Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) with Dr. Niko Hall

A GMO is a genetically modified organism. It is the result of a laboratory process where genes from the DNA of one species are extracted and artificially forced into the genes of an unrelated plant or animal. The foreign genes may come from bacteria, viruses, insects, animals or even humans. Because this involves the transfer of genes, GMOs are also knows as transgenic organisms. GMOs are now present in the vast majority of processed foods in the US. While they are banned as food ingredients in Europe and elsewhere, the FDA does not even require the labeling of GMOs in food ingredient lists. New research is stating results of GMOs have no health benefits only economic benefits. Dr. Niko Hall breaks down the pros and cons of GMOs in the US today. Please welcome, Dr. Niko Hall.

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Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) with Dr. Niko Hall

Today, we have Dr. Niko Hall. It’s an honor to have him back. Today, we’re going to talk about GMOs and the importance of eating organic. Dr. Hall is going to throw in some extra things that he finds important, his wealth of knowledge in this area. Please welcome, Dr. Hall.

Thanks, Kevin. Thanks for having me back on. I enjoyed the last time we got to chat about functional medicine approach and how we achieve health through that. Today, GMO and organic food is a huge topic. A lot of proponents and people against both sides of the coin when it comes to GMOs. I’m so happy to talk about some of their arguments and what is valid in those pro-GMO arguments and at the same time what we’re starting to figure out now, which is shedding some new light on the issue that can’t really be ignored to this point.

Niko, what is a GMO?

GMO, genetically modified organisms, it’s different from breeding practices that bring out certain traits in crops that make them stronger, which has been the farmer’s approach for millennia. Selecting the best corn and keeping those seeds and continuing to do that in hybridization. GMO on the other hand is relatively new. I believe the first crop was introduced in the early 80s. Basically what GMO is, is selecting genes from other organisms that would be beneficial to a crop for one reason or another and inserting that into the crop’s DNA, hence the genetic modified organism, inserting alien genes essentially. That feat in its own is very impressive, to be able to manipulate DNA of these foods and create traits and characteristics that make them more resilient to pest and problems that farmer’s encounter and increase yields on things like that. It’s a huge breakthrough. There’s no wonder why it’s so popular these days and so many farmers are growing it.

At the same time, I feel we are a little bit quick to make this available to the public. Our current understanding of the genome even right now is elementary at best where we just don’t enough about it to be putting these crops out there in such drastically high numbers and exposures. When we talk about GMO, there are basically two main areas. One is they make them resistant to a pesticide called Roundup, main ingredient in that one is glyphosate. It’s an herbicide. Essentially, their crops that have this Roundup resistance, they’re able to just douse their whole field in the glyphosate in the Roundup and their crops won’t die but every other weed will die. That benefits the farmers, saves them a lot of man hours, and managing herbs or weeds. The other part of the GMO aspect is a gene called Bt toxin. Basically, it’s a gene they insert into these plants that make them produce their own insecticide toxin. The way that toxin works is it goes in and essentially when the pests or insects eats it, it goes into their gut, creates a bunch of holes, and just blows their gut up.

That happens to the insect?

Yes, that’s the mechanism of action.

It makes you wonder then we’re ingesting some of that too with it, right?

Absolutely. The industry would have you believe that genes in Bt toxin, they can’t withstand the human digestive system. They get destroyed. They have no impact to us whatsoever. A lot of that was based on studies in the 70s and 80s that they were never able to find DNA passing to the digestive tract in stool samples or whatnot. They can never find intact fragments of DNA back then. They concluded, “DNA gets destroyed in the digestive system, it doesn’t matter.” If we know now what we knew then, I don’t think a lot of these GMO crops would have been fast-tracked to production like they have been.

That was the old research. Now, what’s the new research saying in accordance to that?

As far as the genes go, 70s and 80s, they couldn’t find DNA that passed to the stool but now new studies are showing that genes can survive digestion in both humans and animals. So much so that there have been studies on non-GMO DNA. It’s been the offspring through parents that had GM foods and they’re finding that it can cross through the placenta to the fetus. They’re finding GMO DNA in fetuses or babies that obviously have never been exposed to this before but just from the maternal exposure. They’re also finding it in the blood, in organ systems of marked genes from GM foods. It can even penetrate the blood-brain barrier and have effects there neurologically. That’s huge. This is as far as the ability of the gene to survive and spread to other areas of the body, the environment and so on. The gene itself, it may or may not necessarily be an issue. That was more just refuting their claims. When it does become an issue it’s something that’s called horizontal gene transfer. Do you remember learning about this at all?

I don’t remember learning about horizontal gene transfer.

I don’t think we covered it too much in school. It might have been more biochemistry stuff. Certainly, didn’t cover it in nutrition because it’s not really in the chiropractic scope. What they’re finding is say for example you have the Bt toxin gene. You ingest that. We now know that these genes do not just degrade in the digestive system like previously thought. The way that they can horizontal gene transfer is that gene can actually be transcribed into the DNA of other organisms. Horizontal gene transfer happens among different species and on different animal kingdoms. It’s a common event. They always claim that it couldn’t happen to us. The Bt toxin would not be transferred over to any of our host DNA or what they’re finding now mostly is it’s being transferred over to the genes of our own gut bacteria. Our gut bacteria has these genes that if they are transcribed on the segments of DNA, the corticoprotein that Bt toxin, if they are transcribed and they create that toxin, then our own microbiome is going to be producing Bt toxin in our gut. Like I just mentioned with the insects, we know what that does to guts. It’s not good. What they’re finding is that it’s possible.

In the insects, you said it’s just tearing them up inside and killing them. Obviously, we’re much bigger organisms. What effect do you think that’s directly having on our gut biome?

It’s hard to say. For sure, there have been no studies on this. A lot of the Bt toxin horizontal transfer is right at the beginning of determining what kind of effects this might have. What the scary part is if that toxin is transferred over to our bacteria not only will it disrupt all of the entire microbiome and kill up other species of bacteria, but once it’s in there, regardless what the consequences maybe we figure out long-term, how do you get it out? That’s the problem. There’s no turning that back.

It’s being transferred to the next generation too.

Another thing while we’re on the topic of genes, part of making a GM food when they’re inserting the gene into the DNA of whatever crop that they want to grow, is they use antibiotics to sterilize the area making sure nothing else gets in there. What they do is they put antibiotic resistant marker genes, which are genes to make that crop resistant to antibiotics so that when they apply these antibiotics to them in the manufacturing process, they’re not destroyed. What they’re finding is now that they have these antibiotic resistant markers, these are in the same GM foods that are all over the place. We talked about how genes can withstand digestion, genes can travel to other parts of the body and they can be transcribed into the bacterial DNA the horizontal genes transfer or even our host DNA. If you have antibiotic resistant genes that we’re eating or being incorporated into our bacteria into our DNA, that really increases the odds of developing superbugs.

You said on the last podcast episode, what’s the percentage of our immune system in our gut?

70% to 80% depending on who you talk to. The thing is there. It might not be a widespread issue but it only takes one gene transfer of that ARM Gene, that Antibiotic Resistant Marker Gene to go to a potentially pathogenic bacteria like C. diff or a new form of E. coli and things like that. That one bacteria spreads, you can’t treat it with antibiotics. It only takes that one time. That’s what’s terrifying about that.

We have all that going on. If it doesn’t say certified organic on the label, it’s got a GMO in it? Is that how it works?

Not necessarily. It really depends on who you’re buying from. Seeing from personal experience with the whole certified organic, we grow wine grapes in Santa Barbara County. We grow Pinot Noir and ancient Mission grape. We do all of our farming organically, bio-dynamically with environment number one. However, the certification process to be certified organic is very expensive and laborious. A lot of times you can be farming organically, you don’t want to pay for the certification. Each bottle of wine that has that on there, you have to pay for just the application fees and membership fees. It’s insane. Small farmers oftentimes don’t want to be spending their money on a certification when they’re just growing it organically because of their own principles. Then they pass that charge onto the consumer. It’s just one reason people say organic is so expensive. Certified organic definitely means there’s not going to be any GMO’s in there. They’re not using any artificial pesticides or hormones or antibiotic, anything like that. Organics do have natural pesticide, herbicide applications that they can use. However, they’re not chemically based so they’re not as resilient in nature. If you’re really concerned about that, a couple of things you can do is just rinsing your produce really well. I was reading yesterday soaking apples, or what fruit it might be that you’re going to eat the skin on, and a solution with some baking soda and water for ten, fifteen minutes removed 80% to 90% of all pesticide residues. You can probably even Google that. I’m sure there’s a lot of health sites promoting that practice. I thought it was pretty cool. Simply you’re not going to sit there scrubbing. Just throw them in a bucket of water for fifteen minutes, done. As far as certified organic goes, I would buy that when you can, when you can afford it, but again it’s not the end all be all.

You’ve got the farmers’ markets and all that stuff that aren’t paying for the certified organic trademark but they are organic.

You can put that you’re farm organic but you’re not certified organic, which is fine.

If it’s on the shelf at ShopRite or something and there’s no organic label on it, there’s most likely?

Let’s get into that. One of the biggest problems with the GMs is not the fact that, “There might be an issue here. This causes cancer, yes or no? Is that the debate?” The problem is that it’s insidious in our current food supply. It’s freaking everywhere. To understand how it’s got to that point, you have to go over how we got here. Industrial agriculture comes along. Their point is to produce a lot of food on a small piece of land at an affordable price; simple business. The companies that accomplish the best, they did so without any regard for food, environmental safety, anything like that. In the process of amassing great wealth and power, buying out all these small farmers that couldn’t get a lower bottom line that they could, they became very powerful. I think it was in the late 70s, the big four beef companies like Tyson, Cargill, a couple of other, they owned 30% of all beef production. Currently, those same four companies, they control 85% of all the beef sold in the US. That’s a pretty big monopoly there between those four. With that wealth that they gained from doing this, they started using lobbyists and they became more powerful and that they would pass this what they called are food bills. They pass food bills through legislation, which subsidizes farmers for growing what they’re called commodity crops. This is corn and soy.

The commodity crops are crops that can be used for a number of applications, from animal feed, to the sweeteners and high-fructose corn syrup. Corn, they put it in toothpaste, makeup products. It’s everywhere. What these food bills did was subsidize it to a point where now the farmer is selling his crop, his corn for less than the cost of production, which is insane. We’re producing these foods and able to sell it for less than the cost of production just because the government is subsidizing him to do that. All of a sudden, that becomes the most profitable crop because of these subsidies. He’s not inclined to be growing organically. He’s inclined to follow this industrial agricultural method. He produces as many bushels as he can because he gets the most subsidies back and then so on and so forth. Along with that, a lot of that corn goes to those same companies again to keep the cost of their meats down. It’s a cycle.

This is mainly United States problem then?

US is the number one fan of GMOs in agriculture. Last I read, I think corn agriculture is attributable to 30% of all of the US farmable land or might be US area entirely but it’s huge. Everybody’s growing corn because it’s subsidized. It’s no surprise that what are the biggest Monsanto GMO crops that they’re putting out there? It’s the corn. It’s the soy. The sugar beet. It’s these commodified crops that they know is going to have a huge market and will never be short on cash because of the legislation and the subsidization that’s going through. In addition to this really cheap corn now being able to be bought for this cattle that have been fed and sold for much cheaper than conventional or an organic grass-fed cattle. A lot of other companies love this commodity crop too. All the junk food process food manufacturers, they’re just using this corn and soy as a base for all their foods. You go to the middle isles of any grocery store, go pick up a box off the shelf, you’re guaranteed to see corn or soy in there. That’s all this GMO corn and soy, almost guaranteed. Unless it says it’s certified organic, you’re going to get GMO soy, corn. It’s everywhere.

Are there any pros besides the mass produce that we can get more food for more affordable price? Besides the money, are there any pros to these GMOs?

I’ve asked myself that question a lot and tried to really look into it, but when you go to what we’re just now finding out, it’s hard to say yes. With the use of insecticides, herbicides things like that, now we’re seeing super weeds coming to light and adapting to these herbicides that can’t withstand anything. That’s why they’re trying to pass through a new even more toxic pesticide called dicamba. It had tons of issues. I won’t get into that. At first I thought, “GMOs are good because they are able to make food cheap as it cuts down on labor cost and speeds up production.” But what is the greater cost of that overall to the environment? What is the greater cost to healthcare prices that are going to go up? You have to look at the big picture. Looking at that big picture it’s hard to give one reason why I would say, “Yes. GMO is the way to go.” Just because there are so many side effects and consequences from that practice that are just not sustainable and do more harm than good overall from the grand scheme of things.

This sounds like a vicious cycle too because you have the GMOs that people are buying because they’re cheaper, which are costing them their health and then you have Big Pharma on TV advertising to all these sick people. That’s a vicious cycle right there.

Big Food, Big Pharma, it’s crazy it’s gotten to this point. When you think about the agricultural industry, it’s just a corporation. They’re not interested in health, wholesome foods. They’re not interested in supporting our well-being. They just want cheap ingredients, a long shelf life, addictive taste, and get that bottom line down. That’s it.

What other information you have over there on GMOs or just eating organic and stuff like that?

As far as the GMO goes, we talked about the Bt toxin and how that can do the horizontal transfer. The other aspect of the GMO was the Roundup ready. It’s resistant to glyphosate. What they’re finding now is that glyphosate has become so widespread in the environment. I think a recent study found a glyphosate in 30% of the women’s study in their breast milk, in their placenta and in umbilical blood, there was glyphosate. I think another study I had read recently out of Canada found glyphosate in the bloodstream of 90% something of pregnant mothers, the average levels of which are known to be endocrine disrupting to a fetus.

Causing birth defects maybe?

Yeah, late development. Everything during fetal development is basically hormones dictate what happens when; gender differentiation, growth of this aspect to the body, growth of that one. If those hormones are skewed or interrupted with endocrine disruptors, it interrupts the normal hormonal messages and signals, then anything can happen. This is what we saw with DDT back in the 80s especially here in California. There were huge problems in the environment because they are spraying it everywhere. All of a sudden, there were hermaphroditic seagulls and sea lions where they couldn’t have sex anymore and reproduce.

DDT being a pesticide? Just that or just spraying out?

Yes. It was for mosquitoes. It gets manufactured that one too, Monsanto. Some things never change. I just feel it would be these companies and corporations, they know that there’s going to be problems. They make enough money ahead of time so that paying out in the lawsuits is just business as usual. They’re still more profitable to push it through anyways. That’s really what it is.

Who do we have on the other end of things saying that this is wrong? Are they big enough to make a difference and stop it? I’m sure it’s growing but who do we have in that department?

As far as agencies go, now with our new supreme leader, it’s hard to say that one is getting into that direction anytime soon. It’s a lot of just grassroots movements and people who are trying to speak out and creating their own small organizations so it’s nothing big. If anybody wanted to look more into the whole GMO issue, Google Jeffrey Smith. He wrote the book Genetic Roulette. I believe there’s a documentary out there called Genetic Roulette, which provides a lot of really good information. They give you the right resources if you wanted to help spread the word and be more active or just read out more and get more information. Something that helps too as far as trying to avoid GM foods, avoid pesticides, have you ever heard of the Clean Fifteen, Dirty Dozen?

No.

It’s a list of the Environmental Working Group, EWG.org, that puts out every year. It lists the Dirty Dozen, the twelve produce items or vegetables or fruits that are most likely to be either GMO, contaminated with pesticides and unhealthy to eat. It also, on the flip side, gives you the Clean Fifteen, which are those fifteen fruits and vegetables that are least likely to be GMO and used pesticides on, etc. If somebody’s on a budget, sometimes that’s I will do too is I’ll resort to that list. When you eat green leafy veggies, anything that you eat the whole part of, like celery for example, that’s really porous, that can absorb, is typically going to be in that dirty dozen. Any pesticide that’s sprayed on it, it’s just going to be absorbed right away. You’re not peeling off the skin to remove the outer layer that they get on it. It’s just a cool way to know, “If I’m just going to buy organic, I’m on a budget, I’m just going to stick to these twelve or buy organic because I know that there’s a high likelihood that they’re not going to be very good for me.”

Could you rattle off a couple of those things on the list?

I know the squash is on the dirty dozen because those are pretty common GM food. All leafy green vegetables like your spinach. I believe broccoli is on there too. Papaya, I believe is another one because there are a lot of GMO papayas out there unfortunately. I’ll just mention too wheat and bread. Wheat is not GMO. Most wheat, it’s been hybridize, totally fine but most of the wheat out there is not GMO. What they’re doing now in practice is that they use glyphosate right at the end, right when they picked the wheat. After they harvest the wheat, they spray it with glyphosate as a treatment and that enables it to ripen quicker. Even though they haven’t really been farming it with glyphosate the whole time, they’re blasting it with this pesticide right at the end and then it goes right into production to flour and right to the shelves.

They’re doing that so they can technically say that it wasn’t treated with pesticides at the time of growth?

They’re not making any organic claims. It’s just common practice. It might say non-GMO or whatever but that doesn’t mean they’re not using glyphosate and Roundup on plants that are non-GMO. The way that glyphosate works, number one, it’s a mineral chelator. What that means is it binds the mineral and takes it out. When they’re spraying it on these crops, it’s binding and chelating minerals out of the soil so now the plants have less minerals to absorb through the soil. At the same time, it’s binding and chelating minerals out of the plants too. The plants don’t have the healthy soils they once had to get the nutrients from. At the same time, the glyphosate is preventing them from storing and obtaining the few nutrients that they might be able to get. Say that’s for the animal feed. We do that on all the corns. This corn’s super nutrient pore, we’re giving that through all of the cattle now, all the pigs, everything there are eating these grains. They’re not getting the nutrients either. We’re getting nutrient deficiency starting at ground one and it just works its way down the food chain all the way to us. Not only is glyphosate in our systems chelating minerals out too or that we’re getting from GMO agriculture chelating them out, but the food itself is just poor in minerals and nutrients because of the use of glyphosate and its chelating effects.

We haven’t even been able to study this long-term. We don’t know how this is going to look in twenty years because it’s so fresh.

There’s no human trial. There’s no long-term study. There’s no labeling. There’s no post-market monitoring. There’s no regulation. It’s insane. We’re guinea pigs.

I’m interested in that Clean Fifteen list too then.

They update it every year, 2017 Dirty Dozen list. If anybody wants to access this, they can go to the Environmental Working Group’s page. It’s EWG.org, a lot of great resources on there. As far as the most likely fruits and vegetables to be GMO or contain pesticide residues in 2017, they found the number one are strawberries, two was spinach, three nectarines, number four apples. Those four, a lot of people eat those on the daily. Moving on from there, you have peaches, pears, cherries, grapes, celery, tomatoes, sweet bell peppers and potatoes; a lot of staples in the diet. Those are all on the dirty dozen list. Make sure that you’re getting those organic when you can. Farmers’ markets are even better. As we all know, nutrients, especially antioxidants in produce, they degrade over time. You want to be getting your produce as fresh as possible. The best way to do that is at the farmers’ market. I think at a grocery store, it’s an average of seven to thirteen days from farms to table, from produce somewhere in there depending on the crops. Farmers’ market is the best way to go. If you have CSAs in your neighborhood, join one of those. Just pay a monthly fee and you go pick up your box of veggies once a week, once every other week. They just pick it that day and load it out.

I haven’t heard of that.

Just Google CSA and type in your city and maybe produce as a tag as well. See if there’s anything in your area. The best way is just go to farmers’ market. One of the stalls that has more produces available, they’re probably more likely to do a CSA because they have the variety. They’re not just focusing on a handful of crops, and ask around. See if they do something like that or anything. A lot of times you’ll find too going to the farmers’ market, their organic foods, not only I think taste better and look better all-around but they’re going to be far more affordable than somewhere like Whole Foods or elsewhere that’s just trying to make a buck with this health food trend these days.

Whole Foods is ridiculous. They have great products but it’s pricey.

Have you heard of the online place now, I’ve just entered a membership because we got Sprouts in town, Thrive Market?

No, I haven’t.

Basically, it’s an online store. There’s no fresh stuff yet but they started a couple of years ago. They sell all health foods that you can find at Whole Foods for wholesale prices. You can spend $60, you get the year membership. We did it for a year and half last year and it was great. You’re stocked up in all this stuff that you’re saving significant amounts of money on. What I really like about their company, they have a conscious approach to making good food more affordable. For every membership that you sign up for, they donate a membership to a low-income family, which is beautiful.

Did you do that every time you want a produce, you would go on that website?

I order different fresh stuff. I find the most difficult thing when it comes to eating healthy is like a gluten-free pasta or an organic, good quality quinoa or rice or any kind of jarred stuff, marinara sauces, barbecue sauces. It’s not just full of high-fructose corn syrup or sugars that have a really good profile. As far as pantry items, they were great.

We’re talking about GMOs and everything that is in our systems, another thing that’s probably beneficial to talk about is do you recommend any good detoxes for the body to just help rid your system of all these pesticides and everything?

For anybody that doesn’t do a current supplemental regimen, I like to give people the option of having just a foundational health even if they’re not a patient of mine. I have a blog in my website. It just talks about what I call the Five Key Nutritional Products. One of those is anti-oxidants to counteract all the issues that we are seeing with our current environment. I think there were 80,000 chemicals that are currently being used in North America. These have never been tested long-term, never been tested how they work with each other, yet our bodies are having to encounter them, process them, and eliminate them every day, all day. They’re working overtime. It was a quote from the World Health Organization. They came out and said that they believe 90% of all chronic and serious illness could be prevented if we are able to eliminate 600 of the most dangerous environmental toxins. That’s World Health Organization. That’s significant. This stuff is causing a problem. I know we just talked about glyphosate. That’s one the big ones but it’s everywhere. You can’t get away from it. Supporting the liver through antioxidants is one of the best ways to do that. It’s not necessarily a detox program per se because there’s nothing you can do that’s going to go in there and take out any kind of fat soluble toxins that are hanging out and heavy metals or other things that are going on but just supporting the body’s own detoxification, elimination pathways. It’s really the best approach we have to ridding this from our body and protecting us from future exposure.

There are a couple of anti-oxidants that I really like. One of them is called Ultimate Antiox Full Spectrum. It’s made by Designs for Health. It’s the most comprehensive one I found to date just based on the number of vitamins and nutrients in there. It’s called broad spectrum because it covers so many different forms of antioxidants, from herbal to the vitamins and minerals, your cuminoids are in there, holy basil, ginkgo. There are tons of stuff in there. Of course, the Big Three, vitamin A, C, E, your ACES, those are your big antioxidants too. Just making sure you’re getting those in every day. It’s huge. Another one for antioxidants that people like to get it more from a plant source, you can do greens drink called Nanogreens. It’s made by BioPharma Scientific. I just do a scoop, 30 minutes before breakfast, it’s the way to do it. Shake with some water. You’ll actually find you get a lot of energy from this. Oftentimes, I’ll do that instead of coffee in the morning. It provides ten servings of fruits and vegetables. Everything is sourced organically, really good clean greens product. It’s been our favorite one for a number of years now. That’s a really good way to get antioxidants.

Going back to the foundational health having five key products, I’ll just briefly list the other ones. I think it’s important to have a high quality fish oil. Omega-3 fatty acids and how the anti-inflammatory behavior of them and how it counteracts. You might have a poor diet and poor lifestyle in the past where you ate a lot of processed meats and foods, your Omega-6 are high, you’re pretty inflamed. Starting fish oil now can drastically prevent and reduce your risks of serious diseases down the line. From heart disease, your cancers, your neurological diseases especially for neurological health, Alzheimer’s and dementia, Omega-3s are huge. Just doing a quality Omega-3 every day, that’s EPA and DHA. It’s about 1,000 milligrams, can go a long way towards longevity.

Another really important one is vitamin D3. A lot of times people say, “You don’t really need it. You can get it from the sun.” They go to their doctor. They ask them to measure vitamin D. He reluctantly says, “They are at 33.” He says, “You’re great. You’re in the range.” All the research actually says that the ideal range for vitamin D3 is minimum 50, better at 70. We’re looking to get patients more on the 50 to 70 range for vitamin to be at the level that your body requires and that’s the level that we see in the research that prevents certain diseases. It’s nice to have information from labs and look to this research and say, “I’m in this range that the lab says is cool but all this says is I have a 20% less chance of getting heart disease if my number is 20 higher. Why not go 20 higher?”

The labs data is from mostly sick people, right? Because it’s coming from people that needed to get blood work done because there’s something wrong. They’re taking the data from the majority of those people. Is that right?

Yes. The lab gets their numbers. They take the average of everybody coming in and they go two standard deviations in each direction. That’s how to get a lot of their ranges. There are other ones with the glucose 126 and you’re diabetic. Still, 124, just because you’re not classified diabetic yet you’re having some insulin problems, you need to make a change before it gets there. At the same time, people can be 126 and then they finally get their glucose fasting down to 102, 103, they think they don’t have diabetes anymore and they’re in the clear, but that’s not the case. It’s a sliding scale. You have to be skeptical of the lab values and how most often you can be at one end or the other, but as long as you’re right next to that number and not over it, they say you’re totally fine. It’s not the case.

Vermont, is that one of the only states that doesn’t allow GMOs in their entire state? Did you hear of that?

I did not.

I don’t have any research behind this but somebody told me once that Vermont is completely GMO-free.

I know that they were the first one to pass GMO labeling laws but Monsanto’s fought them tooth and nail. Another big reason to hate Whole Foods is when California had the GMO labeling law, they donated a lot of resources and money towards getting that overturned. They were on the anti-labeling campaign. As far as that goes, the US is way far behind. I think it might have been Malta that just joined in to try to not allow the renewal of the use of glyphosate in Europe. They joined now twelve countries in the European Union that are trying to ban the use of glyphosate, so that’s huge.

How is Europe accomplishing all this? Because they were doing it right.

Honestly, it’s because of the lobbyist we have influencing our government.

Niko, that was just a wealth of information. Do you have anything else you’d like to share?

As far as the whole thing goes, GMO is such a big issue. There’s just not enough information out there to confidently say, “Yes. They’re safe. Keep using them.” It’s actually quite the contrary. Studies that are coming out now are actually showing a lot of problems with the feeding studies things like that. My advice is just to advice patients to avoid GMOs the best they can. That reminds me there’s a quote that I had found when I was doing a presentation not too long ago from the American Academy of Environmental Medicine. Back in 2009, American Academy of Environmental Medicine came out and said, “Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food consumption including infertility, immune dysregulation, accelerated aging, dysregulations of genes associated with cholesterol synthesis, insulin regulation, cell signaling and protein formation, and changes in the liver, kidney and spleen and gastrointestinal system.” Back in 2009, based on this, the AAEM, they have asked physicians to advise all their patients to avoid GM foods. That was almost ten years ago now. We’ve only learned more since.

Niko, what’s your website where people can read your blog and everything and just get more information on this?

It’s DrNikoHall.com. I know we briefly talked about some of the foundational supplements I recommend to patients. If you go on to my blog there, I have a recent blog post where I talked about each of those and give you a couple of options in each category, which you can just click on over to the store and pick those up too and have them sent to you. Everything is marked at 10% below SRP to try to stay competitive with places like Amazon and whatnot. I think you’ll find a lot of other great information on there on the blog and don’t hesitate to shoot me an email or give me a call if you have any other questions or if they want to set up a consult or anything.

What’s your email?

NH@DrNikoHall.com.

Thank you so much, Dr. Hall. I appreciate you coming on and spending the time with us.

Thank you for having me again. It’s been a pleasure.

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