GMO’s and Your Health with Jeffrey Smith

Trevor:                         Hi there. I’m Dr Trevor Cates. Welcome to the spa doctor podcast. Today we’re talking about GMO’s and how they impact your health and your skin. My guest is Jeffrey Smith, who is an author, speaker, and founding executive director of the Institute for Responsible Technology, a leading source of GMO health risk information for consumers, policymakers and healthcare professionals. His books include Seeds of Deception and Genetic Roulette that documented health risks of genetically engineered foods. Jeffrey has lectured in 45 countries, counseled leaders from every continent and has been quoted by thousands of news outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Times London and Time magazine, he regularly appears in the media, including the BBC, NPR, Fox News, The Doctors, and the Doctor Oz show. In today’s interview we talk about exactly what GMOs are, how they may impact your health, including your skin, and what you could do to reduce your exposure to them, and also reverse possible damage. So please enjoy this interview. Hey, Jeffrey it’s so great to have you on my podcast.

Jeffrey Smith:               Finally, it’s fantastic. We’ve known each other for some years and it’s great to be here.

Trevor:                         Yeah, I know, I remember when I first started my podcast I asked you to come on and you were so busy at the time and I’ve been trying to get you on the podcast for a while, so it’s great to have you on. So let’s start from the beginning to get everybody on the same page. Can you explain what GMOs are?

Jeffrey Smith:               GMO means Genetically Modified Organisms. Typically when you create seeds, you, you mate the mom and pop and you get the offspring. Here, you take genes from one particular species and force it into the DNA of other species, or you use gene editing to change the, the sequence of the genes within a particular DNA. And all of that is artificial done in a laboratory and creates massive collateral damage in DNA. So you get mutations up and down the DNA. You get changes that you don’t necessarily know are coming. In fact, surprise side effects are the number one result of genetic engineering. Now, why did they create GMOs? Well, they were really pushed forward by Monsanto because their patent on Roundup herbicide was going to expire in 2000. So they created Roundup ready seeds, specifically designed so the crops can be sprayed with Roundup and not die. Normally Roundup herbicide would wipe out the crops so they allowed the crops to survive so that the farmers can just spray over the tops of the fields and everything else dies except the roundup ready soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets and Alfalfa. And then the Roundup unfortunately gets absorbed into the crop and we eat it. There’s also some corn and cotton, and in South America, some soy that’s engineered to produce its own toxic insecticide, which kills insects by breaking open holes in their guts. And we unfortunately eat that insecticide as well and research shows it’s not actually safe.

Trevor:                         Well, and so this, because… this is an interesting conversation to have because the genetically modified foods were created to help people have, you know, so we can have more food, right? So to mass produce a corn and soy and things that we eat a lot of. Right? So the idea was this is science and technology. This is forward thinking so that we could, can help us live, you know, more abundantly in a way, right? And feed more people. That’s the idea.

Jeffrey Smith:               Well, that’s the idea that they are promoting. They spent $250, million dollars over five years. The biotech industry, to give that impression that the reason they created GMOs was to better the world. In reality, they don’t focus on increased yields. They actually don’t increase yields. On average, GMOs don’t increase yield, many of them decrease yield. They’re focusing on selling more chemicals and capturing the seed market. So, when Monsanto originally was attacked in the Europe in the late nineties and they come up with full page ad saying, you know, Let the Harvest Begin, was the title. And they talked about how they were going to help the developing countries. Well, the delegates at a UN conference all responded with their own full page ad saying, “Don’t use us as an excuse to peddle your products. We don’t need it.” And it turns out that when the UN did sponsor the most comprehensive evaluation of how to feed the world, they said GMOs have nothing to offer.

Jeffrey Smith:               They recommended agroecology which can double yields compared to no average increase by GMO. So it’s all been a boondoggle. In fact, many of the reasons why people accepted GMOs is entirely based on the myth-making of the politic industry. They said that it’s safe. It turns out that the person in charge of policy at the FDA was Monsanto’s former attorney, Michael Taylor, and later Monsanto’s vice president and the policy that that he oversaw and essentially wrote, said that the Agency is not aware of information showing that GMOs are different or dangerous. Therefore, no testing is necessary. Nine years later when the documents were made public from the lawsuit, it turns out that the overwhelming consensus among the scientists working at the FDA was exactly the opposite. That GMOs were different, dangerous, and needed to be tested. So now people have been eating this for so long and I’ve had the privilege of bringing the information about the documented health risks to physicians and the doctors started prescribing non-GMO diets and lo and behold, much to my surprise, actually, they reported people getting better right away.

Jeffrey Smith:               Many of them from dramatic turnarounds when they switched to non-GMO and organic food. So I started asking people at lectures…. at the very beginning of legends, okay, rate yourself, at how vigilant you’ve been at avoiding GMOs and I get the, you know, the zero to 20, 20 to 40, etc. That I see how many people are actually avoiding GMOs. And I said, okay, for those of you that have been avoIding GMOs, largely, did you notice any change in your health? And a bunch of people raised their hands. And so I started asking, okay, what’d you notice? So someone had Crohn’s disease problems and they went away or irritable bowel or, or a kidney problem, or even autism, or whatever. And I say, okay, how many, how many others in the audience noticed a change? And so I started asking that at 150 lectures, over some years, including about two dozen medical conferences so that the practitioners who were speaking out on their own behalf, but on behalf of their patients and an incredible pattern emerged of what happens… how people get better when they switched to non-GMO diets. Which happens to match up with what happened with livestock and pets that are taken off of GMOs. Which matched up with what happens when… when lab animals are forced-fed GMOs and the Roundup that’s sprayed on them. Which matched up with the epidemiological evidence of what diseases are rising in the U.S. population in parallel with the increased use of GMOs and it matched up with what we know about the toxins in GMOs that are causing the problems and that we would predict might cause these specific disorders.

Trevor:                         Okay. Well that’s interesting and it is disturbing when politics get in the way of really what helps protect our US citizens. You know, our, our human population. But let’s talk… let’s talk about what are the specific health concerns with GMOs. And you mentioned a few different health conditions, so can you explain to everybody what are the concerns that this is creating with human health? Because I know that there’s not, there’s not a lot of research on this, correct? But there is at least from the, um, the, the way that they’re made and the concerns that it can create.

Jeffrey Smith:               Well, there’s different ways we can look at that. If we look at the animal feeding studies that have been conducted on GMO, we see potentially pre-cancerous cell growth. We see tumors and cancer. We see premature death, organ damage, hormone changes, immune system activation, and damage. Leaky gut, suppressed digestive enzymes, a whole host of problems, and infertility, and stunted growth. When we look at the humans that are saying they’re getting better from, from diseases and disorders… there’s actually… we did a… we did a survey of 3,256 people who responded to the question, what did you get better from, or did you get better? What did you get better from when you switched to a largely non-GMO diet? And there were 28 different conditions. Now, the number one condition that was in the survey was digestive disorders. Eighty-five point two percent of the people said that they got better from digestive problems and of those more than 80 percent said it was either a significant increase; that the problem was nearly gone, or completely reversed.

Jeffrey Smith:               Now that means a huge impact. And so I wrote a peer reviewed article in the International Journal of Human Nutrition and Functional Medicine, not only giving the results of the survey, but we focused on why would digestion be so, uh, assaulted by GMOs. And there’s a lot of evidence pointing to that. Now, it turns out that in 150 lectures that I gave the number one response in the audience was always digestive disorders. And then number two, I combined brain fog and fatigue. And it turns out that fatigue was number two in this survey. Brain fog was number four after obesity and weight problems. So we saw digestion, fatigue, weight problems, brain fog, uh allergies and immune system problems, pain, anxiety and depression all the way down to diabetes and autism and cardiovascular disease, gluten sensitivity, etc. So that’s another way to look at the problems.

Jeffrey Smith:               The third way is to look at, well, what are the GMOs capable of doing to us? And in that article, and in my lectures, I generally focus on three causes. The first is the generic process of genetic engineering. And I mentioned that it creates collateral damage, but I didn’t go into the details. Specifically, for example, in Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Corn. Sure it has the Roundup in it. It often, also, has the BT Toxin insecticide because they stack those traits, but the generic process of creating that genetically engineered corn changed over 200 proteins and metabolites. So now that court has higher levels of, I think you like these terms, putriscine and cadaverine. Some of my favorite compounds. They are responsible for the foul odor of rotting dead bodies, of her bad breath, and they also promote allergies and cancer. So that’s higher levels in the corn and they didn’t know.

Jeffrey Smith:               Monsanto didn’t know that. The FDA didn’t know that. They didn’t bother checking to see the changes before they put it on the market. There’s another corn that as a new allergen, there’s a soybean that has higher levels of an existing allergen. So there’s that generic side effect, background noise that could create all sorts of problems and one research scientist who was fired from his job and silenced with threats of a lawsuit when he discovered the problem because of the pro-GMO uh UK government that was sponsoring the research. He found out that the generic process of genetic engineering caused massive damage in his rats in just 10 days and it was the same process he used… that they used to create the GMOs on the market. So there’s the generic process. Then there’s the BT Toxin, which breaks little holes in the walls of the intestines of insects to kill them.

Jeffrey Smith:               And it turns out it breaks open little holes in the walls of of human cells, and a study came out, last week, that it showed that it created holes in the stomach lining of rats that were studied in Australia. It also can promote immune system responses and create allergic reactions. That… but the one that we have the most research on Trevor is… is the the Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate. That’s an herb. It’s the most popular herbicide. A lot of people have it in their garages, don’t use it. The World Health Organization’s top committee just declared it a probable human carcinogen two years ago and a definite animal carcinogen. It also is a chelator, it binds with minerals, making them unavailable, which shuts down metabolic pathways that support serotonin development in melatonin and dopamine and many other things. It also is an antibiotic. It’s patented as an antibiotic and it kills the beneficial bugs in us, not the nasty stuff like Salmonella, E Coli, and Botulism. It kills the lactobacillus, the bifidobacteria. This stuff we pay for, the stuff we want, and so we’re eating in our food, a broad, a broad spectrum antibiotic, wiping out the balance of the gut bacteria. It also promotes leaky gut. It also creates endocrine disruption, damages the mitochondria. It also has, I mean so many different aspects. He promotes birth defects and it is in high concentrations in the food that sprayed with Roundup, which is the Roundup Ready soy, corn, cotton, canola, sugar beets, and alfalfa.

Trevor:                         Wow. Wow. You know, I’ve always had this feeling that I don’t want to mess with Mother Nature. That Mother Nature is wise and we don’t want to mess with that. I know people have been using Roundup for years and talking about how safe it is and how the research shows that it’s safe. And I always kept saying, “Well, it can’t be because we’re… you know because of how it works and what we’re doing, how we’re disrupting what is naturally occurring.” And when you create those imbalances, you, you’re bound to have some problems come up with that. And I’m always concerned when people say, oh, you know, the research shows it’s safe. If it’s something like tha… that it just doesn’t make sense. And eventually we’re going to have… it’s going to come out that we were wrong.

Jeffrey Smith:               Actually. It’s coming out. There’s a lawsuit. I was just another radio show for a couple of hours about this the other night. It’s a lawsuit that’s underway in San Francisco, of a groundskeeper that got a Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, uh, after being drenched with Roundup. He uses it every day in his… his work. And because of that lawsuit and others, 4,000 people are suing Monsanto or waiting for their, their, uh, trials to start. The law firm was able to get millions of pages of internal documents, literally millions and Monsanto did not respond in a certain way by a particular deadline. And this brilliant law firm said, okay, we can make it public. So we’ve been reading these documents and it turns out they knew for 40 years the side effects. They knew about tumors, they knew about all sorts of issues that they hid. They also showed collusion and manipulation of the EPA, so they had a lapdog and the EPA that was working on their behalf and it’s right there and emails and texts and, and uh, they were able to get the EPA’s committee to say it’s not carcinogen, but it was their own guy.

Jeffrey Smith:               So, um, yeah, we, we have been able to track. And also, same thing with GMOs. We have found… I even talked… spoke to a former Monsanto scientist who said that they found that the rats that were eating the genetically modified corn had serious damage and instead of withdrawing the corn they rewrote the study to hide the effects.  And he was aware of that and he no longer works at Monsanto. When he was concerned because they only feed the rats typically in a Monsanto study, about 33 percent of their diet is GMO and he said to me in South Africa and southern Africa, they use GMO… they use corn as a staple and now they’ve introduced GMO corn there. What happens if they eat GMO corn their whole lives? When rats got damaged in 90 days from only one-third of their diet, it might be the majority of the diet in South Africa, and sure enough, I spoke to a veterinarian who was working with a farmer in South Africa and the animals were eating GMOs and they were having problems.

Jeffrey Smith:               The milking cows, were not producing enough milk. They were getting damaged legs. The pigs had all sorts of problems. He switched them to non-GMO and the animals got better. He ran out, had to go to the market and buy. The problems came back until he was able to grow enough non-GMO corn for the whole year. But his workers, his workers were eating the corn on the farm three times a day and so when he started out as GMO, they had tremendous health problems. He had to keep 20 percent extra hired because so many were sick with flu-like symptoms and inflammation. And he… and he said to the veterinarian once or twice a month, he’d speak to a worker and the eyes would not track together. They’d moved separately and he knew that within one or two days they would be dead. So there was a huge death rate, inflammation rate, and then when he switched… when he started to grow non-GMO and produce it for the animals, the farm workers started eating it and they got better until he ran out or they had.. again to get food for the marketplace. And so unfortunately they were like the “Canaries in the Coal Mine.” Well, that’s anecdotal evidence, but it is severe. It is severe. It’s reported in our film, Genetic Roulette. Now, if you look at what could possibly be going wrong with eating GMOs, we have specific lists and there are ways to counter those problems. There are ways that people can… can help reverse the damage that’s been done.

Trevor:                         Okay. Well, let’s first start by saying, how do people ensure that they’re avoiding GMOs? And, um, but even before you answer that, um, I know a lot of my audience watches this podcast because of skin and we talk a lot about what you’re putting on your skin versus what you’re doing internally. And of course, what you’re doing internally impacts the root causes that impact the skin, right? So know hormone imbalances, nutritional deficiencies all could be part of what you’re talking about from the inside out. But do people need to be using GMO-free skincare products too?

Jeffrey Smith:               Yes. And here’s some interesting information. Roundup is not just sprayed on GMOs, it’s also sprayed on grains. So it sprayed on oats, wheat, barley, rye… it’s sprayed… it’s sprayed on lentils, Mung beans and it’s sprayed on some veggies and some fruits and some orchards. So it’s around, it’s in a lot of foods, um, and it does have uh, the glyphosate, which is the active ingredient in Roundup does end up accumulating in the product. For the other products it’s often the non-GMOs, it’s often spray just before harvest; three to five days as a desiccant to dry it down. There’s a ripening agent. It actually kills these, these cereals, but it kills it slowly. So it… it forces an immediate ripening so it has some benefit for the farmers. But we end up eating all this poison. So I’m not, I would say eating organic or not only eat organic, but putting organic stuff on your skin is important.

Jeffrey Smith:               What came out in the trial, I was reading the 112 page opening remarks of the attorney. I appeared with this attorney on the Doctors TV show for an hour and he’s brilliant and so I was reading his um, opening statement and he was pointing out that in Monsanto’s, in the collection of research on cancer and glyphosate, the eating it had the lower impact, putting it on the skin had the higher impact. So the dermal absorption had the higher impact for creating Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, which is what the lawsuit was about. So that’s, that’s an important piece is to try and avoid it for the skin. But another thing is this. I was actually very surprised, initially, when I started asking audiences what they got better from and in almost all the instances, someone said skin problems and they ranged from, they ranged from acne too, serious sores to eczema and psoriasis.

Jeffrey Smith:               Um, when we were shooting for our film that’s coming out in the fall called Secret Ingredients, you can see the trailer at SecretIngredientsMovie.com. We had a mother whose family had 21 clinic conditions among the five of them and their youngest had eczema all over the body and when they switched to a non-GMO organic diet that went away. And that turns out to be typical. If you look at the survey that we did, we asked about eczema and we asked about other skin conditions and there was a very large percentage of people saying that skin conditions got better. Eczema was actually second to other skin conditions. Um, so I was surprised, but then, uh, in the film that I, I, we have, David Perlmutter explained that the inflammation of the gut creates the skin problems typically, and inflammation, the gut is very, very tightly linked to GMOs and Roundup. So, um, we, I think for those who want to get healthier skin, uh, eating organic is really, really helpful and I can tell you for sure that I have spoken and seen the hands raised, etc., with hundreds, possibly thousands of people and, of course, with the survey, thousands of people getting better from skin conditions under organic diet.

Trevor:                         Yeah. And I can definitely see how that would be connected there. Um, and I, of course with my skincare line, I wanted to use as much organic as possible, partly because of the GMO concerns and, one of course is that, how it impacts our health as when we use the products, but also making sure that we are not supporting organizations that continue to grow GMO produce and food and um, ingredients because it’s just going to worsen the problem around the world. Right? So we want to make sure we’re supporting organizations that do organic. So my skincare line is EWG-verified and you know, Environmental Working Group and I encourage other people to, to look at ewg.org, right? As a, as a good resource for clean, organic skincare products. So avoid that. What are some other things that people can be doing to make sure that they’re avoiding GMOs?

Jeffrey Smith:               Well, organic is the number one. I used to…I used to say eat non-GMO and if you can, eat organic. Now that Roundup is sprayed on so many crops. I say, eat organic and if you can’t, at least, get non-GMO. So the best actually… you may have seen the little butterfly, Non-GMO Project Verified. It’s on a lot of products. Um, that’s does not tell you whether Roundup has been sprayed. So you might have a Non-GMO Project Verified loaf of bread or oatmeal and it’s full of glyphosate residues from Roundup being sprayed on it. Now I do like the Non-GMO Project Verification. I do encourage people to avoid eating GMOs. Absolutely. And in fact, you might see… an organic does not allow either GMOs or Roundup. Now sometimes you’ll see organic and the Non-GMO Project on the same package and you might think, well why do you do that?

Jeffrey Smith:               Because organic also includes Non-GMO. But there is a reason. The Non-GMO Project Verification requires testing. If there’s at-risk ingredients, if there’s soy, corn, etc. It requires testing to verify that if there was contamination is it low and that generally there’s no contamination. The organic standards does not require testing. So it’s a documentation audit. It’s a, it’s like, no we don’t do this and, but sometimes the nature of nature is to spread her bounty. And so you ended up with a contamination with GMOs, etc. And so the Non-GMO Project, will test for that. So the Gold Standard is to have both, the Non-GMO Project Verification and organic, if you can. And then if you had to choose between one or the other, organic is better. And if you can’t get organic and non-GMO, and of course, there’s the farmer’s market. You can ask the farmers themselves, whether they spray? Whether they use GMO? You can grow your own or, you can be part of a CSA, which is Community… community Supported Agriculture where you get your box every week. There’s all sorts of things. So there’s even online delivery services nationwide that you can get some organic food. And if you go with ingredients and cook yourself, it’s going to be the, the impact of switching, the financial impact of switching to organic. If you go from processed, not organic to processed organic, you’re going to have an increase in price. If you go from processed to non-processed to ingredients that you cook, you might actually save money.

Trevor:                         Yeah, that’s a good point because a lot of times people say, oh, organic is so expensive, but not if you’re going to your local farmer’s market and you’re supporting local the… and you’re making your own food, you’re going to actually save money a lot of times by doing that. Um, so, so that’s a great point. And um, yeah, I mean I think this is such an important topic for people to be talking about, but when you people stop eating GMO foods and they start eating more organic, is that enough to reverse some of the concerns that you were talking to health concerns you were talking about or do we need to do more? Is there more that needs to be done because I think you were implying something that there’s a way to…

Jeffrey Smith:               to do more. Yes, there is. Um, so for a lot of people, switching to a healthy diet to organic diet will be miraculous. I know that. People tell me. I get him more testimonials than anyone in the world about that probably so many people are, are, are noticing dramatic improvements and I’m talking even serious issues like autism, diabetes, things like that. I mean, I, I’ve talked to physicians that say that… that in their practice a certain percentage of people will get better just from the diet alone, but a lot of those, a lot of others will get better, but they won’t completely reverse the trend. Or there’s something intractable. And so people would always ask me, what else can you do just like you just did? And I would always say it’s above my pay grade. I’m not a physician, I’m not a scientist. I translate the science into English so people can understand.

Jeffrey Smith:               But then I started going to lectures and hearing the doctors and in case… some cases, scientists talk about what they have done to help the body along and recover. So I started feeling the pressure because I was hearing that, but I wasn’t sharing it with my tribe or with the world because it wasn’t my expertise. So what I decided to do was to bring together these amazing pioneers in something called Healing From GMOs and Roundup. It’s available. You can… people can… it’s going on right now. It’s a free online program. It started July 17, and two speakers a day for 10 days. Or I interview them and we have people talking about products that they’ve developed specifically for detoxification. There’s a… a speaker where they have a product, uh two speakers. We interview them together where they actually reduced the amount of glyphosate in human urine by 74 percent without changing the diet.

Jeffrey Smith:               Uh, in their pre-clinical trial. There is another person that builds up the microbiome, you know, that’s been damaged in a very specific way. There’s someone that’s, a chef, that’s created a way to create fermented vegetables easily. Uh, and then there’s the how to re-mineralize. How to repair. It’s interesting over these 18 experts, um, the variety is stunning. We have some that like, like a nutritionist, like Julie Duniluk, just talks about the foods and what they offer. And then Joe Mercola and Josh Axe and others talk about specific supplements that they find are helpful. Josh Axe talks about diet as well. He talks about herbs and the different body types. Dietrich Klinghardt, who trains doctors, he has a whole detoxification protocol. Same with Lee Cowden who trains doctors. Sergei and I talk about a different type of GMO, a potato and an apple that have, uh, uh, uh, damage potential that’s higher than anything we talked about today.

Jeffrey Smith:               We talked with Tom O’Bryan who has a… he had something that he created for gluten sensitive people. It’s a pill you take that helps digest the gluten in the meal and it turns out it digests. I asked him, he was interviewing me three years ago or two years ago. What does, how does it work with BT Toxin, because that’s really resistant to digestion. He says, well, let’s test it. So lo and behold, most of the BT Toxin is destroyed in the stomach if you take this pill at the same time. So all these different angles, there’s ways of, you know, getting the leaky gut to stop, uh, to, to rebind the tight junctions. I was blown away with it. But again, the range you have, the diet, you have standard supplements like minerals and vitamins that we know about, the more esoteric ones that are the compounds that are somewhere found in the body that people have discovered that help.

Jeffrey Smith:               And then you have these geniuses that have created new products specifically to help with the kind of thing that GMOs and Roundup cause. And then there’s procedures. What to do with a sauna? What do you… do it before the sauna? After the sauna? There’s dietary recommendations in terms of time of eating and becoming more flexible in your metabolic, uh, abilities. So it was, it was pretty profound. And every time I’ve been, pretty much, every time I finished an interview I was like, oh my God, I need to tell someone something. I need to talk about this. It was like, an “aha” experience after an “aha” experience. So that’s going on now at HealingFromGMOs.com. It’s totally free. People could watch it. Um, and so, uh, I’m, I’ve been talking about the dangers of GMOs for 22 years and in this case I get to talk about and also to avoid GMOs, but I get to talk about additional solutions because I’m having the experts talk and I’m asking the questions.

Trevor:                         Right, right. That’s so great. And I, um, and I think it’s great that you are sharing with people not only how to avoid the GMOs, the importance of that, but, but how to address these health concerns that have arisen because it is certainly a big issue. Um, and thank you for putting that together and for anybody that, if you’re watching this recording after this time, you, are you recording these and will they be able to be available later on for sale or something like that?

Jeffrey Smith:               Yeah, later on. For some period of time. Yes, at HealingFromGMOs.com. Absolutely. We’ll probably take it down at some point, so go quickly. What’s interesting is like what I have to admit that years ago when people told me that they got better from avoiding GMOs or that they notice a difference when they take it, I didn’t believe that I was the leading spokesperson on the health dangers of GMOs around the world. I’ve been to 25 countries at this point and, and I, and I feel embarrassed to say even though I was aware that it just 10 days in a study done in, in Aberdeen, Scotland, rats developed potentially precancerous cell growth and all these problems. I was not expecting it to be so obvious in humans. I was expecting it to be some kind of background trend and people would notice when they took all the data, but when I started speaking to physicians, they said to me their patients are getting bid, or an allergist said there are patients who have more allergic reactions to the GMOs.

Jeffrey Smith:               Someone else said, every patient seems to be getting better on a non-GMO diet and I went in to talk to her patients with a video camera to make sure that I got the information. So in this, in this series, I’m talking in some cases to physicians like Dr. Michelle Perro, a pediatrician, who watched the changes in the types of conditions in her patients arise soon after GMOs were introduced. And so the same protocols that used to work, we’re no longer working. So we have these doctors who’ve been worked… who’ve been working with patients thousands of the far more patients than there were ever rats or mice that were studied in terms of GMOs. So they have more experimental data on real humans. And so I learned that actually it works to switch to non-GMO and there’s other things you can do. There’s one veterinarian in this series, Dr. Barbara Royal.

Jeffrey Smith:               She’s Oprah’s veterinarian. She and I had visited her and with a video camera. We have a PetsInGMOs.com website when we talk about how dogs and cats get better dramatically when they switched to an organic diet and she’s interviewed in the 10-minute film that’s available right now on pets and GMOs, but I introduced. I interviewed her for the HealingFromGMOs.com series and she told me a statistic. I wish I had it for the 10-minute film. She said to me that she’ll…the first thing she’ll do when someone comes in with a dog or cat is say, okay, let’s change their diet and get and let’s get together again and see how much that handles. And she said 50 to 70 percent of the animals get better just on a change of diet and you think, oh my God, that’s an incredible statistic.

Jeffrey Smith:               Humans in America eat their weight in GMOs every year because of all the corn, for example, that we. And if you look at 30 different diseases and you track how they’re increasing in the United States and you plot the amount of Roundup sprayed on GMO soy or corn or the amount of GMO soy and corn compared to the total, it’s incredible how parallel those lines are. Now that’s correlation. It doesn’t prove anything, but when you actually see the mechanics, you could see how eating Roundup drenched food might damage our ability to produce serotonin and serotonin… without enough serotonin that might explain the increase in anxiety and depression and the serotonin translates to melatonin and melatonin is for sleep and, and that may explain why there’s an increase in sleep disorders and insomnia. And then there’s dopamine and also which is pain and also joint, there’s all these different things, if you track.

Jeffrey Smith:               And I’ve actually, you know, I had David Perlmutter, we spoke together at a conference at a, a lecture in Florida and I said, David, can he come up to the stage? I wanna, I want to test you. So I, I went through all of the, the… I said, okay, this is what Roundup does. It’s an antibiotic, a chelator, a mitochondrial toxin, a carcinogen, all these different things. I said, okay, you’re an expert. You know what these things mean better than anyone in the audience. I want to show you each of these diseases and the graphs and you give me a plausible explanation of how Roundup might’ve created that and he did, and so do others have different angles and it’s, it’s well studied now that these problems are attacking the fundamental basis of health. I mean the mitochondria is our energy center.

Jeffrey Smith:               No wonder people are getting fatigued and with brain fog, if they’re damaging the mitochondria. No wonder they’re getting inflammation and autoimmune disease if these things lead to leaky gut because that is the correlation between leaky gut and autoimmune disease and inflammation and allergies is very, very high. And people understand the mechanisms about that. Same thing with the skin conditions. So it’s a pretty remarkable package when you look at it together. So at the end of these 18 interviews, uh, my takeaway was, okay, we have a lot of ways to deal with it and people like to deal with diet they can do that, and with supplements and with procedures, but I gained some increased respect for just how fundamentally devastating to our, the GMOs or the Roundup are and how absolutely essential it is that we deal with it.

Trevor:                         Yeah. And, and um, yeah, I got, I’m so glad that you’re presenting this information and I have, I can say that I’ve been in practice for almost 20 years and in that time I feel like health issues, people’s health concerns have gotten more complicated. Patients are harder to treat now than they used to be. There’s so many different layers and so much more of a chronic diseases, especially autoimmune disease. And I think that when we start putting things into our bodies that the immune system can’t recognize, that’s one of the reasons why we’re seeing more autoimmune disease and whether it’s people putting… what they’re putting on their skin or their doing it internally or both and breathing it in and you know, all kinds of things that are, that are happening where we see all the different pesticides and um, you know, endocrine disrupting chemicals and things like that.

Trevor:                         And then you add the GMO component on it. It’s just, I know it’s so hard for our bodies to adjust to that. So it’s… I think more than ever, it’s time for us to live a clean lifestyle and to be very conscious of, of these kinds of things. and I know that eating healthier that some of the changes that people are making with, you know, with these doctors and different people you’re talking about eating healthier, you’re getting more nutrients and of course, but… but they’re definitely that component of eating organic I think is also important. So it’s not just about the nutrients anymore and it’s also about getting clean sources of food in their natural state. The way that, again, go back to Mother Nature, what, what was intended for us to have.

Jeffrey Smith:               Exactly. And we talk about inflammation and autoimmune disease. Um, there is a specific scenario that I like to share for those that may not be aware of the relationship between our digestive track and our immune system. So the walls of the digestive track are tight… have tight junctions… or they’re supposed to. And when you introduce Roundup in a Petri dish of human cells that are tightly bound, the tight junctions disappear. They go, they start to migrate separately. Um, and there was just a study, as I said last week were rats, there was holes in the stomach, the intestines, but in the stomach walls from the BT court. Now if you have holes in the walls of your intestines, then you have the ability for things to go into the bloodstream because it’s only one cell thick. Things can go into the bloodstream that are not supposed to be there.

Jeffrey Smith:               Bacteria, chemicals, but also proteins before they’re broken down. So you have these undigested, large proteins and they’re supposed to be teensy-beensy pieces. That’s the technical term. But they come in as big monsterous proteins. And what does the immune system do? The immune system attacks it. They think it’s, oh, we got to stop this. So it’s a modern immune system. They take out their iPhones, they take a picture of the attacker, they’ve posted on their Facebook and say, you know, they, they say go after anything that looks like this. But it’s not that modern, they have an old iPhone and it’s pixelated and so the immune system attacks anything that looks like this fuzzy picture. And so they started attacking the thyroid. They start attacking the pancreas. They start attacking the body because their instruction is to attack anything that looks like this. And you can look at this specific sequences in the protein on the thyroid and oh, that looks like what just marched in to our system. That’s autoimmune disease. That’s the body attacking itself because of leaky gut and old iPhones.

Trevor:                         That’s funny. Um, and, and also the way that that can lead to dysbiosis issues in the gut too, and we know that gut dysbiosis issues impact the skin. Um, the skin microbiome is impacted by the gut microbiome. So, and that there’s a way that, that all ties in together too. So umm… the biggest takeaway is that it’s important to choose GMO-free, preferably organic, right? And also to go listen to your series to learn more about from these different experts because I’m, I’m sure… I can’t… I mean, I can’t wait to watch some of this too. And, and, and get more information because I feel like this is being kept in a lot of ways as being kept a secret and, and that people. Is this as a common knowledge for people?

Jeffrey Smith:               No, in fact, keeping things secret is part of the way that the biotech industry operates. I have been able to expose so many ways that they cover up both through a regulatory capturing where they capture regulatory agency and also rigging research. Uh, in one of the interviews I do with Dietrich Klinghardt, um, he shared some information. He said there’s a guy named Dr. Pat, who has passed now, from Germany who was the world leader in biophoton research. How our bodies, or other bodies provide or create photons. Light. And he had read, according to Dietrich, he had read my book Seeds of Deception years ago and got interested in GMOs. And then the government of Germany asked him to do research on GMOs to see if they had a positive or negative fix. And he did biophoton research finding that the light levels of the GMO food was lower end distorted.

Jeffrey Smith:               So he wrote a 600-page report and Dietrich actually looked at the report and helped, I think he helped edit it and when Pat submitted it to the government. He handed it to an assistant to the minister who then gave it to the minister and within a day that assistant who had read the report was fired and the 600-page report disappeared and no one knows where it is and this was years ago. And it didn’t surprise me at all because I have seen so much information like that. I get to interview the whistleblowers who do the reports like that. I get to interview the people who are in the approval committees in the minority. They say, you know, the people that approved the GMO is who are the majority, don’t even read the adverse reports. They don’t even read the research. They just rubber stamp and say everything is… is okay. So yeah, a lot of things have been kept secret. And so at the Institute for Responsible Rechnology, the nonprofit that I run, we’ve been exposing that for two decades.

Trevor:                         Right. And I do want to reiterate that you have… it’s a nonprofit, it’s not that you’re…

Jeffrey Smith:               So their thing is there’s… there’s the nonprofit and then there’s also Healing From GMOs. We’re doing a different model for that because you know, we’re, we’re trying to get the word out to even more people so we have.. so that way it’s… it’s a free series and then people can get, they can get, they can buy the DVDs and the transcripts and the audios. And we set it up in a way that we, we took down, took most of the recommendations from the speakers and arranged for discounts. So the discounts that people can get if they buy the package is far greater than how much they would spend on the package and whatever they buy a packet… buy something the vendor actually donates to the nonprofit IRT. So we created a win-win-win situation so people can get their, get all the information on the series, get their products at a discount, save money over the… over the course of the series. And then the institute makes money at the same time. So we’re seeing if this model works. And I’m very excited about it because I’ve been working for 22 years to get the information out and normally I ask for donations so I’d be asking for donations, but this time it’s like no, you can invest in something that you want and save money doing it and we all get supported and we can continue to make the information available for free.

Trevor:                         Absolutely. Okay. Well Jeffrey, thank you so much for coming on today and sharing with us about GMOs and best of luck with your, with your Healing From GMOs Summit.

Jeffrey Smith:               Thank you so much Trevor. Safe eating.

Trevor: I hope you enjoyed this interview today with Jeffrey Smith. To learn more about Jeffrey and the interview series he has coming up, just go to thespadr.com, go to the podcast page with his interview and you’ll find all the information and links there. and while you’re there, I invite you to join The Spa Doctor Community. You could also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes so you don’t miss any of our upcoming shows. Also, if you haven’t done so already, I highly recommend you get your customized skin report at theskinquiz.com. It’s free. It takes just a few moments and you can get great information. Find out what your skin is trying to tell you about your health and what you could do about it. Just go to theskinquiz.com. Also, I invite you to join me on social media, on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, YouRube, and join the conversation. And I’ll see you next time on The Spa Doctor Podcast.