A Shot In the Arm From One Kind Reader

Darkest to lightest hues represent Sleuth4Health’s most to least readership worldwide

Since the start of my blog in September, 2012, I have always been curious about who reads it.  I know people do because the hit counter steadily climbs and the world map lights up – ever reminding me that people are reading in countries like Guernsey, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Namibia or Brunei Darussalam.  126 countries in total have color value on this world map.  Cool!

By far, most people who read Sleuth4Health reside in the USA, as of course do I.  Second to those are the ever faithful Canadians, with the Brits not far behind their North American colonists.  It makes sense that these English speaking nations would be the most avid readers of blogs in English.  Coming in a strong 4th place, however, is linguistically gifted Germany (every German I’ve ever known speaks at least three languages), for which I have no explanation other than that perhaps as a country, they have a strong interest in GMOs and biotechnology in general. (Ihr Deutschen interessieren sich in Artikeln über GVO, nicht wahr?)

Anyway, since my conversion to pro-science and supporter of GMOs, I have observed my readership to be largely of the science and agriculture crowd.  At least these are the folks who comment regularly and are quick to let me know if I’m wrong (which I often am), have left something out, or if they disagree.

Every now and again, however, I hear from someone just like me – non-scientist, open-minded, well educated but not a PhD, lover of learning and the real truth, aware of what’s politically correct but wanting to make sure there is solid reason for one’s loyalty, commitment or support.

With her permission, I’d like to publish an email I received recently from one such individual:  Corinna of Alberta, Canada.

Hi Julee,
I am a complete stranger to you (a 31-year-old stay-at-home-mom to three residing in Alberta, Canada).  Thank you for your blog.

Like the vast realm of those of us who like to read and talk with others, I’ve been inundated with all kinds of wheat-is-now-toxic, GMO’s-will-be-our-demise, never-trust-another-pharmaceutical-company information recently. Like you, I’m not a scientist but I do have a 4 year degree in Psychology as well as an Elementary Education degree and I love to study and learn and seek the truth.
Long story short, if it weren’t for people like you who are willing to seek both sides of every story until you find what is proven true, (plus, have enough humility to admit you’ve changed your mind when important!) I would likely be bogged down and falling with great fear to the anti-GMO movement (and any purely ‘Natural’ movement out there).
I discovered your blog after one of my FB friends posted your GMO’s It’s all in your Head blog post. Since then, I’ve read nearly your whole blog and have been refreshed, excited, and relieved by it.
Thank you! Know that you have a much broader audience than you might suspect!
Keep up your wonderful work – and sharing!
Corinna

My thanks go out to Corinna.  At the risk of sounding very obviously trite, maudlin and cliché all at once, it does sometimes seem that my fingertips press laptop keys in vain, that people don’t really care all that much, that if I stopped writing this volunteer blog, the world would still turn (and of course, it would).  Periodic reminders such as this nice email remind me that my words, position and journey are appreciated and really do matter.   And wouldn’t you know it, on the same day I clicked on Corinna’s email, I got invited to be part of a discussion panel via skype in an upcoming ‘Ag Innovation Syposium’ in Idaho.

Soldier on – I will!

Thanks to all my readers!

Julee K/Sleuth4Health

email:  sleuth4health@gmail.com

Note to readers:  If you’d like to guest post, let me know.  I am always welcoming of fresh ideas.  I also am buried in my new teaching job and could use some help with researching topics.

Do Corporations Really Dominate Farming?

Food and ag writer Tom Philpott of Mother Jones certainly has kept my attention through my own evolution from anti-GMO to pro-science supporter of GMOs.  He used to be my hero.  When it comes to recombinant DNA technology or genetic engineering in general, he mostly writes on the side of the antis but every now and then he comes across quite neutral on his specific food or ag topic and nails it.  At Sleuth4Health, I’m all about the real truth, about GMOs, about agriculture, our food, health, everything. Mostly, I don’t want people to be scared to eat the food that is in their neighborhood grocery store.  Enjoy it!  It is abundant and, for the most part, inexpensive.

I continue to learn as I write this blog.  Now that I actually know a few family farmers, this article was of great interest to me, and coming from Philpott made it even better.

For that reason, I am still a fan of Tom Philpott and Mother Jones!

Here a handful of snippets from his recent article titled:  Does Corporate Farming Exist?  Barely.

Goaded on by small-is-good gospel, plenty of people have adopted a Manichean view of modern US farming: large, soulless corporate enterprises on one side, human-scale, artisanal operations on the other. […]

Reality is a lot more complicated. While there are plenty of mega-corporations in the food industry, they rarely do the actual farming themselves.

A USDA study released in August found that 96.4 percent of US crop farms are “family farms,” or “ones in which the principal operator, and people related to the principal operator by blood or marriage, own more than half.” That number doesn’t leave a lot of room for corporate farmers, does it?

[…]

The story is a bit—but not that much—different in meat production.

[…]

The farms that supply the feedlots—that raise the calves until they are ready to be fattened in those corporate-run confined finishing operations (CAFOS)—are almost exclusively family-owned businesses, as this 2011 USDA paper shows. And there are more than 700,000 of them.

Read the full article here

Of course, eventually the produce and livestock ends up in the hands of Big Ag for the processing of the desired food product but until then, it brings me some comfort to know that, yes, family owned cows do still eat grass! See Montana Cowboy College.

Julee K/Sleuth4Health

email:  sleuth4health@gmail.com

On The Subject Of GMO

I ran across this gem this morning. A good, short read with entertaining comments.

The Noise

So much for telling myself I wasn’t going to blog until Monday.

On September 6th, Scientific American’s editorial board wrote an article in which they come out against labeling Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) food.

And that’s good enough for me. Maybe it will put an end, once and for all, to the irrational hysteria over GMO.

As the editors of Scientific American correctly point out, we’ve been eating GMO food since the dawn of agriculture through a long process of selected breeding. All the food that you enjoy today once started out as something you wouldn’t recognize, such as a scraggly-looking grass that we now know as corn.

With the advent of genetic engineering, scientists as far back as 20 years ago have been using modern tools to tweak and improve genes of plant crops that allow them to resist drought and not wither and die under the use of…

View original post 541 more words

Is Jeffrey Smith Blinded By His Own Light?

SP is back!

SP (initials used by his request) recently made my acquaintance via email and shared his essay My Thoughts On GMOs, which I published to very positive reviews back on September 4.  SP is an American expatriot who was living in Ecuador but is soon jetting off to Tibet and who also happens to have studied science writing.  His default mode is a gentle but probing “now let’s just see about that” stance.  As an American outside the US looking in, his global viewpoint comes across to me as steady, informed and realistic.

A few days ago SP emailed me again, this time about Jeffrey Smith, you know, the Institute of Responsible Technology (IRT) guy, the self-proclaimed ‘expert’ on all foods genetically modified.  Having commented on an article at Biofortified, SP implored me to do my part to call out Jeffrey Smith.  The original article, Who Is Jeffrey Smith?, written by plant genetics luminary Anastasia Bodnar, appeared on Biofortified back on June 22, 2009.  It is a testament to the article’s ongoing relevance that people are still commenting on it now.

Since the writing of that article, Jeffrey Smith’s exposure and fame has metasticized.  His documentary Genetic Roulette has circled the globe, won a smattering of awards, continues to be highly criticized by mainstream science, yet still serves as “Anti-GMO 101” for budding soldiers of the movement.  I myself was duped, and frightened out of my wits by that video when I first saw it back in October, 2012.  Now, Smith tours extensively, fulfilling a schedule of appearances at seminars, webinars, forums and all manners of group gatherings in which the topic is anti-GMO.  Aftert a quick glance on the IRT website, I counted 24 upcoming Smith lectures and  appearances and the schedule is only posted through November 9.  He pounds pavement all over the US in the coming weeks – Maryland, Indiana, Idaho, California – on he marches, welcoming new, enthusiastic converts to the fold everywhere he goes.

So here I am, doing my part.

But first things first:  SP, I think your lifestyle is pretty cool, from what little I know of it.   Jetting off here, there – first Ecuador and now soon to be off on a visit with Tibetan monks.  You seem to be living chapters right out of Somerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge – one of my all time favorites.

OK, now down to business.

On Biofortified, Anastasia Bodnar published the article titled Who Is Jeffrey Smith? Lacking the list of credentials that would indicate he knows what he’s talking about, he is nonetheless one of the most influential voices in the burgeoning anti-GMO movement.  He plays the fear card with the adeptness of a trial lawyer and while I believe he thinks he is well-meaning, he is grossly misleading people and causing otherwise sane individuals to be scared to eat food from their local grocery store.  He uses psuedo-science to back up his claims.  See Yogic Flying and GM Foods:  The Wild Theories of Jeffrey Smith.

SP shines his own light on what makes Smith tick in his comments below which originally appeared on the Biofortified site in response to Bodnar’s article.  The bolding is mine.

SP

September 16, 2013 at 5:12 pm · Reply

Jeffrey Smith runs the Institute for Responsible Technology out of his home in Fairfield, Iowa. Yes he does make pretty good money through being a very skilled communicator of distortion and half truth on genetically engineered foods. According to academicsreview.org, IRS filings show Smith’s home based business grossed over $200k/yr for each year, 2008, 2009, and 2010. Likely the income is generated from speaking fees, donations, and book sales. His own website is quite self promotional.

As a yogic flyer, it can be safely assumed that Smith was well embedded in the culture and practices of the Maharishi Mahesh TM movement. A core aspect of the TM movement was the practice of working hard to make a lot of money through semi-religious business ventures. Smith has succeeded, by consistently bending the truth and being a skilled persuader. Part of his agenda is to support his friends and business associates in the organic food movement. Big money there too.

I would call Jeffrey Smith a very talented fear mongerer and first class promoter of mis-information cloaked in the veil of serving a high and noble purpose. Of course he reveals little about his own background for it would dramatically undermine the credibility that he has falsely gained.

• SP

  September 16, 2013 at 9:20 pm · Reply

  People like Jeffrey Smith have so frightened the USA and Greenpeace has so frightened the rest of the world that most countries now have an unnecessary regulatory burden only Monsanto can afford. Universities and private research centers can no longer afford to be in the molecular plant breeding business. People in those sectors are feeling discouraged. Oh the irony.

  Red grapefruit, seedless watermelon, most varieties of wheat, tritical, and many other common foods were produced by genetic modification far more brutal than what Jeffrey Smith is screaming about. For background on development of food crops, I recommend the book: Mendel in the Kitchen (by Nina Federoff).

  He writes in his email to me:

  Hi Julie,

  Here’s a guy that’s blinded by his own light.  He’s a VERY talented charlatan and liar.  Unfortunately, he is influencing a very large number of people because of the considerable media attention he gets.  Dr. Oz for example.  After I watched his Genetic Roulette video, I felt like I was in a fear based trance.  It was weird.  Fortunately, that trance broke as I kept digging.

  The site that refutes Smith on a point-by-point basis is: academicsreview.org  Trouble is, the scientific rebuttal is formal and very detailed.  Smith wins on the basis of charisma and media power.  It seems that media and fear mongering go well together.  I’m kind of ticked off about that to tell you the truth.

  Thanks SP.  Safe travels and keep in touch!

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  Julee K/Sleuth4Health

  email:  sleuth4health@gmail.com

Volunteer GM Corn?

These are photos of a somewhat scraggly and very mysterious volunteer corn stalk that appeared in my front yard.  When it first appeared, I wasn’t sure what it was so I let it grow and in a very short time it became what you see here.   The silk has emerged and elongated.  According to what I’ve read, pollination occurs at this stage.  Fingers crossed on that.

I want to put glasses and a ‘Cousin It’ hat on that mop of beautiful blond hair!

I wonder – could it be GM corn?  I’ve been tempted to spray it with Roundup but I don’t want to destroy it of it’s not RR.  Or maybe it’s Bt corn.  Or if it’s “stacked” could it be both?

Never before has a volunteer corn plant taken up residence in my yard.  Would this be the result of a dropped corn kernel?  A blown corn kernel?  I am so fascinated by this thing!

Julee K/Sleuth4Health

email:  sleuth4health@gmail.com

Celebrating One Year!

I knew my one year blog anniversary was coming up but I honestly thought it was September 12.  This morning when I logged into Sleuth4Health I noticed a strange, bright symbol up in the corner of my dashboard so of course, I clicked on it and out popped “Happy Anniversary with WordPress.com!”

So, indeed, today is my one year anniversary.  The most important thing I have to say is, thanks for reading!

As anyone who writes a blog knows, it takes time – lots and lots of time.  The higher the quality, the more time it takes.  My original year plan for Sleuth4Health was to focus on anti-GMO topics so that eventually, I could advertise or sell organic products and supplements.  I had hoped to turn this blog into some kind of income.  Well, that didn’t happen.

For anyone who doesn’t know what did occur, I’ll summarize it for you:  after being a sharp critic against GMOs and biotechnology, I encountered information via blogs and individuals that made me question what the heck I was doing – so much so that I completely changed the scope of Sleuth4Health to then defend GMOs and the science behind them.  My turnaround has been compared to that of Mark Lynas, another recent GMO convert.  I have also been on roughly the same trajectory of discovery as writer, photographer and blogger Fourat Janabi and it was a blog post of his that originally gave me pause, got me to thinking, and started this whole change process – a process that took about two months to complete.

I carefully choose my topics now and if its not a topic around GMOs, it still must pass scientific muster.  It is no secret that I’m not a scientist.  Call me an every day consumer with a humanities background.  But I’ll still be sent to the corner wearing a dunce cap if I even hint at psuedo-science in a post because plenty of you hard core science-types are out there reading and bless you for your insistence that facts must be facts!

If the topic is GMOs, which I still write about a lot, what the scientists don’t catch, the farmers will.  So I remain vigilant.  I don’t want to mislead, misrepresent and most of all, I remain true to my commitment to tell the real truth, just as the subheading of my blog states.

So I will press on with Sleuth4Health.  If there is a topic you’d like to see explored here, please let me know.  If you’re a reader who doesn’t usually comment, I’d love to hear from you as well.  It’s really nice to know people get something out of the effort put forth.

Truth be known, I’d still like to turn an endeavor such as this into a writing career.  Still working on that one 🙂

If you’re at all curious about what my very first post was, see below.  It’s funny, there is a similar timeline that anti-GMO activists all seem to follow and I was no different.  Every time a new anti-GMO blog pops up, I can see my old self woven into the frightened words.  It is nearly always a “been there, done that” kind of recognition.  That is why all of my former anti-GMO posts remain on Sleuth4Health for all to see.  They are a testament of how someone can change when offered better facts than what they had before.

On to my second year!

Julee K/Sleuth4Health

email:  sleuth4health@gmail.com

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Very first posts on September 10, 2012

And so I begin…

Some information to get started

“GMO OMG” Documentary Revisited

I just read an excellent review written by Farris Jabr on his blog Brainwaves at Scientific American of the upcoming and long-hyped documentary GMO OMG by Jeremy Seifert.

The hype leading up to this soon-to-be released documentary goes back months and months all the way to my anti-GMO days, before I saw the light last April.  One in the final set of anti-GMO posts I made was, in fact, a blurb about this documentary followed by the trailer.  See post here.

Thankfully I’ve done a complete one-eighty when it comes to GMOs since then.  My blog tells the story [1].

This excellent review by Jabr should be mandatory reading for anyone planning to set foot in theaters come Friday when the film releases to a nation-wide audience.  In reality, I fear that the type of people who will be most influenced by the histrionics of the film are not the kind who would consult Scientific American or any other reliable source of science.  But, alas, perhaps a few can be reached.

Here is a brief excerpt from Jabr’s review that focuses on Bt corn and the way it is portrayed in the film.

In one of the most disingenuous scenes in Seifert’s film, he takes his two young sons Finn and Scout to a cornfield. Back in the day, he explains, children could scamper through such fields carefree. But now farmers grow so-called Bt corn, which has been genetically engineered to produce a pest-killing toxin. So, Seifert reasons, the plants themselves are toxic and before he and his sons can enter the cornfield, they need to take some precautions. The Seifert boys pull on white biohazard suits and gas masks and dash off, filming all the while. Seifert loses his sons amid the stalks at one point, but once he relocates them they leave the field and fall exasperated on the ground. Visibly upset, one of his sons begs for water.

Instead of using his children like marionettes for ludicrous theatrics, Seifert could have, I don’t know, done some actual research. If he had, he would have learned that the toxins Bt corn plants make are extremely specific, killing only certain pests; that Bt corn is not toxic to people; that Bt corn is generally coated in far fewer chemical insecticides—which can poison people—than non-GM corn; and that Bt crops were invented precisely to avoid the application of those noxious chemical insecticides.

When I first began considering that as an anti-GMO “activist” and blogger I perhaps didn’t know what I was talking about, Bt corn was first on my list as the GMO I wanted to know more about.  I had read all the scary, anti-GMO literature about the exploding and rupturing stomachs of insects that bite into the corn (read Mercola article here).   When I consulted an actual expert on the subject, plant geneticist Kevin Folta, I asked him about Bt corn specifically.  Below is our email exchange on the topic.

S4H:   How is Bt active in insects but not in humans?  What if the ‘dose’ in humans were extrapolated to mimic the same ratio the corn borers get when they bite Bt corn?

Folta:  This is the absolute miracle of Bt.  It is a small peptide, a little chain of amino acids.  In order to be active it has to be cleaved by an enzyme (which only certain insects have). Once active, it binds to specific receptors in the larval gut.  The receptors bind like a lock and key.  It is remarkably specific.  Once bound, the receptors cluster and form a pore.  The pore allows contents of the gut to mix with the body cavity and the insect larvae dies.

Humans do not have the receptors at all.  Even if they did, the mechanism is so specific that the Bt peptide that affects moth larvae does not work on beetles, and vice versa.  It is amazingly specific.

In the guts of humans or other animals the Bt peptide is just another peptide.  It is digested in the stomach and broken down into amino acids.   Even if the dose were increased to straight Bt, nothing would be expected to happen, at least in terms of how it affects the larvae.

Bt has been used in organic cultivation for a long time and has been studied in depth for over 60 years.  No evidence of harm on animals. Reports that claim this are usually just in tissue culture cells, which are not a suitable proxy for an animal system.

This answer [2] by Folta was extremely powerful for me and when I sat with it, when I truly digested it, when I found that it was corroborated in multiple mainstream science sources,  I realized I had quite foolishly jumped to conclusions about GMOs and was riding a wave of uninformed or at least under informed conspiracy theorist activism.

It was a bandwagon from which I quickly disembarked.  Though it is still going strong, thankfully I’m not on it!

Julee K/Sleuth4Health

email:  sleuth4health@gmail.com

This article was updated at 11:50 PT

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[1] See:  Science Is Laughing At Us,   How To Temper An Anti-GMO Blogger:  My Story

[2] See:  My Conversation With A Scientist:  Part One