General Mills has announced they will be responding to public demand and removing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from their products.
The GMO Inside (GMOI) environmental coalition brought together tens of thousands of demonstrators to flood the Cheerios Facebook page with comments, calls to the corporate headquarters and massive amounts of emails to the executives with one message: Take GMOs out of their cereals.
Michelle Kim of GMOI stated : “When GMO Inside began in November 2012, we chose General Mills as our first target for using genetically modified ingredients in Cheerios. It all started when General Mills launched a customer feedback Facebook app, only to be flooded with comments from GMO Insiders, causing the whole project to shut down.”
On Cheerios’ website, the corporation said : “We don’t use genetically modified ingredients in original Cheerios. Our principal ingredient has always been whole grain oats – and there are no GMO oats. We use a small amount of corn starch in cooking, and just one gram of sugar per serving for taste. But our corn starch comes from non-GMO corn, and we use only non-GMO pure cane sugar.”
The company maintains that GMOs are “safe” because “there is broad consensus among major global scientific and regulatory bodies that approved genetically modified foods are safe. The World Health Organization (WHO), the European Food Safety Agency (EFSA), the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Health Canada have all weighed in on this question – and all have found approved biotech crops to be as safe and acceptable as their conventional counterparts.”
March Against Monsanto (MAM) is another activist group dedicated to changing the political conversation on GMOs and bring awareness of the dangers of ingesting them to the public.
Monsanto has created deadly versions of canola, corn, cotton, soybean, sugar beets and alfalfa; just to name a few. Their most well-known product, Round-Up, has prompted the creation of plant life that are resistant to the weed-killer.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) concluded in a study that GM foods contain pesticide residue has shown to produce human cellular endocrine disruptors measured at 1000 times below.
Corroborating the NIH, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) found that “GM foods pose a serious health risk.”
Pamm Larry, an expert in GMOs, explained : “[Marches] bring awareness to people – who maybe have never heard about these products – to look into not only Monsanto but other chemical companies and start to look a little deeper about what’s happening to our food supply and what’s happening to our environment.”
Larry asserted: “People have the right to know what they’re buying, eating and feeding their children. And corporations should not be able to control what we eat without us knowing about it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment