https://livehealthybewell.com/podcast/jim-turner-exposes-horrific-dangers-and-corrupt-approvals-of-aspartame-and-other-products-episode-22/

Transcript

Hi, this is Jeffrey Smith and welcome to my podcast, Live Healthy, Be Well. Today I’m playing you the audio version of a Facebook live I just did with Jim Turner. Jim was the first Nader Raider. He’s a bestselling author, he’s an attorney and he’s been a successful activist for decades. And we start out talking about the dangers of aspartame, which he is an expert on because he was involved in the legal battle over aspartame and knows the science and knows the, the incredible politics and corruption. We also enter the discussion about genetically engineered bovine growth hormone from Monsanto and the genetically engineered L-tryptophan that caused an epidemic in the 1980s. And he talks about some other information from Monsanto that I had never heard. It’s a wide ranging discussion with a very seasoned activist and attorney. I think you’ll enjoy it.

Jim is an activist extraordinaire. He wrote the book The Chemical Feast, The Nader Report on food safety with the FDA. He’s been an activist and an attorney in Washington for years. He’s the chairman of Citizens for Health. He’s a big supporter of the Institute for Responsible Technology and he happens to be one of the world’s experts on the incredible approval of aspartame and why it should never have been introduced into our food supply.

So I’m going to suggest that if you know anyone who eats anything with aspartame (and there’s over 6,000 foods right now that contain aspartame, diet soda, chewing gum, equal sweeteners, etc.) please share this with them immediately. You will hear by the end, if you’re still eating aspartame, it’s already done the brain damage that we don’t want it to do.

Jim, why don’t you set the stage for us? Tell us about the health dangers, which are ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous. Let’s put it in the context of this corrupt approval. Why don’t you take it from here, Jim.

Jim Turner: I started looking at the FDA and working with Nader back in 1968. We began looking at various issues trying to get across that the basic premise that FDA uses to allow chemicals in the food supply (and they do it for drugs as well) is flawed. They use what they call a “ Risk Benefit Ratio”. What I wanted to do was to show what a problematic system it was, because I wanted to get something that they couldn’t argue had benefits – and that was a sweetener. And, the first we attacked, by saying they’re not actually looking at the data, was a cyclamate. Interestingly enough, I personally was shocked when the FDA took it off the market. I did not expect that to happen because that didn’t fit my hypothesis, but well – that’s pretty interesting.

So then I figured, well, let’s get another one. And the next one that came along, and there was saccharin, which we ended up with a nice warning on in 1975, but the next one was called NutraSweet. It was called aspartame at the time. And it was going to be actually a sugar replacement. It’s not technically speaking an artificial sweetener, It’s actually a high intensity sweetener. Those are two different markets, surprisingly enough. But it’s a high intensity sweetener. It’s got a lot of very, very powerful activities to it. It was actually started out as a drug. It’s G.D Searle in 1965 and it’s so many of these sweeteners. The scientist put his finger in his mouth, said, Whoa, that tastes sweet. His boss got the word. And pretty soon they said, Hey, we’re going to make more money selling this to millions of people than to the few people that are going to buy it if it’s a drug.

Jeffrey Smith: And it was like an ulcer drug or something. It was an Anti-ulcer drug.

Jim Turner: Yeah.

Jim Turner: So, they published it over and they started doing research and it was a complete disaster. The research they did, there’s a very important, very prominent scientist, John Only who recently died, but John Only had just done a great deal of work on MSG and how MSG free MSG, can cause brain lesions in monkeys. He showed that, and it turned out that the aspartic acid in NutraSweet due to the three substances, aspartic acid, phenylalanine and methyl alcohol, that are combined to create this thing, this peptide that is used as a sweetener AND the aspartic acid actually caused the same kind of brain lesions that MSG did. Phenylalanine itself had already carried a package caution which said “ if you suffer from phenylketonuria do not eat NutraSweet. It’s on the package right now. You can go see it.

Jeffrey Smith: Because it can create seizures, right?

Jim Turner: The story is so bizarre that there are many things that not everybody agrees upon. One of them is that you shouldn’t be eating phenylalanine. Whether or not it causes seizures or not. The public board of inquiry, took a pass on that question. They decided not to rule on that. So actually I should tell you that the FDA approved it at 74, we objected right afterwards, 30 days later we objected. We took some scientists down and looked at the data as the first time that data had ever been released on a food additive. We went and looked at it with great care and it was just replete with all kinds of problems. We then filed our petition, attacking it on all grounds that we had found and then ultimately, within a year interestingly enough, the FDA’s own investigators found serious problems and suspended its original approval. That was in December of ‘75. They paneled a public board of inquiry and presented all of our information to the public board of Inquiry. Three scientists, one selected by us, one by G.D Searle and one by the FDA. And they said, in a series of hearings, and then wrote a report which unanimously said it should not be marketed. That they had not met the criteria that allows something to be marketed, technically speaking. That is the, that would have been the end of it ordinarily.

But technically speaking, a board of inquiry ruling is merely a recommendation to the FDA. That ruling was made in February of 1980, which was the election year, Reagan was elected, Donald Rumsfeld was put on the transition team. He was the president of G.D Searle that made NutraSweet. The FDA commissioner at that time, the holdover commissioner, as soon as Reagan got in, he ordered the hold over commissioner not to make any actions of any kind. A new commissioner was appointed who had worked at the Pentagon as a contract position when Rumsfeld was previously the Secretary of Defense, And that guy is the one that overturned the public board of inquiry.

Jim Turner: So the whole story, it’s pretty bizarre.

Jeffrey Smith: I understand that. When they hired Rumsfeld, G.D Searle to get aspartame on the market and he said that he was gonna use his full political power, his political chips to do so.

Jim Turner: Which is very true. And it’s a funny story because when, first of all, the public board inquiries report didn’t come out until about October 6th of 1980. The election was in November and then Reagan was sworn on January 5th, I think it was somewhere in there. Rumsfeld came to town at the time that Reagan was sworn in and gathered all of the G.D. Searle sales people together and had a meeting. One of them, we don’t know exactly who,I think I know who, but there’s still a whistle blower, slipped us the notes of that meeting.

In it, it very clearly, I’m here to tell you salespeople that’s who they were. I’m here to tell you folks that I’m going to call in every one of my chips in Washington DC and make sure that NutraSweet gets approved. That was in 1980. Now, we had already been battling with what I’m selling. I talked to him in ’76. He’d come through. If I were a military leader and had battle stars on my shirt, one of them was from before my questioning with Rumsfeld. He came to Washington with four or five people. It was a very interesting dynamic all the way around because the food industry was very nervous about this product. And in fact, they resisted it, quite significantly. A lot of pressure was put on them to use it.

But, one of our people that had been supporting some of the safety stuff at FDA from the food industry, arranged for this meeting with surround sound. I met with him, and what I said was; “look, we’ve got all this data that says it’s dangerous. FDA’s got data that says it’s dangerous. Why don’t we, among us set up a special group that you agree with, I agree with, FDA, agrees with, we’ll select scientists that will look at it and evaluate all the science and then we’ll come up and we’ll have a joint report saying what we want to say.” Now, my premise was at a minimum we would get information on the label or out if they were going to approve it ultimately after that.

It was six months later that we were told “we’re not going to do that”. And my impression, very distinctly, was that the corporate guys, certainly the G.D Searle corporate guys, looked at the legal route and the science route and whichever one was blocked, they would take the other one. I really felt that they were blocked scientifically. We actually had a fellow who was hired by G.D Searle as a damage control guy, to figure out how to solve the problem of the product having been suspended. They allowed it on the market, in 81, they allowed it on the market for dry foods. Right around the time that that happened.

And this is, you know, after I’d met with Rumsfeld, but before the public board of inquiry report we got contact with a guy who was actually hired as an outside consultant Bart Zero, to look at this PR their submission. What he said to me was, quite frankly, these guys are a drug company. They don’t have any idea how to put a food additive petition in. So they put this petition in and it was a mess from head to toe. We can talk about that in a minute if you want

Jeffrey Smith: Rumsfeld hired some marketing consultants, advertising consultants. A Friend of mine was one of those consultants and his family had to face a previous sweetener that had been taken off the market for health reasons. So he raised the question to Rumsfeld, do we know that this thing is safe? Rumsfeld, blew a circuit, used expletive language and said, it’s none of your business. Your job is to sell it. And then my friend quietly left that account and never got involved, but he was absolutely furious with intimidation tactics so that no one would ask that question on his team.

Jim Turner: It was a very touchy thing. They are their own food clients were having problems and some of their original food clients had backed out. They had some deaths in their factory that were worker deaths and that were very mysterious in the sense that it appeared the workers were ingesting or inhaling large amounts of NutraSweet. The OSHA folks never made a finding that proved what was the cause of the deaths. They did make a finding that the safety conditions weren’t proper. There is pretty clear evidence that we felt we presented that they had shifted the slides in a couple of the studies. So the tumor slides that had been in the treated group ended up in the control group. So that made the two groups balanced. That was another one of the things that we were concerned about. Now the guy that I worked with said, whether that happened or not, the fact was that they kept lousy cages so that you couldn’t tell what the, what the animals were actually eating.

Jeffrey Smith: But wasn’t it worse than that? I mean, didn’t the FDA at some point declare that this was fraudulent practices and ask the department of justice to actually intervene and find out if there was criminal activity?

Jim Turner: What happened is that, there was a whole lot of stuff going on that were bad laboratory practices. So the question that, the issue that came up was, okay, we’re, we’re confident that there’s bad laboratory practices, but we are, we can’t necessarily say that that’s leading to an unsafe product. I mean, that’s a funny way to look at it, but that’s the way they looked at it. And so the general counsel of the FDA, and by the way, this was, aspartame was one of several products, all the rest were drugs that were being subjected to these bad laboratory practices. And there were some, there were several called pivotal studies, and these pivotal studies were under, under a cloud. That’s part of why the public board of inquiry voted not to allow it to be marketed because the burden of proof is on the company to show that it’s safe and effective. The public order inquiry said they hadn’t met that burden of proof.

Jeffrey Smith: I just want to give a little bit of a plot spoiler of some of the information we’re going to talk about in a moment. There was a study put together by psychiatrist Ralph Walton who had people eat aspartame as part of the human trial and he had to stop it because one of the people that was eating the aspartame instead of the control, a hospital administrator, suffered a detached retina and went blind in one eye. Another had a bleeding eye, others reported being poisoned. And he mentioned aspartame as a multi-potential toxin and carcinogen, which also lowers seizure thresholds, produces carbohydrate craving and in vulnerable individuals can cause panic, depressive and cognitive symptoms. So that’s a little plot spoiler about some of the symptoms we’re about to describe that may be happening to your friends who are still eating aspartame.

Jim Turner: We had evidence of all of those things at the time. We actually went in, in 74, when the documents were made public. And we went in and looked at them and therefore an example was a study on, it was a vision study, and it showed to be a deteriorated vision. And, we use that in our, in our petition. Then, the interesting issue, that we had to battle is they, a company kept arguing that we had to prove that the problems were caused by the NutraSweet. And we kept saying, no, you’ve got to prove that it doesn’t cause problems. That’s the kind of fight we were having on the legal side. Ralph Walton was very interesting. He did a study, he did an evaluation of the literature and came out with a bunch of studies. I can’t remember whether the total number was 86 or whether that was half the total number, but the total number of studies divided into three groups, a handful that were neutral, that were done by the government. They were kind of neutral. But every study that was done by somebody paid by NutraSweet said there were no problems. And every study that was done by anybody that wasn’t paid by NutraSweet, they said there was a problem.

Jeffrey Smith: That was like 2000 studies. I remember that you are the one, you’re the one that put that together and made that popular about that information around the world. And yes, it was interesting. I mean like this is perfect evidence of fraud. Didn’t they like to wait to evaluate the tumors on the rats for weeks or months?

Jim Turner: Well, what you started to do that didn’t the FDA, become highly engaged and in fact the Bureau of Drugs, well, the, the commissioner, set up a special investigation group that included investigators from the Bureau of Drugs. And they went into the, went into G.D Searle and they took this whole study, the whole ascertain file apart and they found  huge problems. And in fact, they recommended prosecuting G.D Searle, that task force did. It was called the commissioner’s task force. They recommended prosecuting G.D Searle and that’s how the letter went to the law firm in Chicago, raising a bunch of questions

Jeffrey Smith: This law firm in Chicago, I’m just – people, you got to hear this. What happened when the law firm in Chicago started to investigate and started the prosecution of several, this is priceless.

Jim Turner: What happened? It wasn’t a prosecution of G.D Searle. The FDA’s doing the prosecuting the law firm in Chicago is, suddenly in Austin and they are [inaudible] law firms. So, the lawyers from the FDA right to Sydney and they start having a discussion, and the lawyers in charge of the case, it suddenly in Austin were obviously once negotiating with the local office that FDA, began to drag their feet and so forth and let the statute of limitations run. About a year later, the two lead lawyers from that firm went to work for G.D Searle. That was kind of a fascinating story.

Jeffrey Smith: The attorneys who were defending Searle were able to let the statute of limitations run out and then they became highly paid at G.D Searle?

Jim Turner: That’s correct. Okay. And, the United States attorney was the United States attorney in Chicago. There’s where the two guys went. They were suddenly in Austin, the two guys negotiating with Sydney, you know, the us attorney’s office, they went to [inaudible],

Jeffrey Smith: So, this is what I heard. One of them during the negotiations, he quit his job and then went to work for Searle. Then the deputy, his deputy took over and then he left the statute of limitations run out and then went over to work for cereal. I paid $400.

Jim Turner: They were the U S attorney’s office at that, that did that.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. So they got paid $400 that guy. That’s according to my sources. So this was an example where the, the FDA as the department of justice investigated and then they left the statute of limitations run out. And the people who let it run out ended up getting rewarded by getting paid a lot.

Jim Turner: Yeah. The and the interesting thing is that FDA’s not allowed to go to court, under law. They have to go to the Justice Department that goes to court for them. And that’s the case. FDA never goes to court as the a, as the attorney. It only goes to court as the client. That’s a huge anomaly and problem in our legal system that someday we’ll have to sort out. But that’s what happened in that instance. By the way, when Rumsfeld got a $12 million payout when this was finally allowed by FDA to reach the market. I mean it’s just kind of interesting. He was the former Congressman from the district there. Now obviously it was well known and in fact, we knew people who knew him socially, who were working very hard to expose this story, and journalists and they knew him socially.

They are families, family friends and so forth. They’re trying to get the story out. it’s a very interesting thing about how that class works. So it’s fascinating. I’ll tell you another thing. I found quite an interest. I learned a lot on this case. UPI, United Press International did a very scathing, muckraking report, about three or four parts series. It was a brilliant piece of investigative journalism laying out every single, piece of this. If this story, they put lots of resources into it and then, G.D Searle went to UPI and really, really blasted the editorial board, really tough on the managers. And so when they put the story on the UPI wire, it basically said, G.D Searle has indicated that it plans to Sue papers that run this story. And, basically on the whole UPI newspapers all across the country, only six newspapers ran the story.

Jeffrey Smith: Amazing.

Jim Turner: I mean the ability of that particular class to set I think it more as a set to pull levers all over the place to get their own way, I think is the core story. We were using a sweetener because the first story they always use is, well, it may have some problems, but it really is important. Nitrate, for example, nitrite and meat, was being put in huge quantities that were very dangerous, highly cancers, very prominent, very well-respected. Harvard, a researcher, laid this all out and he was on all the advisory committees and so forth about nitrate and cancer. Well, within two years he was wiped out and the argument was being made is s that nitrite is crucial to stop botulism. Just except for the moment that that’s true.

The amounts that are necessary are relatively small, but the amounts they were using were huge. And one of the things that had happened was using it, over the years had caused the meat to taste a particular way, hot dogs and so on. And so people would get hotdogs that didn’t have nitrate and had low amounts of nitrates. And they would be bland and they wouldn’t like them and they would realize that the reason was the poison had been taken out. so, it’s just fascinating. All the different tools that are available to the people to crush anything that the people with power have to crush anything that’s critical.

Jeffrey Smith: Now it’s obvious that people in the companies knew that there were problems. I have another private story that I’m not going to give enough to reveal names, but basically someone was helping with the advertisement for a diet soda. And the person from the diet soda company warned the director not to drink diet soda. He was drinking. He had drank 12 or 13 that day. He said, because it’s addictive. The person who was selling the diet soda. So, it’s interesting that they know and they also have an aggressive posture to try and stop anyone that lets the world know. Because aspartame is produced, the amino acids are produced from genetically engineered e-coli as part of the production process. That’s why I know so much about it because it’s a product of genetic engineering, which is in my wheelhouse.

So I published once an article about how it was from genetically engineered sources and I got a very angry email from someone who worked for Ajinomoto that was making, was it Ajinomoto or anyway, whoever was running the aspartame and I said, it’s not genetically engineered. And I said, can you explain? Does it have any products from the process of genetic engineering? And he comes back, it’s not genetically engineered, it doesn’t fit the requirements of such and such a law. And I said, well thank you very much. That’s good to know. I was very, very nice and very pleased to receive his information. I said, it is my understanding that it is produced from genetically engineered e-coli. Can you confirm that, whether that’s true or not, and I never heard from him again because it obviously it is.

Now you talked about how it’s three different components, the methyl Ester, which converts to alcohol, which is a deadly poison, and that converts to formaldehyde and formic acid. Well, in the Ramazzinni study, I believe in the Italian study where they just fed it to rats for the entire life of the animal. The rats got some cancers, and they got cancers of lymphoma and leukemia, but they also found that it was, if they had given formaldehyde in the same doses to rats for their lives, they get the same amount of lymphoma and leukemia. So that’s one aspect that’s dangerous is the alcohol aspect, the methyl Ester, which goes to methyl alcohol, that converts to formaldehyde and formic acid. Then there’s the federal alanine, which can lower seizures. But it’s interesting that, as, amino acids are not always a bad thing of course, they’re part of proteins, but, they’re in a dangerous configuration and they’re isolated. So because they’re a dangerous configuration, it’s particularly dangerous and they interact with the free methyl alcohol as well. So, it’s interesting that John Olney talked about aspartic acid as you know, as an excitotoxin that stimulates neurons into hyperactivity until they exhaust and die. And I remember Russell Blaylock giving a talk where I was speaking at a Western Price conference in 2004 or 5 and he was talking about aspartame and MSG as excitotoxins and showing what they do to the brain, which was scaring everyone in the room, not to touch the stuff. But the FDA was able to get it approved because of Rumsfeld’s friend who later had to leave as a disgraced commissioner of the FDA under investigation. And there were more than 10,000 complaints to the FDA more than any other food additive until they simply stopped taking them.

And they were able to identify 92 different symptoms for people who are complaining about the impact of aspartame, including four types of seizures. Let me read you this. Blindness, memory loss, fatigue, change in heart rate, difficulty breathing, joint bone and chest pain, speech impairment, tremors, change in body weight, lumps, blood and lymphatic problems, developmental retardation and problems with pregnancy, anemia, conjunctivitis, male sexual dysfunction and death. And then Roberts also identifies neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, obesity, sudden cardiac death among others. I remember giving a talk at the offices of Now Foods in Chicago and someone came up to me, I think from the company. Yeah. And said that his two year old was having seizures since he was one and a half, was two and a half. And for a year and a half he was having seizures and he was in the hospital and couldn’t figure it out. And they finally figured out that it was always after they fed him gum with aspartame, stop feeding them gum. The seizures went away. Another friend of mine told me that when he drank a diet soda with aspartame, he’d immediately get a searing headache and his forehead. It happened a couple of times and he never drank it again. So this is something that may have enormous effects in, in the United States population. In fact, Russell Blaylock suggest that the jump and brain tumors in the 1980s was partly a result of the introduction of aspartame.

Jim Turner:  My own sense is that it’s much more than partially a, result of, I mean, every piece that you described, lays out, a problematic situation of one kind or another. So let’s just take for example the methyl alcohol. What alcohol, first of all, there’s all kinds of bizarre arguments they make. you know, there’s methyl alcohol and fruit, but there’s ethyl alcohol and fruit too. And so you eat a fruit and you don’t get a blast of methyl alcohol. in fact, the antidote in some instances for methyl alcohol poisoning is the given ethyl alcohol. I mean, that’s one of the dynamics that’s out there. So we took 11 people who were complaining of, basically alcohol poisoning. They had various kinds of eye problems, eye problems we think are very closely related. we took them to a very interesting and successful, methyl alcohol expert in Atlanta, to look at them.

Jim Turner: And, he had been called in when they had the wood alcohol problems that occurred, in Georgia, way back at the 50s or earlier and, he was an expert and he looked at our people and, seven of the 11 had definitely had all of the traces of, a methyl alcohol poisoning. The, the next thing that happened is that, I got a client, who had lost sight in one eye and, it was interesting to be in this battle ongoing, because, she wanted to publicize her stories. She was in a lawsuit and she wanted to publicize her story. She didn’t want all over the country. We were on Larry King and we were on, Regis and Regis and whatever, you know, every story, every program, and every single time, whatever town we were in, whatever a guy would show up or a woman sometimes would show up from, the so-called, I established, you know, the leading eye clinic there.

Jim Turner: And they would make the argument, no, it couldn’t be possible. And one of the arguments they made was she’s only got a blindness in one eye. So obviously it couldn’t be from, an environmental, input of some kind like NutraSweet. Well, I went back and looked at the original, I think it was at 1904 study took from 1904 till after the second world war for the observed connection between methyl alcohol and employees eye damage, to become a standard part of the medical system for that long. I went back and look at the original study and it had people who had blindness in only one eye. The reason is that when you’re doing it in relatively small doses, the eyes actually pick it up, in a different amount. And it actually takes a relatively small dose to harm someone who’s susceptible.

Jim Turner: And so, they were susceptible they were harmed. Now, so here’s another one. They said our client had symptoms of M.S. and this eye vision problem can go along with M.S. There are seven symptoms of M.S is merely a set of symptoms. A causal dynamic is unclear. So 100 million people took NutraSweet, and M.S. went up. So, we raised the question about whether a NutraSweet could cause my client’s M.S. and the answer back was her M.S. was occurring at the time when M.S. was rising generally in society. So therefore you couldn’t trace it directly to a new NutraSweet, aspartame, every argument’s got a counter argument like that. And, the issue you raised about amino acids.

All the people that we got working with us were very knowledgeable. The Doctor only was a bear with world grade. And what happened is they have their own community that they talk in. So we were talking to people who are working on the cereal side about science. You know, the science guys were just doing. So one of the things that we learned is that, if you take a complete amino acid, it was a nice metaphor that somebody told me. The amino acid is taken to the brain, like in a little train. It goes into the brain and when it’s going into the brain, their little carts are filled with all the different components of amino acids. They, they’re 20, or 21 amino acids in a protein and they’re all filled.

Well, if you push one or two of them into the little mechanism that transfers it, you basically imbalance it. So it’s no longer balanced. So you are taking imbalanced, amino acids into your brain. And then they said, well, there’s a brain blood barrier that causes them not to, you know, the brain will screen them out. But it turns out that these amino acids can go through the spaces that are in the blood brain barrior. That’s not a real issue. That’s not a real thing. And if each one of these you wouldn’t, you would track it down. And then the funniest thing that happened from my side activist side is that the methyl alcohol causes problems advocates would not support the federal alanine,and the federal alanine and metho alcohol guys would not support aspartic acid.

So there was a guy out in California, a really prominent scientist who had done a children’s diet and showed that for amino purposes, it was for federal alanine purposes. They were eating too much. If they ate the amount that FDA said you could eat in a day, they were eating too much. So somebody asked him about his party gas. He said, that’s not my area. I can’t comment on that. And that’s what was going into PayPal. World-class side is this, I don’t know if it’s as far to gas it or not. That was what, that’s the way the story I play. So it was really interesting to watch the whole way the society works cause it’s structured so that all the information that’s flowing, is selected and presented by the people who pay the bills, that caused it to get selected and so on and eventually presented.

I mean, it’s a fascinating way to look at this society. It’s the society.

Jeffrey Smith: And there’s new research that’s happened since that shows that artificial sweeteners, including aspartame, don’t actually help people lose weight.

Jim Turner: That was when we went and looked at the FDA, studies that were released. And remember in 1974 when they approved it, it was the first time that the data upon which the FDA relied to release a food additive was ever made public. We went into the study to show that it didn’t cause weight loss. And now the interesting argument there is that they’ve managed to slip over, everybody is in those studies that showed weight gain. It was only for women. And so they would go out and they’d say it didn’t show weight gain and men, but that’s true. But that’s not the issue because it showed weight gain and women.

Oh then they came in and said, well it wasn’t the NutraSweet that caused the weight gain because, it was bad, bad behavior on part of the people who were eating, cause they would eat some nutrients. We didn’t think, well I’ve saved some calories, now I can eat a piece of cake. So it wasn’t nutrition that was causing the weight gain. It was the piece of cake. And when you had all these, I mean it was amazing to sit and talk to these people who are college educated, advanced degrees, some PhD, some doctors, and they were speaking in language and mechanisms and logic that would have flunked them out of my sophomore high school logic class. And they looked at you like they were really smart people. I mean they looked like they were really smart people and they were saying gibberish. I mean, it was just incredible. Okay, fine. they were going to take over the sugar industry when they started out there were a $7 billion project. I don’t think it ever exceeded 2 billion. I think it’s probably around one million now. In a drug company that’s not a particularly big product. Want to hear another story. It’s a troubling story.

Jeffrey Smith: Go ahead.

Jim Turner: A high intensity sweetener was brought to our attention and  it was developed by the University of Alberta and it was purchased by a developer. what he wanted to do you want to do is put in some money, get it ready to go and then sell it to the food industry and he put about 5 million, maybe $10 million into developing and doing all the work to do. And it came time to market it. Now remember, you know this, but the public might not know this, but Monsanto bought  G.D Searle, and the guy who named the thing NutraSweet, who was a political operative when he was a politician, became the president of Monsanto. He is a big player on the world stage and so forth.

Robert Shapiro, and by the way, Rumsfeld, it was another thing that was unique about Rumsfeld is he was a politician. He’d been a member of Congress. He’d been head of the OEO in the white house, and then he went on to become secretary of defense under Ford, and then retired and then got this job at G.D Searle . And that’s what he did until this story that we’re talking about played itself out, and that was when they sold to Monsanto, but he brought with him a whole set of Republican campaign operatives to treat NutraSweet more like a campaign candidate than like a scientific addition to the food supply. And that’s what they did. I mean, they played it. I mean, you could watch them playing it all over Washington, like I’ll call it in all my chips and get it through the process.

So, our little, it was a high intensity sweetener was made. It was a very refined, kind of Stevia. I mean, a really very, very good sweetener and that right up there and easily could compete with NutraSweet. So, the guy that wants to begin their marketer says, okay, we got to get help or we’re going to get a partner that’ll help us market this. So they went on the internet and they found a company that specific job was to promote sweeteners, to sell sweeteners. So you got a new sweetener to come to us. They went to them and they started working with them. And lo and behold, they discovered it was a Monsaanto subsidiary. So they, I told them if they had called me before they got legally in trouble, I could have told them that since they were headquartered in Skokie, Illinois, you might want to figure that that’s what they were.

But anyway they said, okay, we’ll lend you $10 million. And then 30 days before it was to go to market, they called the loan. That’s the Monsanto company called the loan. And we had to go to, you know, had to go to general quarters and fight it and filed a lawsuit in Chicago. And, the company was actually in Canada. Monsanto filed in Canada, but in Canada, in Canada, if you are being sued, in the way that they were being sued for basically failure to perform on a financial transaction, the court appoints a receiver and takes over the company while the suit goes forward. That appears to me to have been what the Monsanto lawyer strategy was. But our lawyers in Seattle filed the case in Chicago on Friday before they filed theirs on Monday.

And when they showed up, we just, our guys took it over to the judge and said, look, it’s already being tried in a federal court in Chicago. So, then that led to a bunch of negotiations that were held and we had three different people come from the a sweetener or a division of, Monsanto and talk to this company. Three first guy comes in and we, the point was made, look, you guys, this is much better than nutrient. None of the problems is a high intensity sweetener. It’s a better flavor. It comes out of the natural source. It’s a good thing. You’re going to get a much bigger market and persuade the guy and he went back and got fired when he came back with that. The second guy comes, same story. He goes back, he says, looking fired. Third guy comes and he says, let me tell you, you’re manufacturing but you’re manufacturing this a high, high intensity Stevia using a water extraction system.

But we manufacture using fermentation and we’ve got big, huge fermentation machines that we own that we have to keep busy. We can’t get rid of the NutraSweet in order to bring this new thing in because that’s a completely different process. We aren’t going to do that all right. Now that is a stupid argument. I mean, it doesn’t make any sense as a business argument, but as a political argument internally, I can imagine the boss is saying, get rid of it. Don’t, we don’t want that product. Ultimately, what happened, as far as I can tell is some, some people who worked for Monsanto actually blocked NutraSweet. They were intuitive visions. It was tabletop, and then it was the one that goes into foods that you mentioned earlier and they divided it and I think one group took one. The other group took the other near two little companies out there operating. They’re using NutraSweet. They bought the whole thing.

I don’t believe Monsanto was involved with it any longer. and, it’s a relatively small market in terms of like $7 billion, but it’s a big market in terms of people who run little businesses and you’ll make $100 million. When you look at this thing, you look at it and you say, who are these people? What are they think they’re doing? We had a guy come, we had a woman come from us and she, I said, we had gotten into that class of people that hang around with these folks. And, she said, well, you know, I go to dinner at their house and, I think it was Shapiro, but I’m not sure, but it was somebody who was high up in Monsanto, either the chairman of the board of the president. And, I asked him, they said, we don’t see that there are kids.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah, it’s like, you know, the whole thing about doing Monsanto, people eat GMOs. I talked to a former Monsanto scientist. He told me that three of his colleagues were testing the milk from cows, treated with their genetically engineered bovine growth hormone. It sounds so much like cancer promoting, IGF one in the milk, the three Monsanto scientists stopped drinking milk unless it was organic. There was a restaurant inside the headquarters of the Monsanto, building in the UK. They stopped using GMOs and they got sent, they were sent a letter saying, do you use GMOs? He said, no, because of complaints and concerns by our customers, we’ve decided to eliminate as far as possible any GMO soy or corn and their customers were Monsanto people.

I was telling this to someone, I think from the UK, and she said, you know, that’s exactly what happened. My husband was a consultant for Monsanto and they were traveling with a big group to go somewhere and he joked, you know, we might end up eating some GMOs and the person thought it was serious. He said, Oh, don’t worry. We’ve taken precautions. There’s no GMOs is going to be served to us. So it’s, it’s shocking that the people who work there are not willing to expose their own bodies. Now as far as exposing our own bodies, I think it’s important that we tell people how to avoid aspartame and it’s not always called aspartame. So I’m going to give some of the names and you can add to the list if you want. Jim, NutraSweet you’ve already mentioned, Equal, Spoonful, Canderel, Bonvia, and Amino Sweet, all of those. And there may be more now that are used to try and hide the fact that it is as aspartame. So we’ve really shaken the trees on this. I’m hoping that anyone who is still using aspartame and watching will decide not only to not use it but to share the information with others. And I want to share some of the information that’s coming across as we’re doing this on a Facebook Live. Okay. Vanessa points out that in Ecuador they put taxes on sugary drinks saying it was a bad idea.

Jim Turner: I want to jump in just a little quickly and, and, and there’s a very different problem with sugar than with these artificial sweeteners. Very, very different problem. It’s a serious problem. But it’s a different problem. So you need to be careful about that. These things are industrial chemicals, cyclamate, saccharin, aspartame. These are industrial chemicals. It’s an industrial product. I mean, it’s like eating a well worse than soap. It’s like eating something that you scrub things with, but people get used to it and they eat it. I wanted to jump in. I’m sorry to interrupt you there, you mentioned bovine growth hormone and I had a funny experience with that because a, the guy that had been telling them about NutraSweet, that we knew who was a consultant on safety issues, was hired by a law firm here to talk about, It was a law firm working for Monsanto to talk about Boga and growth hormone. And, he said to me, I would like your input on that. y’all take a look at it, look at the whole thing and give us some advice.

What should we do about Bovine growth hormone? So I looked at the science look or anything. I said, I have a really great idea for you. Don’t make it. And I got paid, I got actually paid to tell them that. That was kind of nice. But why would you do this? I mean everything about bovine growth hormone, including the fact that it creates a mastitis in the, in the cows, is boy is bad. I mean it’s just bad in every way. And yet they were going to go ahead and do it. And I’ve had that with other food companies. They asked me, well what would you do about this? And I tell him, well I looked at it and I’d say don’t do it. But rarely do they listen to me.

Jeffrey Smith: I would love to get paid for to tell them not to produce it. Congratulations Jim.

Jim Turner: You too. High profile.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. So I will spend another time, I’m going to definitely talk about bovine growth hormone, both on Facebook live and at the live healthy be well. podcast. You can, this whole thing is going to be a repurposed Live Healthy Be Well. Because a lot of people like to listen to the long interviews as a podcast. So I wanted to share some of these really interesting comments that are being made by, and feel free to jump in at any time. So Vanessa points out that in Ecuador, in order to get around the taxes on sugary drinks, a lot of the companies want artificial sweeteners. And so it was, you know, obviously I don’t, I don’t promote sugar, but I like you, if someone has to decide between a sugary drink and aspartame drink, there’s no question in my mind that the sugar is not going to be as bad and, and absolutely devastating to their health as aspartame if we believe what we’re getting from, from even the FDA own files.

Jeffrey Smith: Pat mentioned that she was worn by a physician years ago to stay away from artificial sweeteners. Pauline mentions that she had seizures when she drank diet drinks and thankfully stopped having them when she realized the relationship between them and seizures. So we have someone who actually had the seizures with the diet drinks, but there’s other things as well here. that was with Martha. Martha said she drank soda for years with no issues, then switched to regular soda in order to get off aspartame. But shortly, soon, soon after was diagnosed with lupus, lost vision in one and then both eyes. So she thinks it was because of the aspartame that she was drinking for years. So, I mean we have people right now listening to us that may have been the casualties of this horrific sweetener. so let me see if there’s anything else. Martha asks, but isn’t the process of refined sugar in industrial and industrial chemical products too? So there is a difference. You want to take that question?

Jim Turner: No, you can go for it.

Jeffrey Smith: So you can take beach sugar or cane sugar and you can refine it down and end up with sucrose and it’s very, very pure in its form. It’s 99 point something percent pure and it is a refined and natural end product of something that grew and it’s different than creating this, methyl Ester or this, what is it? This methyl Ester, this unusually isolated and dangerous configuration of aspartic acid and phenol aniline and the combination that work together and make it even worse. These things are really laboratory creations and they don’t exist in nature and they are very toxic individually and together.

Jim Turner: So done on the sugar issue. You want it, you want to, the big issue there is the fructose question. And you want to stay away from fructose. And fructose is as bad as an artificial sweetener. but the sugar is not 100% fructose, the way it’s supposed to be. Now, they managed to get it up. They got it. They got it up to 90% fructose at this point. And you want to stay away from anything that’s got that says fructose on it. it, the, the, the, the problem I see with the attack on sugar is that doesn’t make that distinction clear and so, when, when people say stay away from sugar and they start staying away from sugar, and then fructose starts showing up on the label instead of sugar, then they just go right after where they’re thinking he doesn’t have sugar. I mean, the battle on words is as big as the battle on the chemicals because they have every way of disguising what’s actually going on.

Jeffrey Smith: I know a friend of mine did some research on high fructose corn syrup and from mercury in the high fructose cone syrup, it was a monster of course, there. So it’s interesting that there’s a Coke that you can get. I live in California now. I’m sort of halfway between here and Iowa. And, they, people will sometimes get Mexican Coke because it has sugar, whereas the U S Coke has high fructose corn syrup. so they’d rather do that.

Jim Turner: That’s a widespread fact. And then, you know, people need to, they get to look at it and you just have to be alert. You just have to be alert, and watch out. And, I mean it’s, when you go into that supermarket, it’s going into a minefield. I mean, we work really hard to get organic, out there. I mean, organic helps you a little bit cause it didn’t, it narrows the minefield down a bit, but you still got to look really carefully. Even at organic. It’d be sure that what you’re getting doesn’t carry some kind of crazy thing in it. And, what I’ve always said from day one back in 1968 when I started on this is, basically a consumer takes about half a second to decide whether to buy something or not, in a, in a supermarket and they’re facing a shelf with a product that it, that has a lawyer or a marketing expert or labeled design person, a propagandist, all designed to make it jump into your cart.

So I say, take five minutes of every shopping trip and pick one product thing and study it and figure out, and then make that be the thing you buy until the next time you take five minutes to look at it. I mean it’s hand to hand combat. I mean, a person who’s shopping in a supermarket, you’re shopping for the best three or four people, but people that are selling to you are selling with a team of dozens and dozens of people that have done research. And they do research to figure out, and one study that was done that just blew me away was a can of green beans. They studied the can of green beans with the consumer to see how many stones you could put in the can instead of a bean in or before the consumer would notice that because the stone was cheaper than the bean. And if you’re running bazillions of cans all year long and you put a stone in and you save yourself one 10th of a penny, but that’s on billions of cans, it turns out to be a lot of money. And they had people that studied that.

By the way, just to put this in a larger context, I, when I studied Ralph Nader in law school, believe it or not, he had an assignment study, Ralph Nader in law school and I can tell you that story. Of course, NEDA Raider. Why don’t you, I say I was the first, Ralph says I was one of the first, I came in March. Then, I say I came in March, the rest came in June. but it’s kind of a joke. I was there when everything was taking shape and I, what I, what happened is I went to Nader after studying you and I said, look, you’re not talking about cars. Everybody in the whole country thinks you’re talking about cars, but you’re talking about corporate responsibility. In fact, I read yourself, you know, and so there were corporate corporate responsibilities, a crucial, crucial, crucial idea.

And you can have bad things happen if you don’t have corporate responsibility. Look at cars and put 50 pages on cars. Well, the media being the media, they could write about cars killing people much more easily than they could write about corporate responsibility and so forth for a lot of reasons. So I’m saying an to Nader. I said, look, it’s really important. I said, no one’s getting your point. And now he said, well, what would you do about it? I said, well, if you’re right that the decision making structure of the corporate sector is causing us to come up with bad decisions. And an example is a car, you should be able to look at any corporate structure and you’ll find bad decisions. Oh, great. What would you do, what would you do? We went back and forth and finally he said, well I think we should do food cause I was interested in food myself and Nader said food.

That’s great. I was a cook in the army for six months. So we started working on food. And what you find is that every single one of these markets has a federal agency that’s managing the input and outflow. They are standing in for the consumer. It’s like local apprentices. One of the things that 60’s college students were against, well we got in local PR, we got in local patients for consumers. We got the government standing in for consumers. We don’t have free markets. I mean I’m a free market capitalist. I love free markets. I wish we would try one sometime. These markets are all managed markets and they’re managed in a way that is designed to be sure that the people who sell get all the money. And incidentally, when Adam Smith wrote the wealth of nations, that’s what he was attacking.

He himself was attacking that. In 1783, he said the second edition of the wealth of nations, he said, consumption of the soul, Linden, purpose of all production, the producers interest ought to be attended to only insofar as advances that are the consumer. And he went on to say, the laws that we have are all designed by merchants and manufacturers to screw the consumer. I mean, this is Adam Smith in 1780. I mean, it’s been going on. It was going on a long time before that. It’s been gone a long time since that. And so I’m saying to Nader or let’s look at, and we own a food in my God, every single issue that he found in cars existed in foods, in, in cars. Safety didn’t sell. We had to sell designs in foods. Nutrition didn’t sell. We had to sell conveniences like the same sentence with those words switched. I mean, every single thing that was being done to drive, to create a car market that was killing people unnecessarily, was in the food market. And, and one of my arguments was we’ve got a very bad health profile in the US it’s silly to not look at the food supply is one of the origins of that.

Jeffrey Smith: yeah, I mean that’s part of my, my long term job as you know. I love these stories. I mean no one else has these Jim and you’re going to get a chance anytime just jump in. But I have to make sure that I respond to Martha’s followup question about the sugar cause I also hadn’t finished my answer and that one of the aspects of sugar is that it’s comes in large part more than 50% of the sugar in United States comes from genetically engineered sugar beets and the other part comes from cane sugar and cane. A sugar cane is often sprayed with Roundup just before harvest. So the question is, since both the sugar beets and the sugar cane are sprayed with Roundup, is there Roundup residue in the sugar we haven’t seen?

We don’t know, but there’s also the possibility that when you genetically engineer the sugar beets, you can end up creating some kind of contaminants that might end up in the sugar. And even though the sugar may be 99% pure, that doesn’t get you off the hook. As you know, in the 1980s, there was an L-Tryptophan supplement that was created from the process of genetically engineering bacteria, which is also how they create an aspartame. And that process almost certainly created five or six contaminants that were very small 0.1% or 0.01% of the whole amount. It’s still passed the pharmaceutical standard of safety of our purity if 98.5%. But these contaminants killed a hundred, about a hundred Americans and caused five to 10,000 to fall sick. So the question is how can we trust? Do we trust the sugar? No one has done the research.

What is interesting is that with GMOs, unlike with other foods, the more you refine them, often the less dangerous they are. Because if they’re raw and their natural state, then it’s possible that the DNA could transfer into your own gut bacteria as was shown with soybeans, that the toxins that are produced to them, like the BT toxin, which can poke holes in human gut walls according to a studies done in laboratories, that’s not broken down. so you have all these dangers that are worst in the raw or hardly processed foods, and in the GMO situation, the more you refine them, the less likely you’ll have proteins. The less like you’ll, you’ll have intake intact Roundup, less likely you’ll have a DNA that’s there. But for other foods, oftentimes the more you refine them, the more dangerous they become because you’ll concentrate certain toxins, etc.

Now, Catherine asked the question, can I trust organic? For the most part, I would say absolutely because it doesn’t allow GMOs or Roundup or dozens of other dangerous chemicals, but Jim’s point is well taken that just because something says organic doesn’t mean that the ingredients are healthy. So you can have organic that I don’t think there is any organic high fructose corn syrup in the United States, but you can have organic things that are not particularly healthy, but it’s certainly healthier than it’s not our gen organic counterpart. And in most organic foods, it’s produced with some level of consciousness with the end, with the end users, consumer consumption in mind as you pointed out from Adam Smith. There was another point from Martha. They’ve tested many packaged foods like Nabisco and others and they present with GMO in them.

So from flour, wheat, sugar beets, cane or other ingredients. So with flour, with wheat, wheat is not genetically engineered, but it’s sprayed with Roundup often just before harvest. the sugar beets, you’re not going to be able to find the GMO component in those because when it’s sucrose, you can’t test the sucrose to see that it’s GMOs. So if they find a GMO in the final product, it won’t be from the wheat, it won’t be from the sugar beets. Sugar cane is not genetically engineered. It’s gotta be from something else, which is often the corn or the soy. All right. So those are all the questions that we have. We’ve just done about an hour. Jim, I really appreciate this. Hit us with any more stories you want before we wrap up.

Well, you mentioned L-Tryptophan and that, that was another one that I watched pretty carefully. And what, what’s interesting is, first of all, all of the settlements on those cases are, were, sequestered. So we don’t know what actually was discussed with the company. but as nearly as I can tell, it was one company and they did the project the way that you described and they created the harm that you described. and then the FDA just went haywire and went after all tryptofan when it wasn’t actually tryptofan wasn’t the issue. The issue was this genetically engineered thing, which probably shouldn’t have been called tryptofan anyway, but what’s interesting, what’s most interesting to me about that is that the product came on the market and it was being sold. It was about a unit that costs 5 cents, then you can now buy for about 95 cents.

That’s after going through all of this process. I’m telling you the people that want to say, how do I get the money out of your pocket into my hands, have a kazillion ways of doing that and, and one of the difficult parts of our society is that we all go to work every day or you know the vast majority, it’s going to work every day on the side of how do we get money out of their pocket into the pocket of my company, how do I do that? And we were all sitting there working, working, working, working, working. And then a small percentage of those people go home at night and they try to go to meetings and stuff to figure out how to handle all of the bad stuff that’s been coming into the products that they are trying to get the money out of people’s hands for it.

I had a situation, I was a, I went to a meeting with the Bes Meyerson who is the community at the time. It was consumer affairs, director of New York city. and it just so happened that the morning, that day I went with her around doing things and meeting people and so forth. Her team of weights and measures, people had found a whole bunch of supermarkets that had been short waiting people, at the checkout counter and, and it was a big story in the paper. And, it’s ha, it just so happened that that particular day, I don’t know, maybe she planned it this way. The lunch that we went to was with supermarket executives. So here are all these supermarket executives, they’re standing they’re sitting there talking, talking, talking, and they’re all yelling at her now, why do you do that?

This is terrible. Our people. Yeah. And I, and the finally, you know, I got to my turn to talk about, and they said, all right, well, Jim, what are you, you’re, you’re from the native group, are you doing? And, I said, well, we just did a study, our, our, one of our teams just did a study on the ICC, the interstate commerce commission, the moving vans. And one of the big things that moving vans do that you need to understand moving companies do is that they way they measure how much they charge you is they weigh the truck empty and then they weigh it full. So the difference is what you pay for. So when they weigh an empty, they empty the gas tank, they take all of the wrappings and all of the dollies and all of the material that’s used. Do they take it out of the truck?

They take everything out of the truck they can possibly take out. Then they put your stuff in and then they fill up the gas tank and they acquaint all the, all the dollies in the, in the covers and solvent. And they pump up the weight of the truck by four or 5% so that’s a surcharge on your move. And the guys in the room got, Oh my God, I moved from California to New York and that means I paid 5% more than yeah. And they’re going on and not for, well, first of all, the issue is not that big an issue on one level, but it is exactly the same thing that they were doing in their stores to people who are buying meat. And they they could, they could get outraged about the moving vans, but they were defensive about the meat and the stores.

You want to hear another? Yes. Okay. This is a Supreme court case. Okay. So when they ordered them weights and measures laws, they said you could have a 8%, you could have a number of ounces on either side of zero, like maybe, you know, two ounces or whatever the number was. Because that’s how, that’s what the refinement of the scale was. It could measure that amount. So anything that was within that, that four ounces, let’s say four tenths of an ounce to two tests, it would be zero. So the industry put together a bunch of people that work really, really, really hard so that they could have the refinement of the scale so that they could get it down to two and then they put it all on the side of their collecting money.

So that went to the Supreme court and the Supreme court ruled that that was a violation of the weights and measures act. Imagine they’d put their mind, their energy, their resources and these guys that were designing the scale so would be much more refined. I needed their world. A more refined scale is a really good thing. But the marketing guys over here saying, Hey, we got a refined scale we can apart you would get up our par price, buy it that are out there. I mean they, bazillions of them all over the place. They do all the time on everything

Jeffrey Smith: In the GMO world they’re in, in the Midwest, they’ll make genetically engineered soybeans and Non GMO soybeans and they’ll often call the non GMO soybeans food grade. Even though the GMO soybeans go into the food supply, they call them food grade in particular for Japan. Now Japan has a rule that allows you to get away with not labeling it as genetically engineered if it has up to 5% contamination, which is a huge amount. So we understand that some U.S exporters will take the non GMO soy and they’ll mix four or 5% into it of GMO soy because they can get away with it and then they’ll ship that and it’ll come under spec. But now they have put in the soy that they didn’t have to pay a premium for. And of course they’re poisoning the consumers in our opinion.

Jim Turner: That’s, that’s a standard practice. The Supreme Court actually upheld that, for aflatoxin in corn, they, they will, they will allow you to mix aflatoxin  up to a certain level. FDA allows that under a regulation and they mixed it together. So, the idea, it’s a strange idea because they’re saying if it’s only a tiny little bit, it won’t hurt you. So what they do is they create a situation where they’ve got a whole lot over here and none over here. So they mix them together. So all of it has a tiny little bit, cause it won’t hurt you. Now, the way it hurts people is how susceptible there. So, on average, most people aren’t susceptible to the tiny little bit, but they are susceptible to the large amounts. Well, some people are still going to be harmed by those tiny little bits. And again, it’s for the exact purpose you said, cause they’re, they would, the stuff that has too much AvaTax and they would have to destroy.

Jeffrey Smith: You and I could probably talk for hours because we bounce up. We have such overlapping worlds. I mean, I’ll tell you this, that when you have genetically engineered corn, it actually, and you sprayed with Roundup, it can promote the aflatoxins. And a friend of mine gathered air samples at a corn field and a soy field and sent it into a laboratory. And they were told, Oh, the air samples are very, very dangerous. Make sure you don’t spend much time here. And there’s a lot of mold in these fields. And what happens is if you spray Roundup on the soil, it’ll cause the proliferation of toxic fungus and it’ll kill the bacteria, which normally reduces the amount of toxic fungus. And so these fungus, first of all, they create their plant pathogens and they kill plants, but they can also become airborne so that when you end up dealing with grain and you’re putting them into a large silos, etc, the air quality carries the Roundup, it carries the other chemicals and it carries this dangerous fungus. and so you end up with a very dangerous food supply and an air supply. And we’re working environment for those that work on the farm.

Jim Turner: Well, let me give you a conceptual problem that underlies our entire debate about living in the environment and so forth. Rachel Carson is a hero of the movement and she is a brilliant and a great writer and really had some great insights. Interestingly enough, the fundamental insight of silent spring has never been actualized. I don’t even think the environmental movement has been very effective or at least, I don’t know how they think about it, but her point was that the interaction of all these different things are going to create something that she called the Silent Spring. But the interaction was the concept. But all of the writing that has all of the work that’s fallen out of that has been about individual things in the case of EPA, individual chemicals. But if you go over to the FDA you will find stuff about contaminants in food of various kinds of food additives. When they do a food additive, they look at the food additive alone, by itself. They do not look at the food additive packed up in a package of 25 other food additives.

Jeffrey Smith: Yeah. But it’s worse than that for pesticides like with Roundup. They only look at what the company declares as the “active” ingredient, which is glyphosate. Whereas the Roundup can be 125 times more toxic because it has all these other chemicals, and some of the chemicals that are in Roundup can be a thousand times more toxic than the glyphosate. And the glyphosate also combines with a surfactant to get driven into the plants tissues, which means it also can get driven into the skin of people that happen to have Roundup on them. So the combination is much more devastating. I know someone that was spraying, Dr. Anthony Samsel, he was spraying Roundup around his greenhouse and he noticed because he was also coyote urine to keep the deer out of his organic garden.

He ran out of that. He tried to use his own urine and he realized it was killing weeds and he proved it in his, he says dog, he’s a scientist. So he went and he proved that his own urine was a weed killer. He stopped applying Roundup and is no longer killing weeds. So he thinks it was going through the rubber boots he was wearing. At the trial that just happened where we won three different trials against Monsanto, they were able to put Roundup on a Tyvek suit and it would drip through. It would drip through a suit that was supposed to keep toxic hazard ingredients away from the body and yet it was going right through the suit. They also found out that this whole absorption thing that Monsanto did that we wanted to prove wasn’t absorbed into high concentrations into human skin.

They checked it on cadaver skin. It was over three times the allowable level, and they never reported that to the EPA. They then took human cadaver skin, cut it away, put it in an oven and baked it. You know what happens when you over-bake meat? Then they froze it, then they applied the Roundup; and it hardly absorbed and that’s what they reported to the EPA. Total rigged research. This is corporate science. This is checkbook science. This is tobacco science. This is Monsanto science. So you have been what following this, I just want to take a moment, Jim and honor you because you get to do what all of us have been wanting to. You are in there suing these guys. You’ve also been a great advisor to me and to many other activists because you’ve been in the game for a long time. You understand Washington, you live there, you work there, you understand the law. You have been an amazing hero of the American public, and a hero of consumers.You have this history since 1968, and possibly before, where you have been absolutely full on. You and I could talk for hours and maybe we should get you on again.

Jim Turner: Well, I’m having to come on and yet I’m having to sit down and talk for hours. And my idea was the legal system can help solve some of these problems. As you know it has helped solve some of them, but they’re still out there. All of them.

Jeffrey Smith: All right. I know we will have to, well, fortunately we’ll end on this good note. We, as you know, our Institute for Responsible Technology has been massively successful at raising public awareness about the health dangers of GMOs. Now we haven’t gotten them eliminated from food on the government side, but they’re being eliminated systematically by the food companies. As one brand switches to non-GMO on its label, it starts to attract the consumers and the companies that’s still using GMOs, they start losing market share. They rush to switch to non-GMO on their package. That mechanics is how GMOs were kicked out of Europe. That’s how they’re being kicked out of the United States. And that’s why everyone listening, we should tell people not only about GMOs, but let’s go back to where we started. Friends, don’t let friends eat aspartame. Share this, you know, share this link and you can also go to livehealthybewell.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to the podcast and live healthy, be well. This will be posted very soon, and that way you can share the podcast with people because a lot more people will listen to a podcast while they’re commuting than they’ll listen to on a Facebook live or a. All right. Thank you so much, Jim.

Jim Turner: Thank you very much. I enjoyed it.

Jeffrey Smith : Thank you for listening to Live Healthy, Be Well. Please subscribe to the podcast using whatever app you’re listening to, podcasts with, or go to livehealthybewell.com to subscribe. This podcast will inform you about health dangers, corporate and government corruption, and ways we can protect ourselves, families, and our planet. I interview scientists, experts, authors, whistleblowers, and many people who have not shared their information with the world. Until now, please share the podcast with your friends who will enlighten and may even save lives.