USDA’s No GMO Label Doesn’t Mean No Genetic Engineering

Excerpts:

A food package carries no bioengineered disclosure. Does that mean no genetic engineering went into the food?

No. USDA’s bioengineered food disclosure standard leaves entire categories of genetically engineered foods and ingredients outside mandatory disclosure.

Easing restrictions on natural substances with credible histories of safe use makes sense. Yet natural products face persistent calls for tighter regulation, alongside efforts to suppress truthful information about their benefits.

Meanwhile, novel technologies that fundamentally alter our food are riding a wave of deregulation—even as their implications demand rigorous scrutiny and full transparency.

These priorities are backwards.

A Narrow Definition, Wide Exclusions

Under the current rule, foods generally require disclosure when: 1) they contain genetic material modified through laboratory recombinant-DNA techniques, 2) the modification could not otherwise arise through conventional breeding or nature, and 3) the modified material is detectable.

There are a host of exclusions:

Restaurants and food service: meals can contain engineered ingredients without this disclosure.
Very small manufacturers: businesses with annual receipts below $2.5 million are exempt.
Accidental presence: up to 5% of each ingredient may be bioengineered if its presence is “inadvertent” or technically unavoidable.
Animal feed: meat, milk, and eggs do not require disclosure solely because animals ate engineered feed.
Refined ingredients: oils, sugars, and other ingredients can avoid disclosure when modified genetic material is undetectable.
Processing aids: qualifying incidental additives present at insignificant levels with no final technical or functional effect are excluded.
Certain meat, poultry, and egg products generally fall outside coverage when those ingredients predominate, including after water, broth, or stock.
Many alcoholic beverages: products subject to federal alcohol labeling law fall outside this standard.

Nearly A Quarter of Your Chips

Consider a hypothetical bag of corn chips containing 80% cornmeal, 19% refined soybean oil, and 1% salt.

If 5% of the cornmeal is inadvertently mixed-in bioengineered corn, that represents 4% of the chips. Add oil entirely from engineered soybeans that meets non-detectability requirements: another 19% originates from GE crops.

That is 23% of the product’s weight originating from engineered crops, quite legally without a bioengineered disclosure.

This can also allow proteins made using genetically engineered yeast or bacteria (through a process called “precision fermentation”) to avoid disclosure, depending on what remains in the finished ingredient.

A CRISPR-produced food can escape disclosure if its genetic modification could otherwise be achieved through conventional breeding or found in nature.

But who decides if a modification could arise through conventional breeding or nature?

Essentially it is the food company that makes the decision…

Read the full article at Alliance for Natural Health.

Brian Shilhavy’s Comments:

Modern history has consistently taught us that we cannot trust our Federal Government in the U.S. to look out for the interests of consumers, and that includes the USDA and the FDA. Both of these agencies serve Wall Street, and derive much of their revenue from the very businesses they are supposed to be regulating in Big Pharma and Big Ag.

For example, the entire corn crop in the U.S. is contaminated, even if that corn is certified organic by USDA organic standards. There may be some exceptions, but we (Healthy Traditions) have never found any corn in the U.S. that has tested clean for GMO DNA, and we have been testing for 12 years now.

The only corn we have tested that has no trace amounts of GMO DNA and no traces of the cancer-causing herbicide glyphosate, has been from traditional farms in Mexico, where planting GMO corn is illegal.

Therefore, we believe we have some of the highest quality tortilla corn chips in the U.S., and we fry them in coconut oil, not toxic polyunsaturated oils derived from GMO crops like corn and soybeans. We also do not package them in plastic, but special bags that are compostable with no danger chemicals.

There may not be a finer tortilla corn chip sold in the U.S.!

Order Here!

DISCLAIMER: Brian Shilhavy is the Editor of Health Impact News, and the founder and CEO of Healthy Traditions. Everything published on the Health Impact News network is available to the public free of charge, with a Creative Commons license offered to all who wish to republish Brian’s articles, with attribution, as he earns his income from Healthy Traditions.

Healthy Traditions, originally Tropical Traditions, has served customers in the U.S. for over 24 years.

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