Category: Health Tips

by Rosemary Mason – Colin Todhunter January 19, 2018
If the proposed Monsanto-Bayer merger goes through, the new company would control more than 25 per cent of the global supply of commercial seeds and pesticides. Monsanto held a 26% market share of all seeds sold in 2011. Bayer sells 17% of the world’s total agrochemicals and also has a seeds sector. If competition authorities pass the deal, the combined company would be the globe’s largest seller of both seeds and agrochemicals.
It marks a trend towards consolidation in the industry with Dow and DuPont having merged and Swiss seed/pesticide giant Syngenta merging with ChemChina. The mergers would mean that three companies would dominate the commercial agricultural seeds and chemicals sector.
In response to the Monsanto-Bayer merger, after it was announced in 2016 the US National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson issued the following statement:
“Consolidation of this magnitude cannot be the standard for agriculture, nor should we allow it to determine the landscape for our future… We will continue to express concern that these megadeals are being made to benefit the corporate boardrooms at the expense of family farmers, ranchers, consumers and rural economies… [there is an] alarming trend of consolidation in agriculture that has led to less competition, stifled innovation, higher prices and job loss in rural America.”
For all the rhetoric that we often hear about ‘the market’ and large corporations offering choice to farmers and consumers, the evidence is restriction of choice and the squeezing out of competitors. Over the years, for instance, Monsanto has bought up dozens of competitors to become the largest supplier of genetically engineered seeds with seed prices having risen dramatically.
Consolidation and monopoly in any sector should be of concern to everyone. But the fact that the large agribusiness conglomerates specialize in a globalised, industrial-scale, chemical-intensive model of farming should have us very concerned. Farmers are increasingly reliant on patented corporate seeds, whether non-GM hybrid seeds or GM and the chemical inputs designed to be used with them. Monsanto seed traits are now in 80% of corn and more than 90% of soybeans grown in the US.
By its very nature, the economic model that corporate agriculture is attached to demands expansion, market capture and profit growth. It might bring certain benefits to those farmers who have remained in agriculture, if not for the 330 farmers in the US who leave their land every week (according to data from the National Agricultural Statistics Service).
But in the US, ‘success’ in agriculture has largely depended on over $51 billion of taxpayer handouts over a 10-year period to oil the wheels of a particular system of agriculture designed to maintain corporate agribusiness profit margins. And any ‘success’ fails to factor in all the external social, health and environmental costs. It is easy to spin failure as success when the parameters are narrowly defined.
Moreover, the exporting of Green Revolution ideology and technology throughout the globe has been a boon to transnational seed and agrochemical manufacturers, which have benefited from undermining a healthy, sustainable indigenous agriculture.
The main players in the global agribusiness sector rank among the Fortune 500 corporations. These companies are high-rollers in a geo-politicised, globalised system of food production whereby huge company profits are linked to the worldwide eradication of the small farm (the bedrock of global food production), bad food, poor health, rigged trade, environmental devastation, mono-cropping and diminished food and diet diversity, the destruction of rural communities, ecocide, degraded soil, water scarcity and drought, destructive and inappropriate models of development and farmers who live a knife-edge existence and for whom debt has become a fact of life.
Does the world need it?
Britain is a leader in intensive, corporate-dominated agriculture. But is this the model of agriculture the world should rely on?
Let us turn to campaigner and environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason to appreciate some of the consequences of this model. She has just written an open letter to Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer for England and Chief Medical Advisor to the UK government. Although written to Davies, the letter is intended for the four Chief Medical Officers of Health for England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and Public Health England.
Her letter is essentially a plea to highly placed officials to act.
Mason provides a stark reminder of the impacts of the agrochemical/agribusiness sector, its political power and its effects on health. She draws attention to a report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food, which states unequivocally that the storyline perpetuated by the likes of Bayer’s Richard van der Merwe (in this piece) saying we need pesticides and (often chemical-dependent) GMOs to feed the world is a myth.
The report is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of the “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments which has “obstructed reforms and paralysed global pesticide restrictions”.
The authors of the report call for a comprehensive new global treaty to regulate and phase out the use of dangerous pesticides in farming and move towards sustainable agricultural practices. They say:
“excessive use of pesticides is very dangerous to human health, to the environment and it is misleading to claim they are vital to ensuring food security.”
Mason notes that chronic exposure to pesticides has been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders and sterility. Certain pesticides can persist in the environment for decades and pose a threat to the entire ecological system on which food production depends.
One of the report’s authors, the UN expert on Toxics Baskut Tuncak, wrote in the Guardian:
“Our children are growing up exposed to a toxic cocktail of weedkillers, insecticides, and fungicides. It’s on their food and in their water, and it’s even doused over their parks and playgrounds. The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, the most ratified international human rights treaty in the world (only the US is not a party), makes it clear that states have an explicit obligation to protect children from exposure to toxic chemicals, from contaminated food and polluted water, and to ensure that every child can realise their right to the highest attainable standard of health. These and many other rights of the child are abused by the current pesticide regime. These chemicals are everywhere and they are invisible. The only way to protect citizens, especially those disproportionately at risk from exposure, is for governments to regulate them effectively, in large part by adhering to the highest standards of scientific integrity.
Mason offers Sally Davies and her colleagues evidence that suggests rising UK Mortality rates point to a critical, unprecedented health epidemic. Arguing that the heavy use of agrochemicals in the UK is a major contributory factor, she notes Cancer Research UK (CRUK) is protecting the agrochemical industry due to its strategic influence. As a result, the mainstream narrative on cancer focuses on the role of alcohol (see this also) and ‘lifestyle choices’ while sidelining the strong evidence that agrochemicals are having.
Rosemary Mason asks Sally Davies if she is aware that the UK Department of Health is working with industry, again citing evidence in support of her claim.
As someone who has written extensively on the adverse impacts of glyphosate, Mason refers Davies to research that links Monsanto’s glyphosate-based Roundup with liver damage.
If the National Health Service in the UK is experiencing a crisis – as indeed it is – due to rising rates of morbidity (not withstanding the effects of poor funding and creeping privatisation), surely these spiralling rates of diseases must be addressed. And where better to start by shining the light on agrochemicals rather than blaming individuals for lifestyle choices and alcohol consumption?
For instance, a report by ‘Children with Cancer UK’ in 2016 said there were 1,300 more cases per year of cancers in children, particularly in young adults, compared with 1998. While the medical correspondent from The Telegraph has mentioned pesticides as a possible cause, a spokesperson from CRUK said there is no evidence of environmental factors.
Among the various statistics Mason provides are those indicating that colon cancer had risen by 200%, thyroid cancer has doubled, ovarian cancer is up by 70% and cervical cancer is up by 50% since 1998.
Yes, despite the evidence, the corporate media in Britain is silent about pesticides, which partly results from the corporate sponsorship of the UK Science Media Centre; so any science against the corporations can be suppressed by interested parties, including AstraZeneca, Coca Cola, Syngenta, BP and Monsanto.
While Mason produces figures to show the massive increase in a range of agrochemicals over the years, the Chief Scientist for the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Professor Ian Boyd, points out that once a pesticide is approved there is no follow up. There is also no follow up as to the impacts of not just one chemical but the cocktail of agrochemicals out there and how they interact when in the human body and within the environment.
And let’s not forget that many of these agrochemicals were fraudulently placed on the commercial market in the first place without proper testing.
Readers can read Mason’s letter in full here, where she also discusses a potential UK-US trade deal with the US and the impacts on the lowering of food and environmental standards and subsequent relations with the EU.
The impacts of the Monsanto-Bayer deal and the contents of Rosemary’s letter to the Chief Medical officers of the UK are just the tip of an iceberg. There is a lot more that could and has been said on the impact of agribusiness giants on the globalisation of bad food and poor health, ecological degradation, soil health, ocean dead zones as well as the chemical contamination of our food by the handful of food conglomerates that now increasingly dominate the supply chain.
Alternative approaches and solutions exist but the political influence and financial clout of transnational corporations means that ‘business as usual’ prevails.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/19/corporate-monopolies-will-accelerate-the-globalisation-of-bad-food-poor-health-and-environmental-catastrophe/

A number of vaccines within the past few years have come under intense scrutiny, and rightfully so. When you hear somebody say, “the science is clear”, it’s actually not. This is evident by the fact that hundreds of studies have been published in reputable peer-reviewed journals raising multiple causes for concern when it comes to vaccines, like the role of vaccine ingredients and where and how they disseminate throughout the body, for example.
Here is a great quote from Dr. Jose G. Dores, a professor at the University of Brasilia’s Department of Nutritional Sciences who recently published a study in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. In the study, he offers the following observation: “Despite their long use as active agents of medicines and fungicides, the safety levels of these substances have never been determined, either for animals or for adult humans—much less for fetuses, newborns, infants, and children.” (source)
The HPV vaccine is one of them, and perhaps right now the most controversial, and it’s hitting the mainstream. For example, a recent study published in the journal Pediatrics found that many paediatricians don’t recommend the HPV vaccine.
http://australiannationalreview.com/2018/01/11/colton-berrett-dies-from-his-gardasil-hpv-vaccine-injuries-one-of-multiple-deaths-reported/

A powerful new Lancet study reveals that the so-called breast cancer susceptibility genes — BRCA 1 and BRCA 2 — do not, in fact, cause breast cancer. Jolie’s prophylactic mastectomy, for instance, was for naught.
http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/deadly-breast-cancer-gene-myth-lancet-study-confirms

One of the myths perpetuated by the pro-GMO (genetically modified organisms) lobby is that critics of GMOs in agriculture are denying choice to farmers and have an ideological agenda. The narrative is that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies, including GM crops.
Before addressing this issue, we should remind ourselves that GMOs have been illegitimately placed on the commercial market due to the bypassing of regulations. Steven Druker’s book Altered Genes, Twisted Truths (2015) indicates that the commercialisation of GM food in the US was based on a massive fraud. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) files revealed that GM foods first achieved commercialisation in 1992 but only because the FDA covered up the extensive warnings of its own scientists about their dangers, lied about the facts and then violated federal food safety law by permitting GM food to be marketed without having been proven safe through standard testing.
If the FDA had heeded its own experts’ advice and publicly acknowledged their warnings that GM foods entailed higher risks than their conventional counterparts, Druker says that the GM food venture would have imploded and never gained traction anywhere.
It is highly convenient for the pro-GMO lobby to talk about choice while ignoring such a massive subversion of democratic procedures and processes which could (and arguably is) changing the genetic core of the world’s food.
The denial of choice is a very important accusation. But just what is it that critics are said to be denying farmers? The pro-GMO lobby say that GM crops can increase yields, reduce the use of agrochemicals and are required if we are to feed the world. To date, however, the track record of GMOs is unimpressive.
If we turn to India, we can now see that Bt cotton has largely been a failure. GM cotton has hardly been a success elsewhere either. Although critics are blamed for Golden Rice not being on the market, again the reality is that after two decades problems remain with the technology.
A largely non-GMO Europe tends to outperform the US, which largely relies on GM crops. In general, “GM crops have not consistently increased yields or farmer incomes, or reduced pesticide use in North America or in the Global South (Benbrook, 2012; Gurian-Sherman, 2009)” (from the report ‘Persistent narratives, persistent failure’).
GM agriculture is not ‘feeding the world’, nor has it been designed to do so. The choice for farmers between a technology based on broken promises (as further outlined in this NYT piece) and conventional non-GMO agriculture is no choice at all.
“Currently available GM crops would not lead to major yield gains in Europe,” says Matin Qaim, a researcher at Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Germany. He adds that as far as herbicide-resistant crops in general are concerned: “I don’t consider this to be the miracle type of technology that we couldn’t live without” (quoted in another New York Times article, Doubts about the promised bounty of GM crops.)
A choice between proven non-GMO agriculture and a failing or less effective GMO model (with all the serious health, environmental and social impacts) is nothing but a false choice.
And if the GMO agritech industry wishes to perpetuate the idea that one of its main motives is to promote ‘choice’ and help farmers (and thus consumers) then why does it work to ultimately deny choice? Once the genetic genie is out of the bottle, there may be no way of going back.
Roger Levett, specialist in sustainable development, argues (‘Choice: Less can be more, in Food Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn 2008):
“If some people are allowed to choose to grow, sell and consume GMO foods, soon nobody will be able to choose food, or a biosphere, free of GMOs. It’s a one-way choice, like the introduction of rabbits or cane toads to Australia; once it’s made, it can’t be reversed.”
There is sufficient evidence showing that GM and non-GM crops cannot co-exist. Indeed, contamination seems to be part of a cynical industry strategy. For instance, with GM food crops already illegally growing in India, what future India agriculture? What future farmers’ choices?
It is convenient to paint critics of GMOs as being authoritarian and possessing an ideological agenda. Whether it is Bayer, Monsanto or one of the other major agritech/agribusiness concerns, the real agenda is clear: elite commercial interests and the maximisation of profit for shareholders are the driving forces behind GM agriculture.
Critics of GMOs and transnational corporations did not have a leading role in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies. Monsanto did. Critics did not write the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. The global food processing industry had a leading role in that (see this). Whether it involves Codex, the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring Indian agriculture or the proposed US-EU trade deal (TTIP), the powerful agribusiness/food lobby has secured privileged access to policy makers.
From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to the global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels have been bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global supply chain dominated by powerful corporations.
From the destruction of indigenous agriculture in Ethiopia to the ongoing dismantling of Indian agriculture at the behest of transnational agribusiness, where is the ‘choice’?
Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto. India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill. And Bayer’s hand is likely behind the ongoing strategy behind GM mustard in India. Whether through secretive trade deals, strings-attached loans or outright duplicity, the global food and agribusiness conglomerates have scant regard for choice or for democracy.
Localisation and traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalization.
Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina or palm oil production in Indonesia, the role of transnational agribusiness has been devastating.
What choice do we as consumers have over the tens of thousands of synthetic agrochemicals contaminating our soil, oceans and food. How did they get on the market in the first place? Again, largely as a result of fraud.
What choice do consumers have over GM food when food conglomerates and Bayer have spent large sums of money to prevent labelling?
What choice does the public have when governments become de facto mouthpieces of the industry as they collude behind closed doors with powerful corporations?
What choice did Mexican farmers and consumers have over their right to healthy food
when NAFTA (driven by the powerful food/agribusiness lobby in the US) drove farmers out of business and consumers towards bad food and poor health?
What right have corporations like Monsanto and Bayer to damage (see this too) health as well as natural resources that belong to humanity collectively? These entities with histories of criminality have convinced governments and the public that they have a right to own humanity’s collective resources.
And with that in mind, how will a Monsanto-Bayer merger and increasing consolidation of the seed and agrochemical sector increase choice? It won’t. It hints at of a dark future of corporate monopolies.
In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate-inspired PR, many government officials, scientists and journalists take as given that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. There is the premise that water, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful and wholly corrupt transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.
These natural assets (‘the commons’) belong to everyone and any stewardship should be carried out in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf, not by private transnational corporations driven by self-interest and the maximization of profit by any means possible.
And that’s the real agenda. That’s the bottom line where choice is concerned.
We have been living in the shadow of global agribusiness and its impacts for too long.
When pro-GMO/pro-big agribusiness lobbyists take aim at critics, alleging they are denying choice and have an ideological/authoritarian agenda, they should look a little closer to home.
But to quote the writer Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/01/09/gmos-global-agribusiness-and-the-destruction-of-choice/

Hey, Sydneysiders!
Looking for a healthier alternative to conventional ice cream?
http://myculturedfood.com/home/

Unfermented soy has been linked to digestive distress, immune system breakdown, PMS, endometriosis, reproductive problems for men and women, allergies, ADD and ADHD, higher risk of heart disease and cancer, malnutrition, and loss of libido.

This is obviously very average or very inaccurate as I am 5’11” and weigh 73.4 this morning (4.5 kilos under the average) yet still have belly fat I am losing! 🙁
I found another chart here that may be more realistic as it has three different build types:
https://www.healthchecksystems.com/heightweightchart.htm