USDA: GMO Crops May Cause Major Environmental Risks

USDA: GMO Crops May Cause Major Environmental Risks RT February 25, 2014

A new report published by the United States Department of Agriculture demonstrates that the vast majority of corn and soybean crops grown in America are genetically-engineered variants made to withstand certain conditions and chemicals.

But while GMO seeds have been sowed on US soil for 15 years now, the latest USDA report reveals that Americans still have concerns about consuming custom-made, laboratory-created products, albeit nowhere near as much as in Europe.

The report was released by the USDA’s Economic Research Service and published on their website Feb. 20. And though the paper takes into consideration the trends that have shaped how scientists and agriculturists have approached genetically-modified organisms since they were first introduced in the US a decade-and-a-half ago, the consensus seems to be that no one is certain just yet about what toll the surge in GMOs will truly have.

Between 1984 and 2002, the study’s authors wrote, the number of GMO varieties approved by the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, or APHIS, grew exponentially. Today GMO crops are found in most of America’s biggest farms, they continued, and scientists have in the last several years discovered groundbreaking new ways to make situation-specific seeds that have traits more desirable than traditional crops.

“As of September 2013, about 7,800 releases were approved for GE corn, more than 2,200 for GE soybeans, more than 1,100 for GE cotton and about 900 for GE potatoes,” the USDA affirmed.

Just last year, the agency added, GMO crops were planted on about 169 million acres of land in the US — or about half of all farmland from coast-to-coast.

Around 93 percent of all soybean crops planted in the US last year involved GMO, herbicide-tolerant (HT) variants, the USDA acknowledged, and HT corn and HT cotton constituted about 85 and 82 percent of total acreage, respectively.

“HT crops are able to tolerate certain highly effective herbicides, such as glyphosate, allowing adopters of these varieties to control pervasive weeds more effectively,” reads an excerpt from the USDA report.

As those weed-killers are dumped into more and more fields containing HT crops, however, USDA experts say it could have a major, as-yet-uncertain impact on the environment.

“Because glyphosate is significantly less toxic and less persistent than traditional herbicides,” a portion of the report reads, “…the net impact of HT crop adoption is an improvement in environmental quality and a reduction in the health risks associated with herbicide use (even if there are slight increases in the total pounds of herbicide applied). However, glyphosate resistance among weed populations in recent years may have induced farmers to raise application rates .Thus, weed resistance may be offsetting some of the economic and environmental advantages of HT crop adoption regarding herbicide use. Moreover, herbicide toxicity may soon be negatively affected (compared to glyphosate) by the introduction (estimated for 2014) of crops tolerant to the herbicides dicamba and 2,4-D.” That chemical, as RT has reported on in the past, is a component in Agent Orange and has been linked to health risks. Should the USDA give the go-ahead for GMO companies to manufacture 2,4-Dresistant crops, then that agent could appear in alarming numbers across America’s farmland. But while anti-GMO advocates consider that just one of the reasons they oppose the influx of man-made crops being grown in exponentially large numbers across the county, the USDA said activism along those lines has been comparatively small in the US. “Some consumers, including those in the European Union, have indicated a reluctance to consume GE products. In other countries, including the United States, expression of consumer concern is less widespread,” the report reads.

“Despite the rapid increase in adoption rates for GE corn, soybean, and cotton varieties by US farmers, some continue to raise questions regarding the potential benefits and risks of GE crops.”

But even if the jury is still out with regards to the risks of GE crops, the USDA said they are being grown in record numbers, the likes of which has prompted herbicide manufactures to experience a surge as well. Whether that’s’ good or bad, however, has yet to be determined.

“We are not characterizing them (GMO crops) as bad or good. We are just providing information,” Michael Livingston, a government agricultural economist and one of the authors of the report, told Reuters.

According to the report, herbicide use on GMO corn increased from around 1.5 pounds per planted acre in 2001 to more than 2.0 pounds per planted acre in 2010.

Mercury Is Good For Children And Other Insanely Stupid Health Lies Mike Adams Natural News February 25, 2014 …still pushed by the nutritionally illiterate media If you want to get truly terrible advice on health, foods and nutrition, just tune into the mainstream media.

Across all the three-letter networks, high-circulation newspapers and establishment websites, you’ll discover a bizarre cesspool of truly dangerous, outdated and pharmainfluenced health advice that’s more likely to get you killed than keep you informed. In this article, I examine the five biggest insanely stupid health lies still being pushed by the mainstream media, almost as if these organizations think the world is flat or that mercury vapors can chase away evil spirits that cause disease.

You might even think this article is a joke. Although the content of this article is absolutely true, it really is a joke on the mainstream media which continues to lose readers and viewers by the minute.

Where are all the readers and viewers going? To “alternative” news organizations like Natural News, where readership and social media numbers continue to grow by leaps and bounds. (Maybe it’s because we tell the truth and aren’t a bunch of pathetic sellouts to the corrupt, criminally-operated medical establishment, GMO poison pushers and drug companies.)

Insanely stupid health lie #1: Mercury in lobster is bad for you, but mercury in flu shots is good for young children!

When small amounts of mercury were recently found in Maine lobster, health authorities shut down the harvesting and the media reports on the “Mercury contamination from decades-old industrial pollution.” (SOURCE) Mercury is toxic, after all, and you shouldn’t be eating it. Nearly everyone agrees on that point.

Yet, magically, when far higher concentrations of mercury are injected into children in the form of flu shots, suddenly all that mercury is completely safe and harmless, according to the mainstream media.

Heck, the mercury even enhances the health of children, the media claims! Just watch this media clip which claims that mercury causes “improved behavior and mental performance” in children.

Yeah, seriously. I wasn’t joking when I used the phrase “insanely stupid” in the title of this article.

How, exactly, is mercury harmful when eaten in lobster but completely safe when injected into the body’s muscle tissue at far higher concentrations? To arrive at that conclusion, you have to be insanely stupid, of course. Or brain damaged by mercury in vaccines…

Yet this is the story you will continue to hear across the mainstream media: Mercury in vaccines is harmless, they say. Or better yet, some media outlets claim there is no mercury in vaccines at all,

essentially claiming that mercury is a “conspiracy theory.” The most astonishing thing in all this is the surprising fact that brain damage can be so selective. Apparently, mercury in vaccines can destroy all rational thinking centers in the brain of a mainstream journalist, yet keep alive just enough circuitry to allow them to copy and paste corporate press releases distributed by vaccine manufacturers.

Fascinating how that “selective lobotomy” operates, isn’t it?

Insanely stupid health lie #2: There’s no such thing as a food that helps prevent cancer Here’s another insanely stupid lie pushed by the media, and this one gets people killed. The lie is that “there is no such thing as any food which can prevent cancer.”

This lie is engineered and circulated for the most insidious of motivations: to keep cancer rates high and enrich the cancer industry by attacking the very sources of information the American people desperately need to prevent cancer, reduce health care costs, reduce suffering and increase longevity.

The fact that a multitude of foods have anti-cancer properties is simply not debatable by any rational person who is sufficiently educated on the subject. Blueberries, red grapes, broccoli, onions, garlic, pumpkin seeds, almonds and all sorts of foods have well-documented, scientifically-validated anticancer properties. Any journalist who publicly denies this in an article onlyadmits their own complete ignorance on the subject of anti-cancer foods and nutrition. This is what I mean when I describe mainstream media journalists as “nutritionally illiterate.” They truly are!

Anyone interested in actually finding science that talks about anti-cancer foods only need visit Science.NaturalNews.com where over 11 million scientific studies are organized, keyword-linked and republished from the National Library of Medicine. A person intent on learning something can spend days on the site learning about anti-cancer foods and dietary supplements.

There are also, of course, extremely helpful books written by doctors and PhDs who are experts on the subject of anti-cancer foods. One of my favorites is called Foods to Fight Cancer: Essential foods to help prevent cancer. It describes all the scientifically-validated anti-cancer benefits of certain food groups such as citrus fruits (the white layer inside the peeling is anti-cancer) and cruciferous vegetables.

People who still think there’s no such thing as anti-cancer foods must be living in the Stone Age, or are willfully ignorant.

Insanely stupid health lie #3: Fluoride improves public health It’s interesting that now even a notable professor at the Harvard School of Public Health agrees that fluoride consumption lowers IQs in children.

According to the published study, researchers “found strong indications that fluoride may adversely affect cognitive development in children. Based on the findings, the authors say that this risk should not be ignored, and that more research on fluoride’s impact on the developing brain is warranted.”

But hold on: the mainstream media says that anyone who asks intelligent scientific questions on fluoride toxicity is a nut case. Fluoride is ASSUMED to magically be safe, regardless of the evidence, and this myth is obediently repeated by nearly every mainstream media outlet as if it were established fact. When “fluoride” is ever mentioned, media journalists like up like toy soldiers and salute to the chemical industry’s desire to eliminate toxic chemical waste by labeling it “fluoride” and dumping it into the public water supply.

The reality is far different from what we are told: Fluoride makes the population stupid. It lowers IQ points in children. It dumbs down the adult population, too, and keeps people cognitively suppressed.

“Fluoride” isn’t just fluoride, either: it’s loaded with toxic chemicals and heavy metals.

But that’s the whole point. Fluoride is a huge success at its intended mission: to keep people so incredibly stupid that they will actually believe the mainstream media, or the White House, or even — gasp! — CNN. To watch Piers Morgan and believe anything he says, you almost have to deliberately drink gallons of fluoride to eliminate all higher reasoning function in your brain.

Insanely stupid health lie #4: Nutrition is a waste of money Don’t waste your money on vitamin pills! Didn’t you hear? Nutrition will only give you “expensive urine!”

It is with this particularly insidious lie that the American public is encouraged to stop buying vitamins and instead buy prescription drugs which are 10,000% more expensive and thereby create the world’s most expensive urine of all. In fact, the average American’s urine contains more dollars worth of prescription drugs than the entire day’s salary of a factory worker in China.

According to the mainstream media — which is largely supported by junk foods, fast food and prescription drugs advertising — all you need to be truly healthy is junk foods, fast food and prescription drugs. All those silly “organics” and “dietary supplements” and “superfoods” are just a waste of time and money, didn’t ya know? Only crazy people buy healthy food. Real Americans go to the pharmacy!

Oh, and don’t worry about the fact that everybody around you who actually pursues a lifestyle of junk food, fast food and prescription drugs is dying from cancer, diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

That’s just bad luck, we’re told. It has nothing to do with their diets, because if you believe the mainstream media’s health hacks, diet has nothing to do with health outcomes!

Astonishingly, many journalists actually believe in such lunacy.

Insanely stupid health lie #5: Disease outbreaks are caused by a lack of vaccinations Every time you hear about an outbreak of whooping cough, or measles, or the flu, the entire national media lines up to declare, in obedient unison, “It’s all due to a lack of vaccines!”

It’s almost magical — or possibly tragic — to see the knee-jerk reaction play out across the boughtand-paid-for media. Didn’t you know? Disease is actually CAUSED by a lack of vaccines?

When vaccines are not injected into children in high enough numbers, diseases spontaneously erupt from nothing!

This was, of course, the very theory of disease before the Germ Theory. Diseases were thought to spontaneously appear without cause, and mercury was one of the “treatments” given to patients by doctors of the day to make diseases go away.

Not much has changed in 250 years, it turns out. Today, the mysticism of vaccinations remains just as irrational and faith-based as the medical voodoo of the 1700′s, and the lack of reasoning among those who write the news for the masses is just as pathetic today as it was back then. The technology may have changed in a couple of centuries, but human brains haven’t changed at all, and they’ve always been easy for the establishment to manipulate.

Nowhere along the line has anyone bothered to look at the importance of nutritionally supporting the immune system so that it can fight off infectious disease without breaking down into symptomatic sickness. If you believe the mainstream media, your immune function has no purpose whatsoever and it was a mistake that you were ever born with one. Instead, you should let interventionist medicine run your immune system through the injection of viral strains, aluminum, mercury, MSG, formaldehyde and other deadly chemicals routinely used in vaccines.

You were, in other words, born an “incomplete” human who can only achieve completeness through multiple vaccine injections which then somehow make your failed immune system suddenly whole.

Except that in nearly every breakout of measles, mumps and flu, it’s the vaccinated kids who get sick the most! Don’t expect the mainstream media to ever report this fact. They don’t even ask the question!

(Why bother asking if you don’t want to know the answer, right?)

If vaccines actually worked, then logically all the sick kids would be those who were never vaccinated.

But that’s almost never the case, it turns out. In most cases, vaccines increase susceptibility to infectious disease rather than decreasing it.

Yet more media lies…

Just to wrap up this collection of eye-opening observations, don’t forget all the following lies which were also endlessly repeated by the media (and then proven to be outrageous lies): • Obamacare would LOWER your health insurance costs and be readily available to everyone! And you could keep your job, too!

• GMOs are perfectly safe to eat in unlimited quantities, and without GMOs, half the world might starve to death.

• Drug companies need to charge monopoly prices only so they can raise enough money to develop cures for humanity. Because they care! And the only reason the FDA enforces a U.S. monopoly on drug prices while seizing importations of prescription drugs from Canadian pharmacies is because the FDA cares, too!

• All the money donated to pink ribbon cancer fundraisers goes to help find cures for cancer. (Total lie.

Most of the money goes to fund mobile mammogram trucks that go into low-income neighborhoods to falsely diagnose poor women with cancer so the cancer centers can rack up huge Medicare billings. Kaching!)

• The government isn’t listening to your phone calls, no way! That’s just a crazy “conspiracy theory.”

And no, your credit card records and bank records aren’t being tracked, either… stop being so paranoid!

Want to stop being lied to? Want to know the truth about food, health, nutrition, cancer prevention and vaccines? Read Natural News like over six million other people do each month. And find out why people who stop watching CNN never go back.

Latest Obamacare Fail: Two-Thirds Of Small Business Employees To See Premiums Spike Geoffrey Dickens Newsbusters.org February 25, 2014 Thanks to ObamaCare, about two-thirds of Americans who work at small businesses will see a spike in their health insurance premiums. Reaction at ABC, CBS and NBC to this devastating news for employees across the nation? A big fat yawn. No one at the Big Three networks have reported on the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) report, issued on Friday, that anticipates 65 percent of small businesses will see their health insurance premiums rise. This isn’t what the President promised on the 2012 campaign trail: “The other thing we’ve done is to say, what are the critical needs of small business? A lot of time, one of the biggest challenges is to make sure that you, as a sole proprietor, that you can get health insurance for you and your family. So when you hear about the Affordable Care Act — ObamaCare — and I don’t mind the name because I really do care. That’s why we passed it. You should know that once we have fully implemented, you’re going to be able to buy insurance through a pool so that you can get the same good rates as a group that if you’re an employee at a big company you can get right now — which means your premiums will go down.” — President Barack Obama, campaign speech in Cincinnati, July 16, 2012 On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal’s Jennifer Corbett Dooren broke down the CMS findings: “The report concluded that about 65% of small businesses, or plans covering 11 million people, would see an increase in insurance premiums under these so-called community-rating provisions of the health law. About 35% of employers would see a decrease for plans covering six million people. These employers aren't required to pay a penalty under the federal health law if they don't insure workers.” The CMS report is just the latest in a string of bad news for ObamaCare that the Big Three networks have either ignored or downplayed. ABC, CBS and NBC ignored a February 22 New York Times story that reported government jobs were also being hurt by ObamaCare. And the news of yet another delay in the employer mandate, and a devastating CBO report that claimed the Affordable Care Act would cost the equivalent of two million jobs were barely mentioned on the Big Three evening and morning shows.

INFOWARS.COM BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND