Medical opinion by John F. Ruhland, ND

Do you have health-related questions for Dr. John, the Naturopathic Doctor? Send them to the Free Press at 1463 E Republican #178, Seattle WA 98112, or email to WAfreepress@gmail.com. Please keep questions short. The opinions expressed below are on general issues of health. They should not be construed as personal medical advice. Readers should seek a variety of information about any health concern before deciding on a treatment from a personal physician.

Bioengineered Infant Food

Formula for Disaster

Scientists at bioengineering at companies like Monsanto are playing Russian roulette with our future. They are growing in the Sacramento Valley a bioengineered rice incorporating human genes for laktoferrin and other components of breast milk. The DNA of rice, a staple of the majority of the human race, may soon to be universally and permanently altered.

This is of great concern, and Naturopathic physicians will be among the first health care practitioners to directly see the impact. When people become chronically sick and allopathic physicians can do nothing more except offer drugs to control symptoms, the ill people often end up under the care of Naturopathic physicians. Rice is one of the few grains that chronically sick and most chemically sensitive and highly allergic people are able to eat. What will happen when the rice has been altered to incorporate breast milk components?

Let’s look at how allergies develop. The human gut separates the digesting food inside the intestinal tract from the bloodstream. Food is broken down into its basic elements, including simple carbohydrates, amino acids, fatty acids and minerals. After it is broken into very small fractions, it can pass through “pores” in the gut, into the bloodstream, which carries the nutrients to where they are needed by cells. In times of stress or illness, the pores become enlarged. In some cases we actually diagnose permeable gut syndrome. Larger fractions of food readily pass through the enlarged pores. When they enter the bloodstream, the body senses they are invaders, and produces antibodies. From then on, whenever those larger food molecules pass through enlarged pores into the bloodstream, the antibodies respond by causing an allergic reaction. Before the age of one, and especially before a baby reaches six months of age, the gut has large pores, and many larger molecules get into the bloodstream if a baby is fed solid food. That is why people are sometimes allergic to those foods fed to them as infants.

This brings us to the problem of incorporating breast milk components into rice. First, proteins from bioengineered rice-based formulas WILL get into the bloodstream of infants who drink the formulas. They may then develop rice allergies, and thus will not have the option of eating rice if they have the allergy.

There is a long history of Nestle selling its unhealthy baby formulas to mothers in the developing world. When new mothers use the formulas and then stop lactating, they are forced to continue to the commercial formulas. Putting bioengineered rice in infant formula is thus doubly dangerous. A second problem is that the DNA of all rice plants may become contaminated with human ingredients. Some tomatoes grown today contain genes from pigs. People from various religious groups who avoid pork products are therefore often unknowingly eating pork. Vegans, vegetarians who avoid all animal products, will not be able to eat rice. There will be numerous other problems due to bioengineered rice which will become apparent only after it has been loose for some time. Humanity thus may pay a very high price for the financial gain of a few corporations. The bioengineering of food has just begun, and Earth’s ecosystem is threatened.