You may have heard about nanoparticles – they are tiny bits of matter, microscopic in size, that are being used in a variety of ways. In medicine, nanos are used in detecting disease, delivering drugs, gene engineering, MRI studies, and more.

They are found in over 1,000 consumer products, including car batteries, appliances, alum foil, cosmetics, sunscreens, and computers.  Let’s look at food and kitchen. Nanotech can be round in certain brands of oil, tea, shakes, cutting boards, cleansers, nonstick pans, vitamins, and more. Check out the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies (PEN) list of consumer products with nanos in them.

So what’s the problem? Nanoparticles have not been tested for health of safety to people and environments! Once again, our dreams of scientific wizardry have come true – and regulators have been outfoxed again. Nanos are able to pass through cell membranes and we don’t know what they can do to us, our children, food, pets, and habitats. According to Ethan Huff, staff writer at Natural News, “Deconstructing and reassembling molecular components and injecting these altered molecules back into our clothing, furniture, cars, and food is really more of a giant experiment in human health than it is a successful technological breakthrough.”

Here’s an interesting email exchange between a writer at E Magazine and a representative of the FDA:

E Magazine: What can you tell me about the prevalence of nanomaterials in our food supply?
Sebastian Cianci: FDA does not have a list of food products that contain nanomaterials.

E: Where are nanomaterials most often found within food products? In colorings or additives?
S.C.: FDA does not maintain a list of food products that contain nanomaterials so we cannot reliably answer this question.

I admire the creativity and dedication of scientists — and I also believe we need to test inventions before unleashing them on the public.

We lost on Proposition 37, but the campaign is just beginning! Guess who the opponents of Prop. 37 were? Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences, ConAgra, BASF (“The Chemical Company”), Syngenta, and their allies, who put at least $40 million into deceptive ads to defeat Prop. 37 so they could keep earning billions by selling poison. It’s discouraging that their money swayed so many people, because the facts show GMO is not the deliverance they claim.

One of the claims made when genetically modified food was put on the market in the mid-1990s  (over the objections of FDA’s own scientists, by the way) was that crops engineered to withstand pesticides would permit a reduction in the amount of pesticides used. That should have been good for the environment, right?

Yes, if it had lasted more than a few growing seasons. But in fact, pesticide use has gone UP by millions of pounds per year, and I bet you can guess why. It’s called evolution. As has always happened with pesticides, the target creatures (bugs, for instance, or weeds) are not all killed—the strongest survive and produce the next generation. It doesn’t take long for organisms with short life cycles to become resistant to the pesticide in question. Growers solve this problem by using more chemicals, or stronger ones. For years this has been called the “pesticide treadmill” that farmers can’t seem to escape. (Unless they switch to organic).

Just last month a scientific study demonstrated that pesticide use has gone UP since GMOs were introduced. The author concluded, “Overall, pesticide use increased by an estimated 183 million kgs (404 million pounds), or about 7%.”

If that isn’t enough, pesticides are implicated in the mass deaths of millions of bees that pollinate our crops. That is definitely not sustainable! What you can do: keep alert for new strategies to defeat GMOs and the corporations that make billions from them.