IN-DEPTH: Doctors Warn of the ‘Hidden Harms’ of Bioengineered Foods

Some doctors are disturbed by the current trajectory of manipulating food sources.

A congressional provision makes approval for bioengineered crops quick and easy. Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images

With the rise of bioengineered foods and ingredients on the market, doctors are warning consumers about the “hidden harms” that may be lurking in the foods they purchase.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) defines bioengineered food as a consumable product that “contains detectable genetic material that has been modified through certain lab techniques that cannot be created through conventional breeding or found in nature.”

On Jan. 1, 2022, the USDA implemented a new disclosure standard for bioengineered food, so manufacturers must now label food products with the terms “bioengineered” or “derived from bioengineering” so consumers will know what they are buying.

Informing the public is a good start. However, because these bioengineered foods have not been adequately tested, Dr. Syed Haider has many concerns.

Dr. Syed Haider in Dallas, Texas, on April 28, 2023. York Du/The Epoch Times

‘Hidden Harms’

“The possible effects on the human body when bioengineered foods are consumed is unknown,” Dr. Haider told The Epoch Times, adding: “The food itself could be toxic. It could cause allergic reactions or promote antibiotic resistance. It could also trigger immunosuppression or cancer, and there’s evidence that all of these are happening.

“The way bioengineering technology for food works,” Dr. Haider simplified, “is you take a gene from some other organism, and you insert it, kind of at random, into the genetic code of the food you want to engineer.”

“The problem,” he said, “is we don’t really understand the way the genetic code of anything works, and we could be changing the way that food grows. It could create new toxins in the food, it could increase toxins that were already present in the food, and it can even increase the amount of external toxins the food soaks up.

“We’re at the infancy of this technology,” he advised. “We’re fiddling around with things that we don’t fully understand, which I think is really scary, especially when you don’t check to see what the ultimate effects are. This is a progression of what’s been going on with the green revolution for decades.”

Dr. Haider is disturbed by the current trajectory of manipulating food sources while telling consumers it is a safe and healthy alternative to the natural foods they are replacing.

“There’s a narrative that we’ve all been spoon-fed that this is necessary, that we would starve without this green revolution and genetically modified foods. But it’s not true,” he insisted. “We’re introducing technology into things that never needed it in the first place, and there are a lot of side effects that we’re going to see and hidden harms.”

The American Cancer Society admitted that bioengineered foods “might create substances that could cause reactions” in people with allergies “or result in high levels of compounds that could cause other health effects.”

“However,” it added, “at this time there is no evidence that foods now on the market that contain genetically engineered ingredients or the substances found in them are harmful to human health, or that they would either increase or decrease cancer risk.”

Similarly, while the National Library of Medicine acknowledges there are a “host of multi-systemic side-effects that are being reported by the vaccine recipients”—such as “anaphylaxis, antibody-dependent enhancements, and deaths”—people are also told that the mRNA vaccines “are safe.”

Now, the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science are telling consumers that bioengineered foods or ingredients “are safe.”

However, there is evidence that they aren’t safe.

Dr. Haider cited a study published by The Lancet on Oct. 16, 1999, which involved feeding genetically engineered potatoes to rats.

“There were detrimental changes in their organ development, metabolism, and immune function,” he recalled.

Unfortunately, he said, “anyone who publishes something like this will be attacked, and they were attacked.”

“Just like with big pharma, there are questions that can’t be asked and research that can’t be done because all of the funding for research in these fields comes from the big companies and the government, and the government is in bed with the companies,” he explained, saying, “There’s a revolving door between the government and these companies.”

He is also concerned by the “ongoing risk” as companies “continue to modify foods in new ways.” One example is the way they are injecting livestock with mRNA vaccines.

“The proponents of all of this will say it’s necessary. But it’s a skewed version of reality that is being put forward by people who stand to benefit, and they won’t allow anyone with another point of view to publish anything,” Dr. Haider contends. “If you even argue against the necessity of it, you’re called out as anti-science.”

Dr. Haider chalks up the push for bioengineered foods to the green movement.

“Maybe their real agenda is finally coming out, which is depopulation,” he suggested. “I would argue that everything they’ve done so far claiming to improve productivity and yield was actually part of the reason why we’ve been getting sicker and sicker and dying earlier and earlier.

“Food is supposed to keep us healthy,” he said. “But the food that we’ve been eating for the past 50 years has actually been triggering obesity, cancer, immunosuppression, allergic reactions, autoimmunity, and toxicity in all of our organs.”

‘Read the Label’

On April 19, Rep. Holly Jones (R-Missouri) filed a two-page bill, HB 1169. Producers, distributors, and merchants of products “with the capacity to infect an individual with a disease or to expose an individual to genetically modified material” must be “conspicuously labeled with the words ‘Gene Therapy Product,’” according to the bill.

“This goes into bioengineered foods and lab-grown meats,” Ms. Jones told The Epoch Times, noting how “they even want to go so far as to have us start eating bugs.”

You may already be consuming bugs and not know it. Insects bred as food are called “micro-livestock“ or ”mini-livestock.”

Get Better Wellness reported in August 2022 that if a label has “Acheta domesticus” on it, it refers to crickets. “Some are hiding it by calling it ‘Acheta Protein’ and promoting it as a great alternative to animal protein,” it said.

However, a study by Food Chemistry in June 2021 revealed that consuming crickets can prove deadly for those with shellfish allergies.

Another risk posed by consuming crickets is that they are known carriers of various pathogens like E. Coli and salmonella.

One study published by the National Library of Medicine found parasites in more than 81 percent of the insect farms the researchers investigated; in 30 percent of those cases, those parasites could cause disease in humans.

As Ms. Jones noted: “We also know a lot of these bioengineered foods cause cancer.

“With the ignorance on bioengineered foods as well as lab-grown meats, people have no idea what they’re eating,” she explained. “If you read any information on lab-grown meat, it’s absolutely astounding how they can pass this off as a good alternative to the natural food supply the Lord gave us, like livestock, swine, and chickens.”

What is interesting to Ms. Jones is “how many people are falling for it and allowing it.”

“I am bringing that bill back again,” she vowed. “I will be reintroducing it in the next legislative session in January because people deserve to know what’s in their foods, and then they can make an educated decision on whether to eat it.”

She said people need to “read the label.”

“Just pick up a can of soup. You can’t even pronounce half those ingredients,” she posited. “They’re putting more and more chemicals into everything we eat. The sicker we are, the more money Big Pharma makes, so they want Americans to be fat, sick, and nearly dead so they can come in with a cure or treatment.”

‘We’re Getting Sicker’

Dr. Eric Napute is a licensed, Missouri-based primary care provider. He is a licensed chiropractor, a certified doctor of natural medicine, and an internal health specialist. He is also a certified nutritional specialist with advanced training fellowships and certifications in functional neurology, orthomolecular nutrition, internal health, and advanced biomechanics.

Dr. Eric Napute (Courtesy of D. Eric Napute).

Dr. Napute said he often thinks of “where we’ve been to see where we’re going.”

He remembers 20 years ago, when bioengineered foods first arrived on the market under the term “GMO,” or “Genetically Modified Organisms,“ and Monsanto was in his proverbial backyard ”putting chemical compounds like glyphosate on foods.”

“We were sounding the alarm about potential issues with genetically modified foods then and how they’re not conducive with our human genome,” Dr. Napute told The Epoch Times.

As Dr. Napute explained, our bodies absorb food and turn it into nutrition. The problem, he said, comes when we consume “something that our genome doesn’t recognize.”

“The body sees it as a foreign invader, and many times we started seeing what we call GI Leukocytosis, which is when you eat something, and you get a hyper-immune response in the [gastrointestinal] tract. If done repeatedly, it can lead to things like autoimmune conditions and cause things like leaky gut syndrome.”

Dr. Haider also saw a major increase in neurodevelopmental issues. Growing numbers of children were developing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism. In older patients, he was seeing neurodegenerative declines.

He reflected on the bill recently introduced by Ms. Jones, House Bill 1169 (pdf), saying he was amazed by how “the bill never made it out of committee.”

While lobbyists gave the legislators false information and the legislators “repeated all of the talking points given to them by the lobbyists” to justify killing the measure, he said, “Holly Jones got tens of thousands of calls in support of the bill.

“That’s not normal,” he noted. “Normal is when you get 20 or 30, or maybe even 100 calls—not tens of thousands of calls from all over the country. That’s how serious people are about this. The only pushback on this bill was from the lobbyists.”

What makes Dr. Napute hopeful is that “a lot of people are suspect, and rightly so.”

“The concern now is, what are they not telling us about what’s in our food supply?” he posited. “As a nation, we’re getting sicker.

“My question is, ‘Why are they trying to hide it if it’s safe?’”