Rights of Parents - HealthyLife

BY: Ginnifer Goodwin

Ginnifer Goodwin is the star of ABC’s fantasy drama series Once Upon a Time plays both the fairy tale heroine Snow White and her real world counterpart, schoolteacher Mary Margaret Blanchard. Ginnifer married actor Josh Dallas in 2014. Their first child, Oliver, is a year old.

Credit: This article is as it is appeared in http://www.takepart.com/

Without mandatory labeling of GMOs, it’s even harder to make informed choices at the supermarket.Last week the House of Representatives passed a bill that would make labeling of GMOs in food voluntary for food companies everywhere in the U.S.

When I thought about becoming a mom I pictured family time, story time, playtime—I didn’t anticipate all of the work it would take to figure out what I was feeding my son to make sure he was eating safe and healthy food.

For the 90 percent of Americans and moms like me who want to exercise our right to decide what we want to feed our children, this is the opposite of what is needed. Without mandatory labeling of GMOs, it’s getting even harder to make informed choices at the supermarket because GMOs are in more and more foods. We feel like we’re being kept in the dark.

The use of glyphosate, an herbicide, has skyrocketed in recent years as a direct result of the expansion of GMO crops, and it’s now the world’s most widely used weed killer. The amount of herbicide that is used to grow our food has also exploded because GMO crops are made to withstand herbicides like glyphosate. It didn’t used to be that way.

But the World Health Organization has found that the active ingredient in glyphosate is a probable carcinogen.This stuff is routinely found in our food, air, and water. We don’t yet know the effects on our kids. This is something we won’t know until scientists can study the long-term health effects of this chemical. That’s not a risk I want to take.

Parents spend their time protecting their kids from what could happen, so it makes complete sense that we would want to protect our kids from the potential effects of glyphosate.

To me it’s simple. Foods that are genetically modified should have labels that say so. That way, parents can decide for themselves if they want products grown with tons of weed killer.

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This isn’t a controversial position. National polls consistently show that the majority of Americans believe that GMO foods should be labeled. This is regardless of age, income, education, or party affiliation. If Russia and China get to know whether their food contains GMOs, shouldn’t we?

Yet major food companies have spent millions of dollars trying to prevent mandatory labeling. Why would anyone fight so hard against our right to know?

With so much overwhelming public support for labeling, Congress and the Food and Drug Administration should require companies to label GMO foods. With GMO labels, moms like me will know if the food they are feeding their kids is grown with a weed killer that harms the environment or causes health problems. Once parents know what’s in their children’s food and how it’s grown, they can make an informed decision.

This is why I signed Just Label It’s “Conceal or Reveal” petition calling on companies to support mandatory FDA labeling of GMOs and to stop contributing to anti-labeling efforts. I hope you will sign too.

Image courtesy: http://i.dailymail.co.uk/