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1 in every 250 persons in the UK are affected by inflammatory bowel diseases. Two years ago, I was diagnosed with a type of inflammatory bowel disease called Ulcerative Colitis. It affects up to 120,000 people in the UK, that's about 1 in 500 and between 6,000 and 12,000 new cases are diagnosed every year.(i) For me it meant that I had to keep running to the bathroom up to 25 times a day. My large bowel at the worst of times would produce bloody mucus and I would have severe cramps. Due to the toxins created by the inflammation it also meant that I would be severely nauseous and could not hold down liquids, let alone food.

Over the two years, I was on a course of medication that included anti-inflammatory granules and corticosteroids to try and reduce the inflammation. However, whenever I tried to wean off the drugs, the inflammation would rapidly get worse. Getting desperate for solutions, I tried acupuncture, Chinese medicine, homeopathy, and other natural remedies - anything that might help get me into clinical remission. What had happened was that my body had become immune to the medication because I had been taking them for so long. In order to try and get the medication to suppress the symptoms, I was prescribed Mercaptopurine. This was supposed to weaken my immune system and in theory reverse the immunity to the drugs.


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Sadly this didn't work either and last year I had no option left but to have a major operation where my entire large large intestine had to be completely removed due to the increasing pain, inflammation, bleeding (through the intestinal wall), and resulting diarrhea that had become completely uncontrollable by other means. This is now permanent; I can't have a transplant for a new large intestine, and sadly with only the small intestine remaining I am no longer being able to eat foods high in fiber and my water intake being increased because I can't absorb water as well as I used to.

One of the first things I asked when diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis was what causes the disease. The doctor told me that they didn't know the causes, it could either be dietary, stress related or hereditary but they didn't have a complete answer. I had definitely been a bit stressed out when I first started experiencing the symptoms, just having started my exams and struggling to keep up with the workload certainly didn't help my physical well-being. The symptoms eventually got so severe that I had to quit college and I haven't returned to education since. My consultant did ask what my diet had been like prior to my diagnosis, all I knew was that I avoided fast food and tried to eat as healthy as I knew how but have since learned that much of these issues were exacerbated by the pesticides and many of the processed food ingredients that I had previously been unaware of.

One day I came across the documentary Food Inc., which really introduced me to many of the problems with the food industry. While watching the film, I noticed that one of the corporations that came up was Monsanto. The idea of our food being contaminated kept playing over and over again in my head so I then decided to do some research into Monsanto products and whether they had ever been linked to Ulcerative Colitis or Crohn's Disease.

Monsanto Products

When author Michael Pollan wanted to understand the industrial food system, he decided to trace back the food in the supermarkets to the source. What he found was that almost every single item could be traced back to a cornfield in Iowa. On the supermarket shelf in the U.S., 90% of the products will contain an ingredient that is corn or soy based and most of the time they will contain both. In addition, 70% of food products have GMO ingredients.

Corn and soybeans are commodity crops and therefore can be stored. This in turn means that because it is in the interest of multinationals to purchase these crops at below the cost of production, Monsanto encourages its farmers to grow as much as possible. Farmers are then subsidized by the bushel.

Monsanto's GM Corn

The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world. Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. In 2000, the U.S. produced about 45% of the world's total bushel crop. According to the National Corn Growers Association, about 80% of of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry and fish production. About 12% ends up in food that is either consumed directly (e.g. corn chips) or indirectly.(ii)

Corn seems to have conquered the world. Multinationals have come up with various uses for all this corn and in a world where our food is engineered; where we take different traits from different foods and create new foods that don't stale in the fridge, we must ask ourselves what are the consequences of all this manipulation with nature.

The big kernel of starch that corn provides is commonly broken down and reassembled to create products such as: high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, di-glycercides, xanthum gum, ascorbic acid, calcium sterate, sorbital, saccharin, sucrose, citrus cloud emulsion, ethel acetate, fructose, vanilla extract, starch, cellulose, xyitol, ethyl lactate, gluten, baking powder, alpha tocopherol, white vinegar, ethylene, fibersol-2, fumaric acid, inosital, zein, semolina, polydextrose and margarine.

These corn products are then used in things like: ketchup, cheese, batteries, peanut butter, salad dressing, cake, jelly, syrup, juice, charcoal, diapers, meat and fast food.

Monsanto's GM Corn produces Bt-Toxin. It is true that farmers have used Bt-toxin from soil bacteria as a natural pesticide for years. They spray it on plants, where it washes off and biodegrades in sunlight. However, "the GM (Genetically engineered) version is built-in; every plant cell has its own spray bottle. The toxin doesn't wash off, it cannot be washed off as it is throughout every cell of the plant. Furthermore, the plant-produced version of the poison is thousands of times more concentrated than the spray; is designed to be even more toxic; and has properties of known allergens..."(iii)(xv)

In fact the plant-produced toxin actually failed the World Health Organisation's allergen screening tests. Biotech companies also skim over the fact that there is a huge difference between the GM toxin and the natural bacteria version and claim that because the spray has had a history of safe use in agriculture, it's completely okay to consume. But even the claim of safe use of Bt spray is incorrect.

When the natural Bt-toxin was fed to mice, they had tissue damage, immune responses and even reacted to foods that were previously harmless. Farm workers that were exposed to the toxin showed immune responses. The EPA's Scientific Advisory Panel concluded that the mouse and farm worker studies "suggest that Bt proteins could act as antigenic and allergenic sources".(iv) pg. 76

In Italian government-sponsored research, (v) mice that were fed Monsanto's GM corn, showed a wide range of immune responses. The mice had an increase in cytokines (substances that are secreted by specific cells of the immune system which carry signals locally between cells, and thus have an effect on other cells). The specific cytokines (interleukins) that were elevated are also higher in humans who suffer from a wide range of disorders. See below:

Elevated interleukins & Associations

  • IL-6:Rheumatoid arthritis, inflammatory bowel disease, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, various types of cancer (multiple myeloma and prostate cancer)
  • IL-13: Allergy, allergic rhinitis, ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease)
  • MIP-1b: Autoimmune disease and colitis
  • IL-12p70: Inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis

As you can see, two of the elevated interleukins are associated with inflammatory bowel diseases and one is specifically associated with colitis.

Monsanto's Roundup Soybean

In 1970, Monsanto brought to the market a herbicide called Roundup which quickly became the world's best selling herbicide. In 1996, they introduced a crop that was genetically modified so that it was resistant to the herbicide. This meant that only the weeds that existed amongst the soybean crop fields were destroyed while the genetically engineered crops survived relatively unharmed. To develop their transgenic Roundup soybeans, Monsanto initially used mutated genes from a range of bacteria including Klebsiella pneomoniae.(vi)

In 1996, when Monsanto began selling Roundup Ready soybeans, only 2% of soybeans in the U.S. contained the patented gene. By 2008, 90% of the soybeans contained the gene. The reasons for the huge increase are not only because of cross breeding of the GMO and natural crops but because Monsanto strategically aims to monopolize food production and profits. By claiming intellectual property rights over its seeds, Monsanto is telling us that they are the creator of life. They are able to have exclusive rights to exclude anyone else from using, having, distributing the patented product. In fact, Monsanto had 75 members of staff in America devoted to investigating and prosecuting farmers for saving seed. This has forced farmers to pay for and grow nothing but the Monsanto seed. As Vandana Shiva points out,"when you control seed, you control food" and as Henry Kissinger famously stated,"Control the food, control the people".(vii)


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On September 16th 2010, a study led by Harvard School of Public Health found "certain bacteria that inhabit the intestine provide the environmental trigger that initiates and perpetuates chronic intestinal inflammation in individuals who are genetically susceptible to inflammatory bowel disease (IBD)".(viii)

Lead investigator, Wendy Garrett acknowledged that they "identified two microbes that instigate gut inflammation that leads to inflammatory bowel disease in mice". However, the Professor of Immunology at HSPH, Laurie Glimcher said, "Whether IBD is caused by individual species of bacteria or disruptions of entire microbial communities remains controversial". She goes on to say, "Our findings suggest that answer bridges both hypotheses - specific species of bacteria (Klebsiella pneumoniae and Proteus mirabilis) appear to work in concert with the indigenous gut microbial community to cause IBD."(ix)

Conflict of Interest

Why was it controversial to point out that Klebsiella penumoniae, bacteria that mutated genes were taken from to create Monsanto's soybean is a major contributing factor to IBD?(xiv) Is the political might of Monsanto silencing or diluting its critics?

Maybe it's because Monsanto in 1975 had joined hands with Harvard Medical School in a 12-year multi-million medical research project on the field of molecular biology.(x)

Or perhaps it's because Harvard Medical School also receive millions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies and that many professors are also paid consultants for these companies. In a New York Times article we are told most of the corporate gifts "goes to professors at the Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals, and the dean's office does not keep track of the total."(xi)

If those alarm bells aren't ringing in your head yet - Monsanto, along with other Big Food and Big Pharma corporations also send matching gift donations to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America despite being a major source of the problem.(xiii)

So what we have is a chemical company that created Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam War, murdering thousands and still causing cancer through both the original manufacturing of poisons, the applications of them, and even through the descendants of those who were exposed to "the deadliest toxin ever known to man". Now this same company is manipulating our food supply in the interests of other multinational corporations that care not for well being of the citizens of the world. Now that they have hijacked governments and many of the very institutions that are supposed to protect us, we are faced with a war over our rights to healthy food, a healthy environment, and the right to grow crops of our choosing.

I hope that by sharing this information that more people are now aware that we now live in an age where we have to be extremely careful about what we put in to our mouths. To keep healthy, it's not as easy as just staying away from junk food and exercising and we most go further and keep GM foods and toxic food additives out of our diet by switching to a chemical-free diet of organic foods. Only by getting rid of the true sources of disease such as we are now faced with can we hope to cure or prevent illnesses like the inflammatory bowel disease that has so greatly altered my life.

This article was originally written by Dhruv Shah and edited by Fritz Kreiss