{"id":32508,"date":"2013-08-05T12:00:31","date_gmt":"2013-08-05T11:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=32508"},"modified":"2015-05-06T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T08:00:00","slug":"the-bad-seed-the-health-risks-of-genetically-modified-corn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/08\/the-bad-seed-the-health-risks-of-genetically-modified-corn\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bad Seed: The Health Risks of Genetically Modified Corn"},"content":{"rendered":"

With symptoms including headaches, nausea, rashes, and fatigue, Caitlin Shetterly visited doctor after doctor searching for a cure for what ailed her. What she found, after years of misery and bafflement, was as unlikely as it was utterly common.<\/i><\/p>\n

\"Jon<\/a>

Jon Shireman\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean. When I first came to Mansmann in February 2011, the river was covered with ice, and bare trees stood silver sentry on its shores. I was 36. I\u2019d been sick for three and a half years.<\/p>\n

During that time, when I wasn\u2019t working as a writer and theater director or being a wife and mother, I visited doctors and had tests. I told few friends or members of my extended family how ill I was, because I didn\u2019t have any way to explain what was wrong. I had no diagnosis, just a collection of weird symptoms: tight, achy pain that radiated through my body and caused me to hobble around (my ankles, I\u2019d joke to my husband, Dan, felt like they\u2019d been \u201cKathy Batesed,\u201d \u00e0 la the movie Misery<\/i>); burning rashes that splashed across my cheeks and around my mouth like pizza sauce; exhaustion; headaches; hands that froze into claws while I slept and hurt to uncurl in the morning; a constant head cold; nausea; and, on top of all that, severe insomnia\u2014my body just could not, would not, turn off and rest. I visited every doctor who\u2019d see me and tried everything they threw at me: antidepressants; painkillers; elimination diets (including a long eight months when I went without any of the major allergens, such as gluten, nuts, dairy, soy, and nightshades); herbal supplements; iodine pills; steroid shots; hormone treatments; Chinese teas; acupuncture; energy healing; a meditation class\u2014you name it, I did it. Nothing worked. After I maxed out the available rheumatologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, Lyme disease specialists, acupuncturists, and alternative-medicine practitioners in the Portland metropolitan area, I was sent to neurologists in Boston. All of my tests came back normal.<\/p>\n

In late 2010, after a long and unhappy antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, my newest GP (who\u2019s still my doctor today), Chuck de Sieyes, MD, announced that he was referring me to Mansmann: \u201cBecause I have no idea what\u2019s going on with you, and he\u2019s one of the smartest guys around. And frankly, I\u2019ve had it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Mansmann had moved to Yarmouth with his wife and kids to be close to his parents, who\u2019d retired in Maine. A third-generation allergist, he worked in his father\u2019s allergy clinic, at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, during high school. While in college at Saint Joseph\u2019s University, also in Philadelphia, he helped his dad develop two asthma drugs. Later, he headed an allergy and immunology clinic at a West Virginia hospital for 10 years.<\/p>\n

Mansmann has a helmet of thick, graying hair and an intensely serious air. After escorting me into an exam room, he sat down across from me and promptly pushed aside my thick medical file. He\u2019d read through it all, he said, but he wanted to hear the story from me. He listened patiently, asking questions every so often: When did my rashes flare? Was the pain an ache in my muscles, or did it feel deeper? Was I worse after I slept or at the end of the day? He seemed, as we spoke, to have all the time in the world. Then, with no pyrotechnics, he offered his theory: \u201cI think it\u2019s possible you\u2019ve developed a reaction to genetically modified corn.\u201d<\/p>\n

Genetically modified corn? Everyone\u2019s heard of GMO corn, but I realized I didn\u2019t know what it actually was. Mansmann explained that starting in the mid-1980s, the biotechnology giant Monsanto began to genetically alter corn to withstand its herbicide Roundup\u2014the goal being to eradicate weeds but not crops\u2014as well as to resist a pest called the corn borer. These small changes in the DNA of the corn are expressed by the plant as proteins. It\u2019s those proteins, Mansmann believes, that can act as allergens, provoking a multisystemic disorder marked by the overproduction of a type of white blood cell called an eosinophil.<\/p>\n

He swabbed inside my nose with a Q-tip, then placed the results under a microscope. \u201cTake a look,\u201d Mansmann said. \u201cSee all those pink cells? Those are eosinophils.\u201d My nose, it seemed, was chock-full of them. When the immune system is working properly, eosinophils swarm certain invading substances, be they parasites or viruses, and work to eliminate them. Sometimes, however, an allergenic protein may prompt the immune system to release eosinophils. Then, it\u2019s as if a faucet gets turned on but can\u2019t be turned off\u2014eosinophils just keep coming. Eventually they begin to leave the bloodstream and may infiltrate and damage the GI tract, esophagus, mucous membranes, lungs, the fascial system (the layer of connective tissue that surrounds the muscles, blood vessels, and nerves), and the skin\u2014hence, the avalanche of symptoms. (Some allergists say that the best way to test for a true eosinophilic disorder is to look for the cells in the esophagus and GI tract with an endoscopy. But Mansmann thinks that once you have a preponderance of them in your nasal mucus, they\u2019re likely to be elsewhere.)<\/p>\n

Mansmann\u2019s advice was to strip all corn, even that marked organic, from my diet. \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible to find a corn source in the United States that doesn\u2019t have the [protein] in it,\u201d he said. The U.S. government started approving GMO corn and soybeans for sale in the mid-1990s, and today, 88 percent of corn, and 93 percent of soybeans, are the transgenic varieties. Moreover, Mansmann and others contend that due to cross-pollination via winds, birds, and bees, there\u2019s no such thing anymore as a GMO-free corn crop. He estimated that it would take from two to four months of living without corn for the eosinophils to cycle out of my body, and \u2028almost a year before I\u2019d feel entirely like myself.<\/p>\n

\"Getty<\/a>

Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

While I quickly discovered that blaming GMO foods for any kind of health problem is controversial in the medical and biotech worlds, what\u2019s beyond debate is the increase in the incidence of autoimmune disorders such as type 1 diabetes, lupus, and celiac disease, as well as of allergies. As for the latter, the National Health Interview Survey found, for instance, that since 1999, the number of children with food allergies has jumped by 50 percent, and those with skin allergies by 69 percent (and the increase isn\u2019t merely a by-product of fuller reporting by parents, experts say).<\/p>\n

Allergenic eosinophilic disorders, however, aren\u2019t counted in that data. They were first identified about 20 years ago, according to a pioneer in the field, Marc Rothenberg, MD, PhD, a professor at University of Cincinnati medical school and director of an affiliated center for eosinophilic disorders. \u201cWe\u2019re in the midst of an allergy and autoimmune epidemic,\u201d Rothenberg told me on the phone, \u201cand the environment is the black box.\u201d Mansmann\u2019s GMO theory was \u201cinteresting,\u201d he went on, before quickly adding that \u201cno one in conventional medicine will have the data\u201d to prove it.<\/p>\n

Back in 2011, though, I was desperate enough that I was willing to try the diet Mansmann recommended. After all, how hard could it be to give up corn? The answer was: way harder than I imagined. Corn was my Waldo, popping up everywhere: in tea bags, juice, and cheese culture; it lined my \u201cto go\u201d coffee cups and plastic bags of frozen vegetables; it coated my store-bought apples and was on the bottom of restaurant pizza\u2014almost everything my family used, no matter how piously natural and organic, had corn in it. It came under the guise of dozens of names like \u201cxanthan gum,\u201d \u201cnatural flavors,\u201d \u201cfree-flowing agents,\u201d \u201cvitamin E,\u201d \u201cascorbic acid,\u201d \u201ccitric acid,\u201d and \u201ccellulose,\u201d to name a few. Almost daily, I\u2019d find a new culprit. \u201cDamn, this toothpaste is full of corn!\u201d Then: \u201cWait, our dish soap is made from corn!\u201d Or: \u201cOh my God, iodized salt has dextrose in it!\u201d<\/p>\n

Not to mention the corn that is fed to animals whose meat and eggs I ate, whose milk I drank. I had to restrict my diet, Mansmann said, to vegetables, grains other than corn, grass-fed beef and dairy, wild fish, and game (if I was game). My husband and I threw ourselves into the corn-free diet with gusto: We began baking all our bread, we learned how to make our own flour tortillas and sweet treats like muffins and cakes. By luck, we met an intrepid farmer raising corn-free chickens (harder than you might guess, because chickens have literally been bred to get fat fast on corn). We eschewed anything premade and began gathering foods from local sources we could trust. I stopped taking every medicine or supplement with corn in it (which was most of them). Wherever I went, I took my own stainless-steel coffee cup.<\/p>\n

The first thing I noticed was that my skin rashes began to dissipate. Then, slowly, my body stopped aching, and I could walk or even jog easily, for the first time in years. I started to have more energy, and I slept better at night. The head cold went away\u2014poof<\/i>\u2014and I wasn\u2019t going through a box of tissues a day. My hands became less stiff. I realized, in retrospect, that my frozen hands had been the hardest symptom to tolerate: I could barely button my son\u2019s small shirts or apply a Band-Aid, which made me feel useless as a mother. Almost four months later, in late May, I felt pretty much like my old self. I was so startled by my physical well-being that I didn\u2019t know how to enjoy it. Each night I\u2019d go to bed preparing myself for the possibility that I might wake up sick again the next morning. Could GMO corn really be my problem? Could this blessed state really last? I couldn\u2019t let go; I had to know more. I decided to visit Rothenberg and his team of researchers endeavoring to crack open the black box.<\/p>\n

When I landed in Cincinnati, it was sticky and eerily airless, though it was early June and well after midnight. I couldn\u2019t help but think about how one doctor had told me that the Ohio River Valley is basically a bowl that collects pollen and pesticide sprays from across the Midwest, creating a special kind of allergic hell.<\/p>\n

The next morning, I made my way to Rothenberg\u2019s lab. Despite wearing sneakers and khakis and sporting a \u201cHey, hey, we\u2019re the Monkees\u201d hairdo, Rothenberg exuded a scientist\u2013rock star vibe\u2014he moves through the world with importance. Over the next couple of days, he told me, I\u2019d meet people whose views represented a microcosm of the worldwide debate over the safety of GMOs.<\/p>\n

First up: Karl von Tiehl, a young, cherub-faced clinician and assistant professor in the medical school (he has since moved to Los Angeles to go into private practice). Our interview had barely begun when he informed me that my interest in the impact of big agriculture on the food supply was a preoccupation of his as well. He told me that, for the very worst patients who come to Cincinnati (those whose GI tracts and esophagi have been so damaged by eosinophils that their lives are severely compromised), the team has found that if they \u201cgive them a medical food that\u2019s been so chopped and sliced and diced that there are no proteins in it, that it\u2019s just amino acids, simple sugars, and small fats and stuff\u2014there\u2019s nothing their immune system can react to\u201495 percent of the time, the disease goes away as long as they stay on that simple, horrible smelling, tasting formula.\u201d Von Tiehl doesn\u2019t know if GMO crops are the culprit, but, he says, \u201cyou\u2019re eating what somebody in some office has decided is good for you rather than what your grandma would have told you is good for you. There\u2019s something scary there.\u201d<\/p>\n

A short walk down the hall, his colleague Amal Assa\u2019ad, MD, also a professor at the medical school, dismissed anxiety over GMOs\u2019 safety as almost magical thinking. \u201cWhat\u2019s wrong with chemicals?\u201d she asked. \u201cWe\u2019re so afraid of chemicals because they are man-made, right? A lot of chemicals have helped us\u2014a lot of medications are chemicals.\u201d If anything, GMO foods have been a boon to mankind, Assa\u2019ad said. GMO seeds \u201cproduce better crops that have increased production, that are resistant to pesticides\u2014crops that can feed the rest of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

She echoed the federal government\u2019s position\u2014given voice through the regulatory policies of the USDA, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency\u2014that there is nothing inherently dangerous about inserting the gene of one species into that of another, since the end product is essentially identical with that grown from regular seeds. This is also, perhaps needless to say, the biotech industry\u2019s stance. \u201cThere are several hundred studies that contribute to a huge body of evidence that GM crops\u2026are as safe as their conventional counterparts,\u201d says Monsanto spokesman Thomas Helscher.<\/p>\n

To experiment with a new GMO food in this country, a developer must first get a permit from the USDA to conduct field trials (literally, trials in open fields), following guidelines largely intended to prevent GMO crops from mixing with conventional ones. In addition, according to Helscher, biotech firms like Monsanto are required to compile a document that compares the biology of the modified plant to the unmodified one, determining, for example, if there is a \u201cstatistically significant difference\u201d in the levels of nutrients such as carbs and fats between the two plants, or, if new proteins are introduced, whether they\u2019re included in the database of known allergens. If nothing goes obviously wrong, the crop is free to go to market.<\/p>\n

It all sounds fine, until you dig a bit deeper, critics of this process say. For one thing, they question the objectivity of the allergen database because it\u2019s compiled at the University of Nebraska\u2013Lincoln, whose facilities are funded by the six major biotech companies: Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, Dupont Pioneer, Bayer, and BASF. Indeed, no GMO proteins are on the list, but that\u2019s for lack of \u201csufficient evidence\u201d to put them there, says Richard Goodman, PhD, a UNL research professor and former Monsanto employee. He does add, however, that much of the existing data regarding the allergenic potential of GMO foods simply examines them for amino acid sequences similar to those in known allergens\u2014like peanuts or milk\u2014which limits the usefulness of the whole enterprise to people like Mansmann: They think GMOs may be carrying heretofore undiscovered<\/i> allergens. (If you\u2019re thinking, Well, what do the clinical trials with humans show? The answer is: They\u2019re nonexistent because, the biotech firms say, they are impractical, and, again, GMO foods are basically presumed safe and thus don\u2019t undergo near the level of scrutiny as new drugs.)<\/p>\n

The most fundamental complaint from those worried about the health risks of GMO foods is that hardly any of the research is independent; the biotech firms either conduct or pay for the studies forwarded to the government, and they also pick and choose which ones to submit. \u201cThe scandal is that the USDA does not force the companies to give results of trials that had negative outcomes,\u201d says Harwood Schaffer, PhD, a research assistant professor at the University of Tennessee\u2019s Agricul-tural Policy Analysis Center. \u201cWe\u2019ve seen this in medicine: You only get the data that the [industry] wants you to see.\u201d Schaffer also points out that the biotech firms consider their research proprietary, so there\u2019s no record for the public to inspect: \u201cMaybe the GMO companies aren\u2019t hiding anything, but the question is: Does the public have the right to know?\u201d<\/p>\n

One of my last stops in Cincinnati was the office of affable Australian-born immunologist Simon Hogan, PhD, who, interestingly, was the lead author of one of the few independently funded GMO-food studies. In the early 2000s, Hogan\u2019s interest was piqued when he learned GMO peas were being developed in his native country, so he decided to investigate the new product. \u201cI felt there was a fundamental lack of knowledge on whether GMOs could have an effect\u201d on animals (and possibly people).<\/p>\n

He was surprised by the results: Mice given the GMO peas had inflammatory reactions such as \u201cmucus hypersecretion,\u201d \u201cpulmonary eosinophilia\u201d (eosinophils in the lungs), and airway hyperresponsiveness (\u201cthe lungs were twitchy,\u201d says Hogan). Most important, the peas may have \u201cperturbed\u201d a tolerance mechanism in the mice, leading to enhanced immunreactivity. When the study was published in 2005 in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry<\/i>, there was a deluge of media coverage both lauding and decrying it\u2014most notably on the con side, a Nature Biotechnology article called Hogan\u2019s study \u201cmush\u201d and charged, among other things, that mice probably aren\u2019t analogous to humans when it comes to allergies.<\/p>\n

With all the uproar, the pea project was abruptly canceled. But eight years later, another team published a contradictory report showing that mice react to proteins in GMO peas and in conventional ones. It was funded by the European Union. (Hogan\u2019s very measured response? Good science requires multiple studies before conclusions can be drawn.)<\/p>\n

While most people seem to tolerate GMO corn, I asked Hogan if he thought it could be making a small cohort of the population sick, as his peas did the mice. \u201cI don\u2019t think definitive analysis has been done to answer that question, and because you don\u2019t know definitely what these [GMO] proteins could do\u2026that\u2019s sufficient for me to say \u2018halt\u2019 until we know more.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the level of penetration of GMO foods, and the fairly widespread acceptance of them in America (certainly compared with Europe, where they\u2019re banned in many countries), saying \u201chalt\u201d seems unlikely at this point. Definitely in the air, however, is better labeling of such products. The Connecticut legislature passed a measure this June to require it, and a whopping 96 percent of people favor GMO labeling, according to a 2011 MSNBC poll. Whole Foods Market announced this March that by 2018 everything it sells in the U.S. and Canada will be labeled for GMOs. How the store will implement that is hard to fathom given the ubiquity of industrial corn: Will the bastion of healthy eating plaster GMO stickers on practically every item on its shelves? \u201cWe\u2019re very aware of how much of a challenge [labeling] is going to be,\u201d a company spokesman admitted, adding that they\u2019re committed to it nonetheless.<\/p>\n

My small family has been able to jettison GMOs, thanks to the local farmers we\u2019ve found and our willingness to do without the vast majority of prepared foods. But my husband and I both have jobs, and there are days when we can\u2019t imagine preparing everything from scratch forever<\/i>. Yet when I was sick for all that time, my life felt totally out of control. I still rue the day when I was desperate enough for a diagnosis to believe I had chronic Lyme disease, which necessitated weaning my small son from my breast before either of us was ready so I could be bombarded with antibiotics. When I think back to how suffocatingly powerless I felt, how sidelined as a wife, mother, and productive person, I just feel, well, sick. Although Dr. Mansmann told me that most people allergic to GMO corn can end up tolerating small amounts after a couple years of abstinence, each time I\u2019ve dared cheat, I\u2019ve awoken the next morning with a frozen left hand, a sore hip, and a facial rash. So for now, at least, the extra work isn\u2019t really a choice; it\u2019s a way of life, one that reminds me daily that our modern world is full of challenges\u2014dietary, economic, environmental\u2014that at times feel overwhelming. And perhaps that\u2019s the gift in this: I\u2019ve had to slow down and think about my food\u2014how it was grown, what\u2019s in it, and which trade-offs were made in the journey from a seed to my plate. That consciousness has to be worth something bigger than just my health.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 elle.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With symptoms including headaches, nausea, rashes, and fatigue, Caitlin Shetterly visited doctor after doctor searching for a cure for what ailed her. What she found, after years of misery and bafflement, was as unlikely as it was utterly common.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[140],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-organic-gmo-genetic-engineering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32508\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}