At least seven US state attorneys general are investigating whether Monsanto Company has abused its market power to lock out competitors and raise prices on seed. Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, and two other unidentified states are in a working group to investigate the biotech giant.
The states are probing whether Monsanto violated laws by offering rebates to seed distributors for excluding rival seeds, imposing limits on combining the product with other genetic modifications, or offering cash incentives to switch farmers to more expensive generation of seed varieties.
The state investigations add to pressure on Monsanto. The US Justice Department is investigating the company’s marketing practices, and DuPont Company has accused Monsanto of anti-competitive practices in licensing litigation.
And Monsanto’s stock price is down more than 30%, from $93.35 in May to a 52 week low of $63.75 Friday.
“Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn’t true, at least under the conditions of our tests,” said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. “When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they’re becoming obese — every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don’t see this; they don’t all gain extra weight.”
Every single rat got fat on HFCS.
And the researchers are not talking about a little extra weight:
Continue reading →
We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide,
you name it, it’s on the front page of every paper, CNN…. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God’s sake!
Every single one of those ones in the red is a diet-related disease.
Any doctor, any specialist, will tell you that.
The top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
Number 6 is diabetes.
Those are the ones in red on Jamie Oliver’s graph.
Homicide is number 15.
See CDC for numbers.
(
In 2006 72,449 people died of diabetes and 18,573 of homicide.
You’re almost 4 times as likely to die of diabetes.
And about 40 times more likely to die of heart disease.)
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittney.
She’s sixteen years old.
She’s got six years to live.
Because of the food that she’s eaten.
She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food
environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home
or in school.
Or her mum. Or her mum’s mum.
She has six years to live!
More pictures of people with very round faces and rounder bodies:
This is a normal family, guys!.
We need to change normal.
That’s what Jamie Oliver wants to do.
Obesity leads to diabetes and heart disease.
And what leads to obesity?
Lack of exercise combined with food stuffed with
high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), salt, and fat
in massive portions.
Fast food has taken over the whole country, we know that.
Time to take it back.
I wish I could come up here today and hang up a cure for AIDS or cancer,
you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me.
This, all this bad news, is preventable. That’s the good news.
It’s very preventable.
How?
Vote with your food purchases.
Demand a food ambassador in every supermarket.
Demand big food businesses back food education.
Get the government to work with the fast food purveyors
to wean us off the fat, sugar, and salt.
Schools, ages 4-whenever: proper fresh food cooked from local sources on site.
Every child should leave school knowing how to cook ten recipes
that will save their life.
Corporate American should feed their staff properly.
You can care and be commercial.
That’s his prescription.
Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
The rapid adoption by U.S. farmers of genetically engineered corn, soybeans and cotton has promoted increased use of pesticides, an epidemic of herbicide-resistant weeds and more chemical residues in foods, according to a report issued Tuesday by health and environmental protection groups.
The groups said research showed that herbicide use grew by 383 million pounds from 1996 to 2008, with 46 percent of the total increase occurring in 2007 and 2008.
The report was released by nonprofits The Organic Center (TOC), the Union for Concerned Scientists (UCS) and the Center for Food Safety (CFS).
What’s the cause of this increased pesticide use?
The rise in herbicide use comes as U.S. farmers increasingly adopt corn, soy and cotton that have been engineered with traits that allow them to tolerate dousings of weed killer. The most popular of these are known as “Roundup Ready” for their ability to sustain treatments with Roundup herbicide and are developed and marketed by world seed industry leader Monsanto Co.
Monsanto rolled out the first biotech crop, Roundup Ready soybeans, in 1996.
Monsanto officials declined to comment on the report. But the Biotechnology Industry Organization, of which Monsanto is a member, said the popularity of herbicide-resistant crops showed their value outweighs any associated detriments.
Any associated detriments?
Dead and mutated wildlife?
Poisoned drinking water?
Pesticides in school children?
Cancer and asthma?
Well, I suppose those are all economic externalities of no interest
to the producers of these seeds and pesticides.
Update 2012-08-30: old graph links decayed; replaced with other graphs of same data.
Almost as many obese as healthy weight adults in the U.S., and the rest are overweight. Something changed starting about 1980.
Data source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2005) Health, United States, 2005.
Graph source: Wikipedia Blue Cross Blue Shield, with this accompanying text:
While the percentage of the U.S. population considered overweight has been stable since 1960-62, the percentage considered obese has more than doubled.
A study released by an Argentine scientist earlier this year reports that
glyphosate, patented by Monsanto under the name “Round Up,” causes birth
defects when applied in doses much lower than what is commonly used in
soy fields.
The study was directed by a leading embryologist, Dr. Andres Carrasco,
a professor and researcher at the University of Buenos Aires. In his
office in the nation’s top medical school, Dr. Carrasco shows me the
results of the study, pulling out photos of birth defects in the embryos
of frog amphibians exposed to glyphosate. The frog embryos grown in petri
dishes in the photos looked like something from a futuristic horror
film, creatures with visible defects—one eye the size of the head,
spinal cord deformations, and kidneys that are not fully developed.
“We injected the amphibian embryo cells with glyphosate diluted to
a concentration 1,500 times [less] than what is used commercially
and we allowed the amphibians to grow in strictly controlled
conditions.” Dr. Carrasco reports that the embryos survived from a
fertilized egg state until the tadpole stage, but developed obvious
defects which would compromise their ability to live in their normal
habitats.
