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The genetically modified crop soybean grown on 91 percent of US soybean fields is repeatedly attributed to devastating reproductive and birth defects in animal studies. Nevertheless, the powers that be-in both the private and public spheres-continue to allow Americans to shovel GMO soy onto their dinner tables.

Rats Fed GMO Soy Experience Reproductive Difficulties, Hairy Mouths

Russian biologist Alexey V. Surov and his team fed three generations of hamsters varying diets (one without soy, one with non-GM soy, one with GMO soy, and the final with higher amounts of GMO soy). By the third generation, the pups from the fourth group suffered a high mortality rate and most of the adults were infertile or sterile.

Earlier in 2010, Surov co-authored a paper in
Doklady Biological Sciences, recording the incidence of hair growing in recessed pouches in the mouths of hamsters, most prominently in those of third-generation hamsters fed GM soy. “This pathology may be exacerbated by elements of the food that are absent in natural food, such as genetically modified (GM) ingredients (GM soybean or maize meal) or contaminants (pesticides, mycotoxins, heavy metals, etc.).”

Just five years earlier, Irina Ermakova (also with the Russian National Academy of Sciences) noted in her study that within three weeks, over half of the babies from mother rats fed GM soy died-over five times the mortality rate in the non-GMO soy control group. The pups from the GM group were also smaller. Later, Ermakova fed all the rats in her laboratory a GM soy diet. Two months later, the infant mortality rate reached 55 percent. The testicles of male rats fed a GM diet, where once pink, turned blue.

Both Farmers and the Environment Suffering

GMO studies with troubling results are cropping up worldwide. The Austrian government released a study in 2008 that found that mice fed GM corn produced fewer and smaller babies than those fed a non-GM diet. Everyday farmers-like Jerry Rosman-are even beginning to notice that US pigs and cows fed GM diets are becoming sterile. Even corncob bedding could be partly to blame for strange reproductive habits (or rather, the lack of such habits) in rats, as discovered by Baylor College of Medicine researchers. They also found that the GM corn material contained compounds that curtailed male sexual behavior, stopped the sexual cycle in females, and contributed to breast and prostate cancer call growth in cultures.