. Jeffrey has a six minute film at responsibletechnology.org/takeaction that discusses some of these dangers: Seven Reasons Why Gene Editing Is Dangerous and Unpredictable. The biotech industry has been licking its wounds because the movement to limit and ban GMO foods has been successful at informing consumers, and doctors that it is not safe that we have been able to contain it to 12 genetically engineered food crops as opposed to Monsanto’s stated goal by this time to have 100% of all commercial seeds genetically engineered and patented. What’s even scarier is that it used to take a long period of time and was expensive to genetically engineer foods, but now you can buy a gene editing kit from Amazon for a few thousand dollars and create your own GMO every day.
9:41 Monsanto convinced the White House that GMOs were safe and that GMOs were going to increase US exports and domination by the US in world food trade and they should be allowed on the market. Monsanto were able to get a former attorney of theirs–Michael Taylor–into the FDA to create a pro GMO policy.
Jeffrey Smith is a global thought leader on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms for over 27 years. He has written 2 bestselling books, Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette, directed 5 documentaries, the most recent of which is Don’t Let the Gene Out of the Bottle in 2023 and Secret Ingredients in 2018. Jeffrey has given thousands of lectures all around the world and has counseled world leaders on six continents. He is the founder and CEO of the Institute of Responsible Technology and he is now sounding the alarm not only about about GMOs and glyphosate but about GMOs 2.0.
Dr. Ben Weitz is available for Functional Nutrition consultations specializing in Functional Gastrointestinal Disorders like IBS/SIBO and Reflux and also specializing in Cardiometabolic Risk Factors like elevated lipids, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure and also weight loss and also athletic performance, as well as sports chiropractic work by calling his Santa Monica office 310-395-3111. Dr. Weitz is also available for video or phone consultations.
Podcast Transcript
Dr. Weitz: Hey, this is Dr. Ben Weitz, host of the Rational Wellness Podcast. I talk to the leading health and nutrition experts and researchers in the field to bring you the latest in cutting edge health information. Subscribe to the Rational Wellness Podcast for weekly updates and to learn more, check out my website, drweitz.com. Thanks for joining me, and let’s jump into the podcast.
Hello, Rational Wellness podcasters. I’m very excited to dive into the topic of genetically modified foods and glyphosate, which are topics I’ve been wanting to discuss for a while, but did not have the right guest and now will be joined by the most prominent voice talking about the potential dangers of genetically modified organisms, Jeffrey M. Smith. Jeffrey is a global thought leader on the health dangers of genetically modified organisms for over 27 years. He’s written two best-selling books, Seeds of Deception, and Genetic Roulette. He’s directed five documentaries, the most recent of which is, Don’t Let the Gene out of the Bottle in 2021 and Secret Ingredients in 2018. Jeffrey has given thousands of lectures all around the world and has counseled world leaders on six different continents. He’s the founder and CEO of the Institute of Reasonable Technology.
Jeffrey: Responsible Technology.
Dr. Weitz: Oh yeah, Institute of Responsible Technology. Yeah, sorry. He’s now sounding the alarm not only about GMOs and glyphosate, but about GMOs 2.0, which I’ll explain. Genetically engineered foods have had their DNA changed using genes from other plants or animals. Scientists take the gene for a desired trait in one plant or animal, and they insert that gene into a cell of another plant or animal. Currently, in the US the main GMO crops are soybeans, corn, sugar beets, canola, and cotton. There are currently two approved GMO animals, the AquAdvantage Salmon and the GalSafe pig. Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us today.
Jeffrey: Thank you. Thank you, Ben. Great to be here.
Dr. Weitz: What is your background, and how did you get involved in this particular field?
Jeffrey: Well, I’m going to first say that a number of times during our conversation, I’m going to talk about some short films that we did and things that people can do to take action. So right at the top, I’m going to give the URL so that people can go back and realize it’s at the beginning.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely.
Jeffrey: You don’t have to find it in the middle. So responsibletechnology.org is the mothership website, and if you do a /takeaction, then you’ll find out why I’m going to ask you to take action and what’s there, and there’s some films there and there’s some ways that we can prevent a apocalypse, things like that. All right. So you asked me the question, how I got into it. 27 years ago I was in a lecture by a genetic engineer who’s blowing the whistle on the technology Monsanto was about to release it in our food supply officially, and the genetic engineer said, “There is no way that Monsanto or any scientist on Earth could predictably genetically engineer anything and put it in the food supply without possibly causing allergic reactions, toxins, nutritional problems. There’s just no way. In addition, once you release it outside, it’ll cross-pollinate, and you have no way to recall it so you have just changed the gene pool forever. This technology is not ready for prime time and will not be any time in the seeable near future.” So I decided to chip in a little and help with messaging and education and marketing and strategy, which is where I like to contribute. 27 years later and speaking in 45 countries and training 1500 people to speak on it, I contributed a little, and I continue to. We’re going to talk not only about what you introduced terms of GMOs and health and the environment and also glyphosate, but GMO 2.0 and how that actually puts us at risk in a cataclysmic way. I mean, way beyond anything that I’ve been talking about for 25 years. That’s a subject of Don’t Let the Gene Out of the Bottle, which is a 16-minute film, which happens to be at responsibletechnology.org/ takeaction.
Dr. Weitz: I went there and I watched it.
Jeffrey: Okay. Now I am ready to go deep. When I say deep, I mean, when I’m speaking at a medical conference, for example, or even at just a general health conference, and it’s a breakout session. So you get to choose. A lot of people go, “Well, I know GMOs are bad. I don’t need to go and hear about that.” If I am in a keynote and everyone has to hear what I have to say, then it’s like, “OMG, I had no idea. I thought I knew the dangers of GMOs. I thought I knew that they were bad, but I didn’t know this bad.” So we’ve convinced tens of thousands of practitioners to prescribe organic diets. We’ve had tremendous, tremendous impact. But it’s not like, “Oh yeah, GMOs, that’s another thing that could go bad.” We’re going to look at some charts today that I’ll describe for those that are listening just by audio, and it’s going to be like, “I had no idea that switching to organic was the number one, the number one step for getting your health together,” and far distant from number two. I mean, we’re going to talk about all these very popular diseases that everyone’s getting and talking about and how they may be directly linked to your consumption of GMOs and the glyphosate, which is the chief poison in Roundup, in your food. So we’re going to raise some eyebrows today for people that haven’t heard this.
Dr. Weitz: I just talked briefly about what genetically engineered foods are. Maybe you could put some more meat on those bones. Explain what genetically modified organisms are, why they were first developed.
Jeffrey: Sure. First of all, you mentioned transferring genes from one species. That’s the traditional way, but there’s another GMO in town, and it’s gene editing. You don’t have to be transferring genes from other species. They’re still GMOs, but you’re going in there and you’re knocking out genes or cutting the genome in a place or two and hoping that when the thing gets reattached, it either adds what you want in or leaves out what you want and doesn’t bring anything in extra that you don’t want. So there’s a lot of wishful thinking. Another film, which is just six minutes called, Seven Reasons Why Gene Editing Is Dangerous and Unpredictable is also at that one page, responsibletechnology.org/takeaction because right now, just as an FYI, the biotech industry was licking its wounds because we have been so successful for these 25 years convincing and explaining to consumers why this stuff was not safe, and to doctors, to consumers.
People realized, half the world’s population realized that GMO foods were not safe, and it contained to about 12 genetically engineered food crops as opposed to Monsanto’s stated goal by this time to have 100% of all commercial seeds genetically engineered and patented. We’ve been able to keep it that way through education. So they come along and say, “Okay, squirrel, look the other way. We are using gene editing, but it’s not GMOs. In fact, we don’t use any foreign genes. We put it in there and it’s safe, it’s predictable, it’s even natural. In fact, it’s just what nature would do automatically, only we do it better.” This concept that gene editing should get a pass has been the subject of a multi-million dollar gang-up lobbying campaign that convinced the American government, the British government, the UK, convinced Japan, convinced India, Australia, convinced Brazil, Argentina. They’re trying to create that same situation in the EU. So all of the incredible benefits and successes that we’ve had over 25 years are at risk because … Now here’s an interesting thing, Ben. It used to take so long to genetically engineer and expensive and a lot of expertise. You can buy a gene editing kit for $2,000 and create your own GMO every day. We’ve given the keys to the kingdom to virtually everyone. Now, I’m getting a little ahead of myself.
Dr. Weitz: I heard you say that. I’m still in shock over that possibility. I can’t believe that that’s legal. How is that legal?
Jeffrey: Because of lies. I mean, if you go back, all right, we’re going to go back to the original GMO 1.0. Okay. How is it that something which, and I’m going to explain how it’s related to so many diseases that, I mean all the major diseases, how it’s possible that they could have allowed that on the market. Same question you asked just now. It turns out Monsanto convinced the White House … They had a lot of friends there … That GMOs were going to increase US exports and domination by the US in world food trade. So the White House told the regulatory agencies, “Allow GMOs on the market very, very quickly. In fact, here what you’re supposed to do, FDA is bring in this man called Michael Taylor,” Monsanto’s, former attorney who had the plan. They created a new position for him. They never had a position of the Deputy Commissioner of Policy. They created it for Michael Taylor. When he was in charge, he was to create the GMO policy. He also created the FDA policy on Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone. So he created basically, fox in the chicken house. The policy that the FDA created that’s still good today or still bad today, is that the agency isn’t aware of any information showing that GMOs are different than non-GMOs. Therefore, no testing is necessary, no labeling is necessary, and companies like Monsanto could put GMOs on the market without even telling the FDA. If they do tell the FDA, there’s a meaningless exercise at the end of which the FDA writes a letter and reminds them, “It’s your job to determine if your foods are safe, not ours.” So that is the policy created by Michael Taylor based on that sentence saying, “We know no difference.” That was all a fraud. We realized … The policy came out in May 1992, and in 1998, my friend, Steve Druker, pioneered a lawsuit against the FDA. They were forced to turn over 44,000 secret internal memos. Then we realized that the overwhelming consensus among the scientists working at the agency was exactly the opposite. That GMOs were different, were dangerous, needed to be tested and should never have been approved. Their predictions came true, their predictions that in fact this stuff is very dangerous and that people would just have the expectation that it’s been done 1000 times before, so no one really needs to test it, and that’s all the current situation. So we have gathered all the evidence that we could, and it’s like a smoking shotgun of evidence showing that GMOs and the Roundup sprayed on them … I’ll explain that in just a minute … Are probably driving tremendous number of diseases in the United States. We know that when people switch to organic, which doesn’t allow either, they get better from the same type of diseases.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, I went to the FDA website. This is what the FDA website states. “GMO foods are carefully studied before they are sold to the public to ensure they are as safe as the foods we currently eat. These studies show that GMOs do not affect you differently than non-GMO foods. Further,” the FDA website says, “GMO foods are as helpful and safe to eat as their non-GMO counterparts. Some GMO plants have actually been modified to improve their nutritional value. An example is GMO soybeans with healthier oils that can be used to replace oils that contain trans fats. Since GMO foods were introduced in the ’90s, research has shown that they’re just as safe as non-GMO foods. Additionally, research shows that GMO plants fed to farm animals are as safe as non-GMO animal food.”
Jeffrey: This is basically fiction. This is a fictional story. Chapter one, once upon a time … Let me tell you what the actual FDA scientist said. We have the memos. This was from Linda Kahl, the Compliance Officer, summarizing the experience of the 17 scientists that were handpicked to create the policy on GMOs, which was overruled by Michael Taylor. She said, “The process of genetic engineering is different than conventional breeding and according to the technical experts at the agency leads to different risks. By trying to say that it’s the same is forcing a square peg into a round hole.” Then Louis Pribyl, a microbiologist from FDA, when he got back the latest version from Michael Taylor, said, “What’s become of this document? It’s basically a pro-industry document that doesn’t address any of the side effects. It’s what do I have to do to stay out of trouble type document.”
Then the toxicological evaluation, the head of the toxicological department said that it’s justified to have at least a partial human toxicological studies on every GMO. Charles Guest, who was the head of the Division of Veterinary Medicine said, “The milk and meat from animals fed GMOs is different and can have specific unique risks.” Talking about bioaccumulation and things like that. They were very specific. What happened was even this completely sanitized pro-GMO version written by Michael Taylor, ignoring all the science, was sent up to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and the White House Counsel and another person came back and said, “No, no, no. It raises too many issues. It has too many pages dedicated to the environmental issues. We should emphasize that GMOs are safer.” As it went up the political chain of command, GMOs got safer and safer until we end up with this complete absolute moronic fiction.
I mean, I can give you some examples that are … I mean, when I speak to medical conferences, I’ll start off at the beginning and say, “Okay,” or any conference, “Tell me what percentage of organic foods you eat. How many, zero to 20, 20 to 40,” and I get a chance to see everyone’s hands up. For the practitioners, I say, “How many of you prescribe organic diets?” Very few people usually raise their hand. So at the end of 40 minutes of pictures of rat tumors and this thing and that thing and epidemiological evidence and plausible causative pathways between GMOs, Roundup and different diseases, I say, “And now, what percentage of your diet will be organic going forward? Zero to 20?” No one raises a hand. “20 to 40?” Everyone’s like 60 to 100%. “How many of you will prescribe organic diets?” All the hands go up.
I went back to some conferences where the doctors had actually started prescribing organic diets, and they said it worked. Our patients got better. I went to their offices, interviewed the patients, and it worked. Went to the farmers who took their pigs and cows off of GMOs and their animals got better. I looked at veterinarians both in terms of livestock and in terms of pets, and we also have the animal feeding studies. So we have a bunch of diseases, which I’m happy to introduce at any time that we think are related to GMOs and Roundup, and we have a bunch of individual reports and clinical trials, clinical experience of people getting better from these same diseases or their precursors. We have the animal feeding studies and the experience of the vets and the doctors. I can describe why we think GMOs and Roundup are driving diseases like nothing else, and the main thing is switch to organic.
Dr. Weitz: Right. So let’s go into that. My understanding is a lot of these genetically modified foods are, like the corn and the soy, are genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup so then they can just indiscriminately spray this herbicide all over the food.
Jeffrey: Yeah, let me explain that. Well described. Roundup kills virtually all the plants. It also kills a lot of microbes. It’s an antibiotic. If you were to spray it over your field of soybeans or corn normally, you’d kill it all. So you have to spray it before the emergence of the crop or just spot spray it on weeds. But Monsanto’s patent on glyphosate, which was the chief poison in Roundup, was going off in 2000. They wanted to maintain sales so they genetically engineered seeds, soy and corn, then cotton, canola, sugar beets and alfalfa to create plants that would withstand and not die when sprayed with Roundup. So they call them Roundup Ready. So the Roundup Ready soy, as a farmer, you buy the seeds, you sign a contract, “I’ll only use Monsanto’s glyphosate based herbicide.” So they ended up continuing their domination of glyphosate even though it’s off patent.
Now the farmers can weed really easily. They can weed after their crops are growing, and then new weeds come up and they just spray right over the top. One application, two applications, three applications. Now, glyphosate by itself is not as toxic as Roundup because Roundup has all sorts of other things, including a surfactin that drives it into the tissues of the plants. Now, it also drives it into human skin. It also can drive it through clothes, even through boots.
In fact, Monsanto was required to turn over evidence of how much absorption into human skin was taking place. So they took the human cadaver skin and they put Roundup on it, and they found it was over three times the allowable level of absorption. So they threw that information away, hid it illegally from the EPA, and then they decided to do a Monsanto version of a study. I love how Monsanto science is. This is typical. This is typical, Ben. Monsanto took human skin from a cadaver and baked it in an oven. Now you know what happens when you bake meat? It gets harder and harder and harder. It wasn’t good enough. They probably tried it. It wasn’t good enough. They took this baked, overcooked human skin and then they froze it. Then they took this leather-like result of human skin and applied Roundup, and there was hardly any absorbed. So they reported those numbers to the EPA, omitting that, I don’t know, that inappropriate fact that they had baked and frozen human skin before they applied the Roundup. That was hidden. They never mentioned that there was no asterisk, by the way, this has no resemblance to human skin. So this is a Monsanto type study.
Dr. Weitz: So it potentially would not have even gotten approved if they-
Jeffrey: Oh, no. Oh, no. There’s so many ways that they manipulated data that none of this stuff would’ve gotten approved. So now you spray it over the crop and it drives the glyphosate poison into the soybean plant. Then it gets 15% or so in through the roots, damaging the soil below, and about 80-85% that stay in the plant, mostly in the food. Now, we eat that food. Now, glyphosate is no friend to the human body. Now you’re a physician, and I’m going to describe some of the things that glyphosate does, and you’re realizing that I’m actually checking off a checklist of the foundations of health and that any one of these could lead to many diseases, if not a vast number.
Glyphosate was originally patented as a chelator to descale industrial boilers and pipes. So it grabs onto minerals and doesn’t let go. So the first thing it is is it deprives our body of minerals. Second, it creates leaky gut. Third, it kills off beneficial gut bacteria, but not the nasty stuff. Four, it can block the production of serotonin, melatonin, and dopamine. Next, it can damage aromatase, which sets the balance between the estrogen and testosterone. It can damage and collapse the structure of mitochondria, which are the energy centers in our bodies. It can cause gap junctions, which is the way cells intercommunicate. It knocks that out by 50%. It blocks the detoxification pathways of the body, both the NRF2 going down 30%, and the P450 cytochrome pathway, CYP enzymes that operate in the liver. It causes damage to the microvilli in the intestines. It blocks the production of, not completely, but it suppresses the production of enzymes in the gut to break down food. It causes birth defects, oxidative stress, and genotoxicity, and is declared a Class 2 carcinogen by the WHO.
Now, that’s like you name a foundation of health, and it’s taken care of by this Darth Vader chemical. It is just slashed and burned. So now when you’re spraying soybeans or corn, Roundup Ready corn, with Roundup and you feed it to rats like Monsanto did, and there was 50 statistically significant changes that they said, “Oh, they’re not a problem,” and it was only 90 days and they sent it to Europe. This guy, Seraline, who was reviewing for France, said, “This is a lot of problems, and these show preliminary evidence of damage to liver and kidneys and preliminary evidence of a lot of things.” But they cut the study off in 90 days, and they didn’t do all the tests that they should have done to see if these things were serious. In fact, they did pretty superficial studies.
So he took the same type of rats, the same rat size group, the same amount of GMOs in the food supply sprayed by Roundup and fed them for two years. They had multiple massive tumors. The tumors started at 120 days right after they finished the 90 days, the first tumor started. So they had multiple massive tumors. Some of them were like 25% of the body weight. They killed the animals because it was considered suffering after that point. They had organ damage and they died early. Now, was it the corn, the Roundup Ready corn or the Roundup? They figured out before they even started to have more than one experimental group. So one group were fed the Roundup Ready corn sprayed with Roundup. Another group was the Roundup Ready corn that was never sprayed with Roundup. A third group, actually, many groups had just Roundup at varying levels in the drinking water, eating natural corn, and then they had a control.
It turns out all of the groups had multiple massive tumors, early death and organ damage, whether it was the Roundup alone, the GMO alone, or the two together. The only group that didn’t was the control group. So we understand more about how Roundup does the killing and whatnot because there’s more research on it, all those things I just described. For GMOs, because the FDA said we don’t need any testing, there’s just a handful of studies. But that handful of studies show potentially pre-cancerous cell growth in the digestive tracts, smaller brains, livers and testicles, partial atrophy of the liver, damaged immune system changes in virtually every organ and every system studied. So we have an idea. So what I’d like to do, Ben, with your permission, is walk us through some of the evidence.
Dr. Weitz: Absolutely.
Jeffrey: All right.
Dr. Weitz: Please do.
Jeffrey: So I’m going to share a screen in just a moment, and this is a amount of Roundup sprayed on soy and corn in the United States in a graph showing the slope. Other slides that I’m going to show, it’s both the amount of Roundup sprayed on there, and also the amount, what percentage of GMO soy and corn there are because it’s basically the same. You only spray Roundup on soy and corn if it’s GMO, at least the volume that we’re talking about.
Dr. Weitz: I just want to say to all the listeners. Anybody who’s listening to this on your phone, when you get home, go to YouTube and watch a YouTube video and go to my Weitz Chiro page and you can see the slides.
Jeffrey: These are plotted against rises in specific diseases. So for those who are not going to see it, and I haven’t started showing it yet, the correlation is pretty tight. A perfect correlation is one. These correlations are like 0.9. I’m looking at one like 0.93, 0.97, 0.96. It looks like the two are sloping up together. All right, so let me share my screen.
What we’re seeing first is inflammatory bowel disease. You could see this is the discharge rate per 1000. Now, I’m going to go through a lot of charts very, very quickly. I’m going to name the disease, and you can just look at the slope. For those that are not looking, I’m just going to name the disease. Your friends watching, their jaws are dropping going, “OMG.” Just acknowledge that these things do look like they’re related.
Here’s deaths from obesity, anxiety, diabetes, deaths from Alzheimer’s, deaths from Parkinson’s, deaths from high blood pressure, autism in six-year-olds, insomnia, celiac disease, acute kidney injury, death from kidney failure, kidney and pelvic cancer, liver cancer, liver and bile duct cancer, thyroid cancer, that’s from acute myeloid leukemia, breast cancer, that’s from intestinal infection, deaths from disorders of lipoprotein metabolism, peritonitis, hepatitis C, dementia, deaths from senile dementia, ADHD, schizophrenia, suicide by overdose, birth defects, and there’s a lot of birth defects here, heart defects, newborn metabolic disorders, newborn genitourinary disorders, skin disorders, newborns with lung conditions, eye disorders, blood disorders, plus general [inaudible 00:29:28] anemia, lymph disorders, deaths due to stroke. In this final slide, and I’m going to come back to this in just a minute because I want to introduce this, so first of all, all of those charts are devastating, but they don’t prove causation.
You can run two things together and say, “Hey, see. A causes B,” but you can’t tell that A causes B. So you need other information. If we just have that, it would be kind of weak evidence. It would be stunning in its coincidence, in its correlation. But you can look at those particular disorders, and we can find supporting evidence from animal feeding studies showing often the precursors to those when animals are fed GMOs and Roundup. You can find plausible causative pathways. What is it about GMOs and Roundup that are causing that? For example, you saw insomnia. Insomnia is often governed by the amount of melatonin you have. Melatonin comes from the amount of serotonin available. Serotonin is created by L-tryptophan, which is produced by your gut bacteria in a metabolic pathway called the shikimate pathway. The shikimate pathway is disabled by glyphosate. Straight line. Straight line.
If you don’t have enough serotonin, that could explain some of the ADHD and the anxiety and all that stuff. When we talk about digestive problems, there’s probably 40 or 50 things influencing that. Speaking of digestive problems, in 2009, I went to the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. I’ve been speaking there every year. The GMOs and Roundup influence on different diseases. Each year they focus on a different disease, allergies, cancer, and I was just basically putting all the evidence together, showing is it possible that GMOs and Roundup might affect those diseases. Sure enough, there was a lot of evidence. So a lot of these doctors started prescribing non-GMO diets, and they’re the ones that first told me this was influencing people. Before then I was, I’m embarrassed to say, I didn’t really believe people when they came and said, “I can notice if I’m eating GMOs or not.”
But these doctors are saying, “Oh, no, it’s quick.” In fact, this one doctor, Dr. Emily Lindner, had put 5,000 patients on non-GMO diets and said, “Yeah, anxiety and depression goes away kind of right away. Asthma and allergies, three to seven days. Digestive disorders within about two months, and then you have to rebuild it. So maybe two years for the digestive.” I was blown away, and I interviewed some of her patients. So I started getting bold. Around 2012, when I came out with Genetic Roulette, I started asking audiences, “Okay, how many of you who are in the 60 to 100% non-GMO, how many of people noticed changes in your health?” A bunch of hands went up. Almost everyone in that category. All right. “What did you notice?” People would tell me, “Oh, I got acid reflux that went away,” or less weight or kidney disease.
I’d always say, “All right, who else noticed a change in this area?” I’d get a sense of the number of hands. In 150 lectures, including about two dozen medical conferences where they were referring to their entire practices’ results, the number one result was always digestive disorders. The number two was always the combination, I’d say increased energy and reduced brain fog, always number two. There was about 28 different conditions that I tracked. So I wrote it up in a survey and sent it out to … At the Institute for Responsible Technology we have subscribers, and 3,258 people responded.
This particular screen that I’m now to share is the summary of what we found in those 28 different conditions. 85% reported improvement in digestive problems. This was peer-reviewed and published in the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine. 60% said reduced fatigue, 55 reduced obesity, 52 reduced brain fog, 52 reduced anxiety and depression, 50 food allergies and sensitivity. Then below 50% going down to just 1.4, you have memory and concentration at 48, joint pain, seasonal allergies, gluten sensitivity, insomnia, skin conditions other than eczema, hormonal problems, musculoskeletal pain, autoimmune disease, eczema, high blood pressure, asthma, menstrual problems, diabetes, mental disorders other than anxiety and depression, underweight, cancer, kidney disease, infertility, autism, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
So it’s interesting that many of these are the same ones or similar to the ones that are on the rise in the US population now. That’s basically the general population that eat more than their body weight in GMOs every year going up with the increased use of GMOs and Roundup in the United States. These are people who opt out of that experiment and get better from many of these same disorders. Then we have veterinarians like Barbara Royal, who’s Oprah’s vet, she said when she went to veterinary school, they didn’t even talk about dog cancers or dog allergies. Now it’s all over the place. One out of every 1.6 dogs have cancer, I’m told. She said, “I got a sense that maybe it’s the food and the GMOs and the Roundup. So very tentatively, I’m kind of scared. I put the animals on a organic diet, and now everyone goes on an organic diet,” or at least the diet that doesn’t have GMOs and Roundup, and she said, “80 to 90% are all managed by the next visit. They don’t even need anything.” 40%-
Dr. Weitz: That’s incredible.
Jeffrey: Completely healed. What I’m saying is if people don’t know whether what they’re experiencing, and that they may have been part of this disease list, maybe they’re not, if you switch to organic, you may be fixated on, “Oh, I want to lose weight,’ or, “I’ve got diabetes, so I’m going to check my blood sugar,” or, “I’m going to check insomnia.” You may be focused on one thing. I suggest that you focus on everything by taking notes. Get a spreadsheet and start with what percentage of your diet is organic. Start today, zero or whatever it is. Put your energy level, your mood, one to 10, and all your symptoms, the date. Then the next day, percentage organic everything, Move right along. Three or four weeks, see what happens. Some people will notice that if they go on vacation and they cheat and they go out to eat, things go back. In the movie I did with Amy Hart, Secret Ingredients, these doctors say they got excited when their patients cheat because then their autoimmune disease symptoms come back, their joint pain comes back, and then they don’t cheat again because they realize that was the reason. So you don’t have to get to that level. You can just do it and see what happens. I would say that is one experiment where the payoff is huge.
Dr. Weitz: Not only when you consume these genetically modified organisms, corn, soy, et cetera, but they spray Roundup on a lot of crops just to dry it out before we eat it.
Jeffrey: Exactly. So that’s why, Ben, I used to say to people, “Eat non GMO, and if you can, eat organic because you’ll avoid the other poisons.” Now I say, “Eat organic, and if you can’t, at least eat non-GMO, but also avoid the foods that are sprayed with Roundup heavily that are not GMO.”
So let me unpack this. I think it was about 2006, Monsanto was looking to sell their Roundup herbicides to other farmers. They said, “Okay, wheat farmers. Spray your wheat three to five days before harvest.” Now guys, we’re spraying something that’s going to kill your wheat, but it’s going to kill it slowly, and it’s first going to dry it down. So when you dry it down, it actually helps in terms of not getting moldy, but also the plants start to die and they say, save our kids, send all the energy to the kids, which is the grain. So it forces the ripening of the grain. So it fast paces the ripening, it dries down the harvest, it kills all the weeds for next year. It’s called staging, and then you just harvest it and feed it to people with a massive amount of glyphosate in the wheat.
So right now, wheat is not GMO, except there’s a crop that came out of Argentina last year. Don’t eat Argentinian wheat unless you know it’s organic and non-GMO. But in other cases, it’s not been GMO, but it often is sprayed with Roundup. One of the worst is oats because it’s like a sponge. Then you have the lentils and the mung beans and the chickpeas. Don’t eat hummus unless it’s organic. You see, organic does not allow either GMOs or Roundup to be used, so that’s why I keep emphasizing organic. If we just said non-GMO, you’d still be having bread and oatmeal and hummus and things like that that could be loaded with Roundup. If you go organic, you also avoid other things like atrazine and all these other nasties.
Dr. Weitz: I did a little research, and not only is there glyphosate, but there’s also heavy metals like arsenic present in Roundup.
Jeffrey: Oh, yeah. The surfactin is about 1000 times or maybe 10,000 times more toxic than glyphosate alone. Some of these other co-ingredients are hormone disruptors and are toxic. Yeah, it’s pretty nasty stuff. I mean, the impact of glyphosate alone though cannot be understated. They had parts-per trillion that caused non-alcoholic fatty liver disease in rats. This was the most sophisticated research showing that it was causal. Not like it suggests, but glyphosate causes non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and at tiny amounts. So tiny in fact, that if you calculate the amount per body weight of these rats per day, the EPA allows 437,000 times that amount in our water supply. So we’re eating it. Now 30, 35% of the US population has non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, and they have glyphosate in their urine. Those that have the worst version of the non-alcoholic fatty liver disease have more glyphosate in their urine. That’s another study.
Dr. Weitz: Wow. We’re expecting Americans to have a tsunami of liver failure as a result of this increase in the non-alcoholic fatty liver.
Jeffrey: Absolutely. And liver cancer, cirrhosis, all that stuff. It’s a pretty remarkable world that I live in because I hear, maybe more than anyone, people with such a variety of diseases and disorders coming to me saying, “Guess what happened to my,” whatever. “My restless leg syndrome went away.” heard that. It was like someone says, “I can tell there’s a change in my urine just whenever I eat a GMO. I could see the bubbles.” It’s like the veterinarian could see the difference in the processing of his kidneys when he eats a GMO or not, and instantly.
So yeah, I mean, I’ve heard this from so many people, and I would say, you don’t have to understand the details. In fact, I don’t go slow enough in an hour-long conversation with you so that people can rationally expect to understand all the details if they understand the patterns and they see the plausible causative pathways between the shikimate pathway and the neurotransmitters, and they see the pathway between the genotoxicity and the oxidative stress and the leaky gut and the gap junctions and cancer. All those are cancer-causing.
You see, and we know, for example, Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is deeply connected, and that’s from the bone marrow, and that’s where the glyphosate residues end up and hang out there for a long time. So we can break it down. My main point is I’m not trying to give people the ability to give a talk on it. I do do that, and it takes eight hours to really understand it all. I just am wanting to give people enough information to go, “Oh my God, did you hear that? We have to make a change in our diet.” The number one convincer is the movie, Secret Ingredients at secretingredientsfilm.com. That shows people who are on the spectrum, who are no longer on the spectrum or infertile, who now have kids, who were overweight, who had brain fog, who had allergies, and they transitioned out and they went, it was organic A to B. Boom.
Dr. Weitz: I learned from your website that I remember back in the ’80s when the FDA took tryptophan off the market and it’s still off the market, and that was actually a result of genetically modified, the way they produced a tryptophan.
Jeffrey: Well, it is back on the market. But here’s an interesting thing. The FDA, if you look at the documents that were made public because of that investigation, they were trying to promote pharmaceutical drugs and tried to suppress the sales of competing herbs and amino acids and other things. So they were wanting to get tryptophan off the market, but they couldn’t. Then along comes a genetically engineered variety from a company called Showa Denko KK out of Japan that caused about 5,000 to 10,000 people to fall sick, and about 100 people died from this horrible disease. It was only that company’s brand that was causing the disease, and only that company was genetically engineering the bacteria that was producing the tryptophan. So what did the FDA do? They blamed it on all tryptophan. When they testified before Congress, they never mentioned that genetic engineering was involved.
Tryptophan was used for calming and insomnia. That was taken off the market. Then comes Prozac, or I think that was the thing that came in at that time. Sales come up heavily, and the FDA took it off the market saying, “Oh, that was causing the problem.” They didn’t even take it out of baby formula or IVs. It was like, if it’s going to really cause problems, you’ve got to really take it off the market. So it was even a bad coverup. They never got the strains and brought them over to the US to see, because there was five to six contaminants that were found that were between 0.1 and 0.01%. I mean, we looked at that. In fact, one of my friends who passed away, Bill Crist, was the chief investigator for years and turned over all of his notes to me before he died. I published that in my book, Seeds of Deception, and then summarized it in Genetic Roulette. What’s interesting here, Ben, and I do want to jump to the GMO 2.0 before we run out of time.
Dr. Weitz: Yes.
Jeffrey: But what’s interesting is, it was causing an epidemic, and it was an epidemic with 5,000 to 10,000 falling sick. The only reason that it was discovered was because the disease had three simultaneous characteristics. It was fast-acting, it was acute, and it was rare. Now, if any of those things were not in place, if it was not fast-acting, if it took months to show up, no one would link it to a food supplement on the market. If it was not rare, someone just got more colds or something, kidney disease, something that’s already out there, they were just treated. People don’t say, “What supplements are you taking?” They don’t pay attention.
It was acute and it was serious, so it forced people to go to the hospital or to doctors, and this had all three. It was a absolute disastrous disease that caused paralysis that progressed, pain that was off the charts, and no one had ever seen it before, and it was still almost missed because no one was talking about in the literature. It just happened to be that one doctor had two patients with it. That coincidence. They checked everything they were taking. There was one thing that both were taking, and that was L-tryptophan. In fact, if one of them had an L-tryptophan from a different company, they wouldn’t have gotten sick.
But anyway, that was what caused the investigation to identify it. So that means that the foods that are on the market, the GMOs and whatnot, may be causing diseases and have been just as was predicted or concerned by the FDA scientist, massive diseases, all this whole list of diseases could be going up because of GMOs and Roundup, but it’s not fast-acting, acute and rare. These are common diseases that are happening. So it’s not that it’s easy to figure out the cause when it’s a food, because when you go to the doctor and say, “I have cancer,” they don’t say, “Oh my God, what have you been eating?”
They don’t look for that. There’s a certain set of circumstances that will then cause an investigation, and then research and then additional research. There’s a certain way that it becomes epidemiologically identified. But if it’s simply in the food supply, it can be missed forever. So the main takeaway of this L-tryptophan is that that demonstrated that genetic engineering might cause serious diseases and that they can be missed.
Dr. Weitz: I’ve been preaching organic for years, and people say, “Well, can I really trust organic?” My answer’s usually, “Look, I’m sure it’s not perfect, but it’s going to be a lot better.”
Jeffrey: I would say that is an excellent, excellent answer. There is occasional fraud. But if you go to responsibletechnology.org, you can actually see a glyphosate residue report. The FDA tests all the insecticide and herbicide residues on foods except for glyphosate because they’re friends in Monsanto convinced them that it was harmless. So we have to basically take our studies and other NGO studies, non-profit studies, we put them all together in one database, go to our site, and you can look at all at the foods. Those that are organic are almost always very slight amounts of glyphosate or non-detectable. Now, why would it be slight? Because there’s so much glyphosate being sprayed. It’s in the air, it’s in the water, it’s in the rain. The US Geological Survey founds glyphosate in 60 to 100% of the air samples and rain samples in the Midwest. In Mississippi, it was 75%. So you can’t avoid it completely, but you want to minimize it.
Dr. Weitz: Very, very scary. So let’s go into GMO 2.0.
Jeffrey: All right. Now I think we have given the problem and we’ve given a solution, and the solution is eating organic. This has been the focus of our institute to get consumers to realize-
Dr. Weitz: And also try to contribute and lobby to have genetically modified foods taken off the market and be labeled, et cetera.
Jeffrey: Right. That’s in addition. But for those listening, the first thing is protect yourself and your family. If you have energy left over and time and money, contribute to the cause, et cetera. So that was sort of the messaging for 25 years. Then along comes GMO 2.0 and it’s given a free pass by all these governments. One of the examples of 2.0 is gene editing. You’ve heard of CRISPR. Now CRISPR may ultimately be useful for clearing off a defective gene for someone that has a genetic disorder. It has all these side effects, so much so that the prominent journal, Nature, called the side effects chromosomal mayhem. I mean, massive damage, and they’re going to try and fix it, and maybe they will. I’m not against the use of this when it’s applied to an individual with consent who’s aware of the dangers. Sometimes human gene therapy does work, and sometimes it kills people.
But we’re now using the same accident-prone technology … The most common result of genetic engineering is surprise side effects … And we’re putting it into the food supply. We’re putting organisms into the environment where they cannot be recalled. Now gene editing is so cheap, it’s like a gene rush, Ben. We know what a gold rush is. You have all these people going out in a Wild West scenario. Now we have all these individuals, companies, students, well-wishers, wanting to genetically engineer things, to patent them and to solve problems of nature. The thing is, if you multiply all of this enthusiasm into actually giving people these kits and these labs, and you give them the keys to the kingdoms and they change the gene pool, then eventually maybe this generation, we will have fully corrupted nature’s gene pool, replaced nature, and no future generation can inherit the products of the billions of years of evolution. But instead a hybrid somewhere between nature and manmade constructions. Now, this is a potential catastrophe.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah. Very, very scary.
Jeffrey: Of all of the organisms that you can genetically engineer, I’m going to ask you a question, which do you think are the most dangerous?
Dr. Weitz: Well, I don’t see what could go wrong if we were to modify the DNA of a virus.
Jeffrey: Yeah. Why not? All right, so let’s make it even a broader class. Let’s talk about microbes. So we take microbes. You know and many of your listeners know, they hear the word microbiome and they go, “Oh, that’s important. That’s the thing. That’s the in thing now.” We’re discovering after the millennia of our history that this micro Jedi army inside us is largely responsible for the state of our health, whether we’re fat or skinny, even some of our desires, our moods. 80% of diseases I’m told by my friend Karen Christian, who’s an expert, comes from changes in the microbiome. It turns out Roundup kills off beneficial stuff in the microbiome in such a way that I went through these same 28 different conditions with Karen Christian. I said, “Can the changes that you saw in the human gut from Roundup explain any of these?” All of them. All 28 of them.
So now we realize the microbiome is mission-critical for humans. When there’s less microbes in the brain when we reduce them, IQ goes down according to my friend Dietrich Klinghardt. Now, the microbes in the soil sequester carbon, promote health, create nutrient density. Algae’s a microbe. It produces 70% of the Earth’s oxygen. That’s a lot. The fungi on the soil shuttles nutrients between trees and allows the small trees that don’t have sunlight to grow because the mother trees give them the nutrients. How? Through their friends, the fungi, which are microbes. The microbes are amazing. Now, they have co-evolved with us so much that we actually have a situation where in the second trimester of humans, milk-digesting bacteria move into the birth canal to inoculate the newborn, and then a lot of the milk that comes from the mother is indigestible by the infant. It’s designed to feed the microbes, and the health of the baby is reflected in the salivary microbes, which feedback through the breast to the mother, which change the formula.
I mean, it is so important that these nuanced changes are mind-blowing, and I haven’t even gotten into some of the details. So this co-evolution is such that we have outsourced 90% of our everyday metabolic and chemical functions to these critters. We can get away with a measly 23,000 genes, less than earthworms because we use the genetic information of 3.5 million genes in the microbes living inside us. There’s 10 times more than, actually more than 10 times, compared to the cells inside our body.
Now, along comes a high school student, a high school student who has a CRISPR lab in his biology class, and he can order from 10,000 different microbes online or 120,000 different targeted gene sequences to tell the CRISPR where to cut. Or he can order his own gene sequence, or he can pick up microbes from his own gut or his own poop. Or he can take it out of the swamp near his house. Then he can CRISPR it and then take it for a walk. Now, let’s suppose it survives, lives long, thrives, multiplies. First of all, they replicate faster than cows. They replicate very, very quickly. They travel. We know that. We didn’t need a pandemic to know that microbes travel and mutate.
Most people don’t realize that microbes also exchange genes. They’re very promiscuous. Just bacterial sex. It’s actually this flow of genetic information through the microbiome that allows the entire microbiome to adjust and adapt to support ecosystems and to be supported by them. So the same random act of weirdness by a high school student now ends up in 10,000 different types of microbes and 100,000 different ecosystems, including inside human bodies, making changes that were never part of the co-evolution, causing possible human health issues or collapsing ecosystems in the environment.
Then you have companies like Bayer Monsanto … Bayer bought Monsanto, whose joint venture with Ginkgo Bioworks is creating nitrogen-fixing microbes for the soil. Now, there’s many reasons why you don’t want to release genetically engineered nitrogen-fixing microbes. Now, one is, what happens if it gets washed into the Mississippi and then it transfers those nitrogen-fixing microbes into algae, and now you have algae that can produce its own dead zones? We don’t know if that’s a possibility, but we may end up with nitrogen-fixing microbes inside us. Or what about the survival mechanism built into those nitrogen-fixing microbes, which probably kill off other microbes and have antibiotic resistance so that they survive? That’s like a tank. So you put the trait inside the tank, now the tank gets transferred inside our gut bacteria, and now it’s surrounding a pathogen killing off other bacteria, resisting the death by antibiotics, and you’ve now changed the population of our pathogens in our gut because of this nitrogen-fixing microbe.
Now, it gets worse. If you go to, guess what that URL is, it’s responsibletechnology.org/takeaction. If you go to, Don’t Let the Gene Out of the Bottle, as you saw, there’s some well-meaning scientists that said, “Let’s take a natural soil microbe that’s on the roots of every plant on the planet and turn it into a alcohol production factory and give it to farmers so they can rake up their crop residues and put it in tanks with the genetically engineered bacteria and turn it into alcohol to run their tractors and put the nutrient-rich sludge on the bottom on their fields.” Well, as you’ll see, I’m not going to be a complete plot spoiler, but according to a scientist involved, if it hadn’t been stopped by research results of her graduate student, that seemingly well-meaning thing might have ended terrestrial plant life on planet Earth. I hate when that happens.
But we don’t know if it would’ve happened. We don’t know if the other one mentioned in there would’ve altered weather patterns forever, but it’s potentially there. So now what I’m talking about is if every high school has a CRISPR kit and all these college students use CRISPR and all these entrepreneurs and organizations use CRISPR, and they’re releasing these microbes in the environment, millions of varieties each year, what’s going to happen to our nature? What’s going to happen to our health? Right now on responsibletechnology.org/takeaction, we have a response to the USDA’s draft guidance on how to get a permit to genetically engineer microorganisms. Their take on what’s considered to be safe is so 50-year-old science. Maybe, all right, I’ll give them the benefit of doubt. 20-year-old science. Maybe.
They have a comment period, and I want to suggest that everyone go there and add your name to the comments so they see it’s not just the Institute for Responsible Technology, but it’s 1000 of our closest personal friends or 10,000 of our closest personal friends, and we’re going to send you also after that updates and other action steps because we have even bigger fish to fry because we’re now starting a new global movement to protect the microbiome. We’re going to have various opportunities for people to use their networks to support us, et cetera. I do strongly recommend people make a recurring donation. For the healthcare practitioners who are listening, very shortly, maybe by the time you visit the site, we will have a healthcare practitioner program. So you support us and we give you all this information, train you how to speak, give information for your practitioners.
If you’re a company, we have a way of getting information out to your customers. You can be part of [inaudible 01:01:20]. We have all sorts of things we’re working on now, and we’re just held back right now by the amount of staff we can afford. So we need a little more money to get a little more staff so we can get a lot more money, so we can get a lot of staff, so we can get a big global movement. Now, here’s the good point, Ben. Which movements out there might be good allies to us? Which movements and campaigns are needing a healthy microbiome? Certainly human health, certainly regenerative agriculture, certainly carbon drawdown for climate change, because most of the heavy lifting are the soil microbes, certainly all the environmental groups including the oceans. Even the Indigenous people who think GMO means God Move Over, they are on our side.
Even national defense is freaking out about the availability of CRISPR kits and the ability for some purposeful or random accident. So we have an opportunity to create a movement of movements at a time just after microbes wreaked havoc on the world population and economy. The receptor cells of the planet are open just at this time when we need to lock down GM microbes and say, “Not on our watch.” In fact, never should we allow the random release of GM microbes in the environment knowing what we know about the nature of microbes, the nature of microbiomes, their supportive ecosystems, and the accidental and unpredictable nature of genetic engineering.
Dr. Weitz: So what’s the possibility that we could stop letting all these groups and individuals have their own CRISPR technology?
Jeffrey: Well, I’m guessing, Ben, that in the last 12 minutes, when I started talking about, maybe even eight minutes, when I started talking about the microbes, that nearly everyone who was not distracted by driving in traffic understood what I was talking about. They’re like … In my day, there was a TV commercial, the Memorex commercial, where someone would listen to Memorex and their hair was going straight back like they were in a windstorm. I could see people after hearing this, they’re like, “Oh my God, we’re doomed.” But the thing is, one of our greatest assets is that it’s so easy to explain. It’s not as hard as climate change. It’s not as hard as DET, glyphosate. It’s like microbes are running the universe here. They run our health. You release a microbe, it may change it in ways that are unpredictable. We don’t even know what 99% of the trillion microbes out there are doing, and yet we’re going out to make permanent unrecallable changes. Probably not a good idea. That took a minute. Right, right. Here’s an example of something that almost took us down.
Dr. Weitz: And that’s if the humans that have this CRISPR technology actually have good intentions. As we know, human beings would never try to harm each other.
Jeffrey: Oh, no. Well, fortunately, we’re all well-meaning people that are ethical. Maybe Monsanto may … Anyway, so the point is, we have to go after the governments to make changes. If it’s me knocking at the doors of government and it’s Monsanto Bayer with its massive lobbyists, I’m not going to get very far. If it’s these movement of movements with popular culture supporting and school curriculum enlightening the children and creating an awareness of this, then we get to make a change in human collective consciousness, which is absolutely necessary right now. As a physician, you are most clearly aware that sometimes a very serious diagnosis or prognosis becomes the wake-up call that turns into the person’s biggest blessing.
Dr. Weitz: Correct.
Jeffrey: This is one of those. This is like guys, we have now reached that inevitable time in human civilization where we can irreversibly redirect the streams of evolution for all time, ending biological evolution as we know it. Even a single one of us who goes to high school can make the wrong move and cause the cataclysm. So now that we realize that we have that capacity, it means that we have a new responsibility. That new responsibility means we have a new relationship with nature. We can’t just be going side by side saying, “Yeah, whatever. Just continue.” We have to be stewards. We have to be protectors. We have to protect it in such a way that it becomes a permanent feature of human civilization. That’s why I talk about curriculum, so that just like every child reads about pollution and climate change, now every child needs to know about we cannot play with the gene pool in this haphazard way. We have to protect nature. So this is an opportunity to influence collective consciousness. I don’t believe that consciousness is linear or local. I think that we’ve seen times in human history where civilization jumps up, leaps forward with new inputs and a certain number of people getting it. I think it’s happening quickly right now, and I think this is an example of something where we need to leap forward. So all of a sudden, in some short time people say, “Oh, remember that time when we were simply allowing anyone with a CRISPR kit to introduce an organism? Wasn’t that silly?” We haven’t gotten there yet, but that’s what we’re going for.
Dr. Weitz: Yeah, we’ve got to put the gene back in the bottle soon too.
Jeffrey: Absolutely.
Dr. Weitz: Well, this has been awesome, Jeffrey. Thank you so much.
Jeffrey: Ben, I’m passionate. Can you tell?
Dr. Weitz: I can tell. [inaudible 01:07:18] you.
Jeffrey: The thing is, I’m also very optimistic. I mean, when I started off on the GMO issue in 1997, no one wanted … Actually, it was ’96 … No one wanted to talk about the health dangers. None of the NGOs. It wasn’t a consumer thing. They were all talking about environment and whatnot. I’m saying, “Guys, this is really important.” Now 48% of the world’s population, 51% of America at a minimum, believe that GMO foods are unsafe. We’ve built a movement, we’ve seen the impact. We are enormously successful, and now we have to build a whole new movement, but we don’t have 27 years to wait.
Dr. Weitz: Right. So everybody go to … What’s your website again?
Jeffrey: It’s responsibletechnology.org/takeaction, and please make a donation. Sign up, give your name, support the comments to the USDA. That will also put you on our list unless you tell us not to, and we can give you updates and more information, ways that you can support us by getting the word out, giving you more knowledge, et cetera. Then please make a donation, ideally recurring so we know it’s coming each month. So that gives us the confidence to say, okay, we have a budget to this and this and this. We were able to get by with so much less money when it was a consumer education campaign, but now we have to change governments, create international treaties, national laws, and that’s expensive.
Dr. Weitz: Right. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: You’re welcome, Ben. Safe eating.
Dr. Weitz: Thank you for making it all the way through this episode of the Rational Wellness Podcast. For those of you who enjoy listening to the Rational Wellness Podcast, I would certainly appreciate it if you could go to Apple Podcasts or Spotify and give us a five-star ratings and review. That way more people will discover the Rational Wellness Podcast. I wanted to let everybody know that I do have some openings for new patients so I can see you for a functional medicine consultation for specific health issues like gut problems, autoimmune diseases, cardiometabolic conditions, or for an executive health screen, and to help you promote longevity and take a deeper dive into some of those factors that can lead to chronic diseases along the way. That usually means we’re going to do some more detailed lab work, stool testing, sometimes urine testing, and we’re going to look at a lot more details to get a better picture of your overall health from a preventative functional medicine perspective. If you’re interested, please call my Santa Monica Weitz Sports Chiropractic and Nutrition office at (310) 395-3111, and we can set you up for a new consultation for functional medicine. I’ll talk to everybody next week.
