Dr. Guy Hatchard highlights that genetically modified microorganisms (“GMMs”) are widely used in food production, including in everyday products such as bread, meat, dairy and beverages, due to their ability to accelerate fermentation processes.
Research has found that GMM contamination is present in virtually all products produced via batch fermentation using genetically modified microorganisms, posing potential public health risks due to the presence of antibiotic-resistant genes and other concerns.
How have they got away with this without a public outcry? The use of GMMs in food production is largely unregulated and unlabelled, with many products containing genetically engineered enzymes, additives and other ingredients that are not identified on labels.
Major Health Alert: the Extraordinary Genetically Modified Invasion of Our Supermarkets by Stealth
Many of you have written and asked about the current prevalence of genetically modified foods and the potential health risks. An up-to-date answer to this question comes as a huge surprise even to the team at the Hatchard Report. Today’s article lists the affected products and discusses the history and industry pressure that created a regulatory framework lax enough to allow the genetic engineering of the preparation and content of most supermarket foods.
Food processing aids, enzymes, additives, flavours and colours were originally derived from natural plant and animal sources, With the rise of mass production in the food industry these were required in greater quantities to ensure that industrial-scale fast continuous processes turned out products of uniform appearance, taste and consistency. As a result, food industry chemists invented batch fermentation techniques whereby naturally occurring bacterial strains such as lactic acid bacteria (“LAB”) facilitated the necessary cell replication and proliferation at a mass scale.
More recently batch fermentation has become dominated by genetically modifiedmicroorganisms (“GMMs”).
These GMMs are designed to tailor and accelerate the fermentation processes. A 2023 paper entitled ‘Bioengineered Enzymes and Precision Fermentation in the Food Industry’ reports:
Enzymes have been used in the food processing industry for many years. However, the use of native [naturally occurring] enzymes is not conducive to high activity, efficiency, range of substrates and adaptability to harsh food processing conditions. The advent of enzyme engineering approaches such as rational design, directed evolution and semi-rational design provided much-needed impetus for tailor-made enzymes with improved or novel catalytic properties. Production of designer enzymes became further refined with the emergence of synthetic biology and gene editing techniques and a plethora of other tools such as artificial intelligence, and computational and bioinformatics analyses which have paved the way for what is referred to as precision fermentation for the production of these designer enzymes more efficiently.
Ostensibly, these genetically modified processes are supposed to be more efficient and produce purer products however these routinely differ in critical ways from their natural counterparts. As a result, the food industry pushed very hard for the GMM processes to be unregulated and unidentified on food content labels. For example, a 2022 article entitled ‘Recombinant DNA in fermentation products is of no regulatory relevance’ deceptively suggested that fermentation products produced via GMM techniques are “more sustainable.” It stated: “There is no meaningful rationale for using recombinant DNA for regulatory classification of fermentation products.” It argued that too much regulation would de-incentivise innovation in industrial biotechnology, and introduced instead a concept called “proportionate regulation,” which amounts to little if any regulation. In the end, their view has prevailed around the world. The role of GMMs in food production has escaped identification on labels.
PERCEPTION RESET 