Originally posted by Dr. Davis on 2014-09-10
on the Wheat Belly Blog, sourced from and currently found at: Infinite Health Blog.
PCM forum Index of WB Blog articles.

Wheat: It’s WORSE than GMO

It’s a common ploy used in industries under attack: Throw out a provable fact and repeat that fact over and over again, and hope that the real accusations never get heard. While such tactics rarely yield long-term success, it is a method of damage control that delays the inevitable decline that such attacks bring.

The grain industry has been employing this tactic, as recently shown in this article from The Gazette: “Speakers [from the grain industry] addressed consumers’ belief that wheat is a GMO (genetically modified organism) crop. ‘It’s a myth,’ said Brett Carver, wheat genetics chair in agriculture at Oklahoma State University.

“GMO generally means introducing a gene from a different source – foreign DNA. That’s where the train leaves the tracks. All breeding (in the United States) is done at colleges, where we work inside the natural genetic boundaries. There is no GMO wheat grown in the U.S.”

Okay, so in their line of thinking, if wheat is not genetically-modified, non-GMO, it must therefore be okay. Let’s take a look at the work of Dr. Peter Shewry, one of the world’s leading experts in wheat and grain breeding at the University of Reading in the U.K.

In a May, 2014 study published in the Journal of Cereal Science, Dr. Shewry and colleagues state that:

Mutation breeding, which is based on the use of radiation or chemical agents to induce mutations, has proved to be very effective in generating novel genetic diversity for important traits that has been exploited in breeding programmes. This has resulted in the production of 3218 different crop cultivars with economic and social benefits. More recently, the availability of large genomic resources and bioinformatic tools together with new sophisticated technologies to detect mutations in target genes have led to the development of a technology termed TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes). This approach combines classical chemical mutagenesis and PCR-based screening to identify mutations in a given gene of interest. TILLING involves the use of chemical agents such as sodium azide (NaN3) or ethyl methane sulfonate (EMS) which are able to alkylate nucleotides to induce point mutations which are randomly distributed over the entire genome. EMS alkylates guanine bases that will then pair with thymine instead of cytosine, ultimately resulting in a G/C to A/T transition. Different high-throughput technologies are available for mutation detection. Treatment of seeds with EMS is very effective in producing nonsense, missense and silent mutations. [Emphasis mine]

So wheat is not “genetically-modified,” meaning no gene-splicing technology was used to insert or delete a gene, but “mutation breeding,” or mutagenesis, is alive and well, able to induce mutations through the entire genome. Genetic-modification introduces only a handful of changes, while the methods of mutation breeding introduce mutations throughout the entire genetic code of a plant.

So don’t fall for this common tactic employed by industries under attack, the smokescreen that diverts attention away from the truth. No, wheat is not a GMO plant and I never said it was. Wheat has been subjected to methods that are worse than genetic-modification.