Are Foods Being Turned Into Bioweapons?

Just as medicine is being hijacked by the biotech industry, so is our food supply. President Biden recently signed an executive order that makes biotechnology a key focus of every federal agency, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

May 22, 2023 | Source: The Defender | by Dr. Joseph Mercola

In an April 17, opinion piece in STAT News, Dr. Peter Lurie and Beth Ellikidis argue for the genetic engineering of food, claiming “newer technologies can make highly targeted changes at the base-pair level — one specific rung on the DNA ladder — enhancing precision and reducing the likelihood of ‘off-target effects’ in which the base pairs are unintentionally added to or deleted from the genome.”

While targeted genetic engineering is indeed possible, and modern technology lowers the likelihood of unintentional additions or deletions, this precision does not guarantee there won’t be adverse effects.

One of the reasons for this is that many genes are multifunctional and can have multiple downstream effects.

By altering a single gene, you can inadvertently affect the expression of hundreds of others. What’s more, the multifunctionality of genes is rarely intuitive.

So, while it may seem convenient to genetically engineer cows without horns to prevent injury to other cows and farmhands, as suggested by Lurie and Ellikidis, there’s no telling what that tweak might do to internal organs or biological pathways.

In turn, there’s no guarantee that cascading effects will not alter the nutrition of the meat or dairy that comes from that cow. Maybe it’ll be fine, maybe it won’t. The problem is that, oftentimes with genetically engineered foods, safety testing is minimal or absent.