The Impossible Burger, a new “plant-based burger” marketed by Impossible Foods, is now appearing on diners’ plates in selected California restaurants. And this genetically engineered food does its best to impersonate meat, reportedly sizzling, browning when cooked –even “bleeding.”
In other words: “Franken-Burgers” have arrived and they call this healthy?!
The appearance of these GMO burgers signals a new wave of genetically engineered foods created by gene editing– a technique that natural health experts say is insufficiently tested. Now, many consumers – blissfully unaware of the “burger’s” GMO origins – are already chowing down on the Impossible Burger.
This, in spite of a recent survey showing that over two thirds of consumers say they would not knowingly eat GMO foods.
Food ALERT: GMO-based Impossible Burger breaks down into dozens of untested proteins
According to Impossible Foods’ own website, their burger is actually based on yeast that has been genetically engineered to resemble leghemoglobin – a substance found in the roots of soybean plants.
Soy leghemoglobin, or SLH, breaks down into the bright-red “heme” protein – which causes the burger to resemble meat, and (creepily) even allows it to “bleed.” When ingested, SLH breaks down into 46 other proteins of undetermined safety – proteins that are not normally found in the human body, and have undergone no testing whatsoever.
And here’s the kicker: although Impossible Foods didn’t need the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Adminsitration (FDA) to sell its GMO burger, the company requested that the agency confirm it as GRAS (generally recognized as safe).
The FDA – to its credit – expressed concern that SLH has never been consumed by humans (and may be an allergen, to boot). According to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, the FDA stated that the current arguments in favor of the burger were “not enough to establish the safety of SLH for consumption.”
But, the FDA stopped short of deeming the burger ‘unsafe.’
Note: The Impossible Foods website, for its part, maintains that the FDA does in fact validate SLH as safe. But, natural health experts are far from convinced of its safety.
Genetically altered foods are being heralded with the ability to “stop hunger” – but is the claim realistic?
Genetically engineered foods such as the Impossible Burger have been touted as having the ability to help sustain the 9 billion-strong human population predicted on earth by 2050. On the surface, it sounds like a noble mission.
GMO crops (such as Roundup Ready corn) are engineered to survive being doused with synthetic chemical pesticides, such as glyphosate and dicamba. This means they are responsible for a tremendous increase in the use of these toxic substances, which have been linked in studies to cancer, dementia and immune problems.
US Right To Know, a non-profit organization dedicated to pursuing truth and transparency in the US food system, points out that GMO pesticide-resistant crops have been associated with an array of disastrous effects.
These include birth defects in Hawaii, cancer clusters in Argentina, contaminated waterways in Iowa, damaged farmland across the Midwest – plus much more.
Remember “Golden Rice?” (or maybe you don’t). This vitamin A-enhanced GMO rice was touted almost two decades ago as “the rice that could save a million kids a year,” yet it failed to materialize on the market.
This is due to the fact that breeders have yet to develop varieties that grow as well as existing natural rice strains.
When one trait – in this case, the ability to produce beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A – is edited in a genome, other capabilities (such as speed of growth) may be altered, and not for the better.
Maybe fooling Mother Nature is a bit harder than GMO scientists think?
Choose wisely! Have a great day!!
