Organic Bytes
Newsletter #831: Monsanto, Operation Paperclip

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MILLIONS AGAINST MONSANTO

Monsanto, Operation Paperclip, the A-Bomb and Human Radiation Experiments

Alexis Baden-Mayer, Political Director at Organic Consumers Association:

The Buchenwald Touch

Monsanto was an essential part of the top-secret Manhattan Project and ran the U.S. government’s Mound Laboratory nuclear plant until 1988.

You’d think Monsanto was in it to defeat the Nazis, but in 1954, it merged with Bayer, a company that had spent the war making money off the Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz and Buchenwald, selling Zyklon B and using people who were not sent straight to the gas chambers as slave labor or human subjects.

Not only did Monsanto merge with Bayer, run by convicted Nazi war criminals, but it offered jobs to Nazi scientists through the CIA’s Operation Paperclip.

Monsanto and Bayer’s work together as Mobay (and ever since) is exactly what one would expect from the merger of a Pentagon contractor and a Nazi collaborator.

During the Mobay years, Monsanto worked with the Pentagon on deadly radiation experiments—without the consent of their human subjects, including prisoners and children–experiments the scientists admitted privately had “a little of the Buchenwald touch.”

Monsanto’s secret military radiation experiments included spraying a low-income, mostly African-American housing project in St. Louis with radiological weapons in 1953 and 1954.

Monsanto supplied radioactive materials for an unknown number of government-sanctioned human radiation experiments, including one from 1945 to 1947 where 829 pregnant women were secretly given radioactive pills, causing at least four children to die from childhood cancers.

Monsanto even sought to profit from these experiments by creating consumer products like their nuclear-powered pacemaker, in use from 1966 to 1988.

All the while, from 1943 to 1988, Monsanto was running a deadly human experiment on its own workers at Mound Laboratory. Monsanto collected thousands of urine samples and maintained laboratories to monitor the health impacts of workplace radiation exposure, but when their employees got cancer, they refused to help or compensate them.

PLANTING PEACE

If You Want It

By Kaare Melby, Organic Consumers Association:

When I was a teenager in the early 2000’s my family went to a music festival in a rural northern Wisconsin farm field. The festival was called “War Is Over (If You Want It)”, referencing the 1971 John Lennon song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”. The festival was wild, featuring talented regional hippy bands. There was no corporate sponsorship, just people coming together, sharing food, enjoying music, and spreading positivity.

Later that year my family participated in an event that has been called “the largest protest event in human history.” On Sat, Feb 15, 2003, six to ten million people took to the streets in more than 600 cities around the globe in opposition to the coming Iraq War. My family went out to San Francisco, California, to join the protest. I loaded up on a coach bus with my then-girlfriend, and we went to join the protest in Washington, DC.

I had never seen so many people in one place. Washington, DC was absolutely swallowed by the protest, and it was overwhelming to know that there were cities all over the world with just as many, if not more people out protesting. It was global solidarity, and the words “war is over if you want it” echoed in my ears. That year we also had regular anti-war protests in Duluth, MN that were consistently well attended, and full of thoughtful signs and theatrics.

Remembering all of this, it strikes me that there was a very active anti-war movement 20 years ago. Where did it go?

Order your OCA “Planting Peace” bumper stickers from our Minnesota office

SUPPORT OCA & RI

We Can All Do Our Part  

Our triple global health crises of deteriorating public health, world hunger and global warming share common root causes–and the best way to address these crises is to address what they all have in common: an unhealthy, inequitable food system perpetuated by a political and economic system largely driven by corporate profit.

The overwhelming evidence is that human health is seriously deteriorating, and that the underlying causes of this health crisis are directly related not only to our highly toxic industrial practices, but also to our degenerate food, farming and land-management practices.

We can all do our part, turning down our thermostats, by buying fresh foods produced locally and regionally, like pressuring politicians to require local purchasing for schools and institutions, or better yet, by growing some of our own.

Also, you can help us with a donation, we give you our continued commitment to work with our allies to help transition our food system away from pesticides, GMOs, synthetic food, hormone disruptors and antibiotic residues in non-organic produce, grains and meat, excessive sugar, salt and bad fats, overly processed foods and beverages to a healthy organic regenerative way of eating and farming. Please consider making a donation today.

Make a tax-deductible donation to Organic Consumers Association, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit

Make a tax-deductible donation to Regeneration International, our international sister organization

Click here for more ways to support our work

MONSANTO MAKES US SICK

Groundbreaking’ Legal Action Demands EPA Finally Ban Glyphosate

Julia Conley writes for Common Dreams:

“Citing research from the U.S. government’s own National Institutes of Health, a coalition of environmental and farmworkers groups said Wednesday that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is out of excuses for continuing to allow the use of the herbicide glyphosate, which has been linked to cancer in people who are exposed to it.

The Center for Food Safety (CFS) filed a petition with the EPA on behalf of Beyond Pesticides and four farmworkers groups, including Alianza Nacional de Campesinas, saying glyphosate’s registration in the U.S. is illegal.

The petition was filed a week after cancer scientists at the NIH published a study in Environmental Health Perspectives, which found that male farmers had “markers of genotoxicity” when they reported high levels of glyphosate use.

The study is only the latest to link glyphosate, the active ingredient in the widely used weedkiller Roundup, with cancer and other health issues. The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer warned in 2015 that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans,” and Roundup manufacturer Monsanto—now owned by Bayer—was ordered to pay more than $2.3 billion by juries in 2018 and 2019 for failing to warn the public about the product’s risks.”

Read More

HEALTH ISSUES

The Hunter-Gatherer Groups at the Heart of a Microbiome Gold Rush

Jessica Hamzelou, MIT Technology Review:

“We’re all teeming with microbes. We’ve got guts full of them, and they’re crawling all over our skin. These tiny, ancient life forms have evolved with us. And over the last couple of decades, scientists have come to realize just how important they are to our health and well-being. They help extract nutrients from our food, influence the way our immune systems work, and can even send signals to our brains that play a role in our mental health.

But some researchers believe our microbiomes are in crisis—casualties of an increasingly sanitized, industrialized, and antimicrobial way of life. Disturbances in the collections of microbes we host have been associated with a whole host of diseases, ranging from arthritis to Alzheimer’s.

‘It’s very clear in industrialized nations we have lost many species that were probably fundamental to human evolution,’ says Justin Sonnenburg, a microbiome scientist at Stanford University. ‘They’ve just become extinct.’ Some have seemingly disappeared before we’ve even had a chance to figure out what they do.

Some might not be completely gone, though. Scientists believe many might still be hiding inside the intestines of people who don’t live in the polluted, processed, and antimicrobial-laden environment that most of the rest of us share. They’ve been studying the feces of people from hunter-gatherer societies like the Yanomami, an Indigenous group in the Amazon, who appear to still have some of the microbes that other people have lost.“

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ENVIRONMENT & CLIMATE

The Ridiculously Stupid Reason the US Is Letting Animals Spiral Toward Oblivion

Benji Jones writes for Vox:

“Part of the problem, environmental groups say, is that the [Fish and Wildlife Service] FWS is failing to work through a backlog of species that are in desperate need of protection. Under the [Endangered Species Act] ESA, decisions about protection for species are supposed to take two years, but on average, it has taken the Fish and Wildlife Service 12 years,” wrote researchers, including Greenwald, in a 2016 study. “Such lengthy wait times are certain to result in loss of further species.” (A more recent assessment indicates that wait times between 2010 and 2020 were shorter, likely because the FWS received fewer petitions to list species during that time.)

The Fish and Wildlife Service is aware of these delays. Gary Frazer, the agency’s assistant director for ecological services, which administers the act, blames them on funding and staff shortages. The process to formally declare a species endangered, which requires an extensive review, is expensive.

Here’s what’s strange: Even though the FWS acknowledges there is a resource shortage, the agency doesn’t ask Congress for more money outside of relatively modest budget increases, according to Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. What’s more, the FWS actually asks Congress to restrict the amount it can spend to list species as threatened or endangered. According to Frazer, that’s because the agency receives an enormous number of petitions. If it were to address all of them, he said, it would have to pull resources away from other important activities under the act.”

Read why we don’t have a money problem, we have a prioritization problem!

DR. JOSEPH MERCOLA

The Underappreciated Role of Carbon Dioxide in Health

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola:

STORY AT-A-GLANCE

CO2 is typically thought of as nothing more than a harmful waste product of respiration, but it’s actually a driver of mitochondrial energy production, and it improves the delivery of oxygen into your cells
One of the simplest ways to optimize your CO2 is by breathing properly. Most people tend to over-breathe, which causes you to expel too much CO2. Proper breathing involves breathing less and breathing slower. Both of these allow CO2 to build up, and that appears to be part of why breathwork has such wide-ranging benefits
To have sufficient CO2 production, you need healthy mitochondria because CO2 is produced exclusively in the Krebs cycle in the mitochondria. If you have mitochondrial dysfunction, if you’re hypothyroid or have high levels of inflammation, then you will not be producing enough CO2
When your CO2 is too low, your body reverts to an “emergency” vasodilator, nitric oxide (NO). Drawbacks of elevated NO include peroxynitrite species formation and pseudohypoxia. NO also damages the polyunsaturated fats (PUFAs) in your cells, and inhibits energy production
CO2 combats cancer development by lowering the pH of the cell, thereby allowing extra water to be excreted. This is the opposite of linoleic acid (LA) and estrogen, both of which suck water in and cause the cell to swell. Cellular swelling is a feature of cancer cells

FOOD PRESERVATION & NUTRITION

Fermented Garlic Honey Is the Homemade Remedy To Try This Cold and Flu Season

By Kelly McCarthy, ABC News:

“The latest social media trend has been a longtime remedy for many households.

With leaves falling from their branches, piling up in parks, yards and streets, it’s the perfect time to head indoors and make a simple two-ingredient home remedy that could be a big help this cold and flu season.

Social media has been blowing up with homemade remedies that use ingredients with health benefits to stave off sickness — particularly honey and garlic, and other iterations known as fire cider.

The DIY remedy has been soaring in interest ahead of the holidays, with the hashtag #HoneyGarlic amassing over 120 million views on TikTok alone.

‘This wellness staple is not a new trend, it’s a revival of grandma’s wisdom, straight from her kitchen cabinet,’ Happy Mama Essentials blogger and wellness creator McKenzie Wheeler told “Good Morning America.”

‘You can eat both the garlic and honey,” she continued, adding that the garlic cloves are intended as ‘quick relief’ while the honey can be ‘helpful for sore throats and coughs.’”  

Learn More

PESTICIDES

Scientists Call for Clear Restraints on Conflicts of Interest by Agencies That Regulate and Register Chemicals

Beyond Pesticides reports:

“Drawing on a recent gathering of international scientists, a group of 34 scientists published a call for much stricter scrutiny of researchers’ conflicts of interest by agencies that regulate and register chemicals, with recommendations for the newly formed Intergovernmental Science Policy Panel. Writing in Environmental Science & Technology, the authors, led by Andreas Schäffer of Aachen University in Germany and Martin Scheringer of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic, cite an abundance of examples of chemical companies and their trade associations manufacturing doubt via an array of techniques, resulting in agencies such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dropping certain provisions from rulemaking, ignoring scientific consensus, and keeping chemicals on the market—and in the environment—that many scientists say should be entirely banned. The authors produced the article in response to this webinar to discuss how to ensure that U.N. panels dealing with global crises get the most sound scientific advice conducted by the International Panel on Chemical Pollution.

Over the last four decades or so, the notion that conflicts of interest affect the validity of scientific research and professional opinions has been steadily eroded. Regulators wallow in compromised research, hamstrung by political pressure and pinched funding even as they face some 350,000 chemicals registered for use globally, only a tiny fraction of which have been tested for safety. Arguments in favor of enforcing rigorous conflict of interest (COI) policies in evaluation and registration of pesticides and other industrial chemicals have been repeatedly emphasized in scientific journals and the press, yet almost nothing has reduced the amount of industry influence over that process. In 2022, the United Nations Environment Assembly decided to create a new advisory group called the Intergovernmental Science Policy Panel to provide expert advice to the U.N.’s existing intergovernmental panels on climate change and biodiversity.”

Learn why pesticide regulation is a major target for industry influence and more

Read “Invited Perspective: Important New Evidence for Glyphosate Hazard Assessment”

TOXIC CHEMICALS

Why There Still Aren’t Limits on Lead in Baby Food

Berkeley Lovelace Jr. writes for NBC News:

“Despite strong efforts to limit lead exposure from sources like paint and gasoline, the U.S. government doesn’t broadly limit lead levels in food, a blind spot that’s become all the more glaring, experts say, as cases of lead poisonings in young children linked to contaminated cinnamon applesauce continue to mount.

As of Tuesday, lead poisoning had been reported in at least 65 children, all younger than 6, who ate pouches of now-recalled cinnamon apple puree and cinnamon applesauce, up from 57 cases two weeks ago, according to the Food and Drug Administration.

Children under the age of 6 are most vulnerable to lead poisoning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The heavy metal can lead to developmental problems, damage to the brain and nervous system, and problems with learning, behavior, hearing and speech. Lead exposure can lead to lower IQ and underperformance in school, according to the CDC.”