Recently, Cheerios made its way into the mainstream news when talk show host and comedian Ellen DeGeneres gave her studio audience a big pile of money to commemorate her One Million Acts of Good campaign.
“I think we should all be kind to one another and that is why I am partnering with Cheerios,” she told her audience.
To commemorate the campaign, Ellen Degeneres showed her fans a box of Cheerios and asked them to take a looksy under their seats. They all discovered boxes, which meant they all got to split a whopping $1 million. People jumping up and down with a box of Cheerios, yelping in glee over money, makes for good TV and boosted sales.
Problem is, Cheerios is garbage, a whole lot of garbage rolled into one. For starters, they are owned by Nestle, which is a member of the GMA ( Grocery Manufacturers Association), an organization that has spent millions to stop the labeling of GMOs.
“The use of genetically modified (GM) ingredients is not only safe for people and our planet, but also has a number of important benefits,” according to the GMA.
Meanwhile, Cheerios tested one of the highest cereals for glyphosate, the destructive but extremely popular Monsanto herbicide. HoneyColony just published a piece on the new Glyphosate Study and the crazy amounts of Roundup found in products such as Cheerios. This fact isn’t good for bees. Or us. Glyphosate is sheer poison.
Glyphosate may actually be the most important culprit in the development of a wide variety of chronic diseases, specifically because your gut bacteria are a key component of glyphosate mechanism of harm. Cheerio!
To think, this is what your kids are chomping on to start their every morning. Every week, General Mills, which owns the brand along with Cinnamon Toast Crunch, Lucky Charms, and Fiber One, produces and ships almost a half million actual cases across the U.S. There are roughly 2.7 billion boxes of this cereal sold each year.
In March 2015, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization announced that glyphosate, the world’s most widely-used herbicide, is probably carcinogenic to humans.
Monsanto, however, has repeatedly stated that there are no legitimate safety concerns regarding glyphosate when it is used as intended, and that toxicological studies in animals have demonstrated that glyphosate does not cause cancer, birth defects, DNA damage, nervous system effects, immune system effects, endocrine disruption or reproductive problems.
Buzz The Bee Vanishes
Greenwashing is a great way to absolve your sins and paint a responsible altruistic self-image for the gullible mainstream.
Last March, Cheerios removed its bee mascot ‘Buzz’ from the front of cereal boxes in the U.S., leaving behind a silhouette image in order to raise awareness on the decline of our prime pollinators around the world. The campaign was called Bring Back the Bees.
Incidentally, it’s been more than a decade since colony collapse disorder was discovered and bees— that pollinate a third of food around the world — continue to die due to the slew of chemicals they come into contact with.
The campaign reads:
We’re working toward a goal of providing enough seeds to help five million Americans plant pollinator gardens in the U.S. this year. You can do your part to help us bring back the bees by planting your seed mixture and sharing on social using #BringBackTheBees, so we can celebrate all the new pollinator gardens this spring.
Ironically, Honey Nut Cheerios is made with whole grain oats that are actually wind pollinated. No bees required. And they’re full of Roundup, cornstarch, inflammatory Canola vegetable oil, aging and fattening sugar, and honey that isn’t even organic or raw and therefore dead and void of any nutritional benefits.
Yes ‘go with the goodness of Cheerios.’
For the record, General Mills contends that they do not use genetically modified ingredients in their original Cheerios. But then again they also think GMOs are safe. They write on their website: “There is broad consensus among major global scientific and regulatory bodies that approved genetically modified foods are safe.”
And for those consumers who are concerned about gmo but not the other crap in Cheerios, you can eat the original since their whole grain oats are not gmo, probably because, um, GMO oats don’t exist. Yet.
“We use a small amount of cornstarch in cooking and just one gram of sugar per serving for taste. But our corn starch comes from non-GMO corn, and we use only non-GMO pure cane sugar.”
But hey you know how GMOs seeds work. A stray GMO seed blows out of a wheat or corn field and breeds with a species in the wild or on a neighboring farm. The modified gene proliferates and spreads through the population, and there you have it: a sullied seed forever.
Whoops.
“In the 17 long years since USDA gained new statutory authorities, GE crops have cost farmers billions of dollars in lost revenue from transgenic contamination and herbicide drift damage,” says Andrew Kimbrell, executive director at Center for Food Safety.
Just in case their site adds a disclaimer stating that there is always the “ small chance of some small amount of material coming from some other source, such as in shipping or manufacturing.”
Keep in mind that other Cheerios varieties use other grains, such as corn, that is from GM seed.
The Honey Nut Cheerios campaign also included giving out more than 1.5 billion free seeds. The seeds, once planted, were meant to provide more nectar for the declining bee population.
Sounds good, right? Yes when you are dealing in the superficial. Some of the wildflower species included in the packet of seeds can do serious damage to various ecosystems across the US.
“The packets contain more than 20 species of seeds, including some that are banned in certain states because they can “take up all the space and use up all the resources” and “spread disease” that could be detrimental to plants and humans, an ecologist told Lifehacker. For example, continues Lifehacker, the packets contain California poppy seeds that are listed as an “invasive exotic pest plant” in the Southeast. The California poppy is nice in California but listed as an “invasive exotic pest plant” in southeastern states. And many of the flowers on this list are not native to anywhere in the US, so they are not necessarily good matches for our local bees.
In response to the article, Cheerios said none of the seed varieties in the packets are considered invasive and that all of them are already available at retailers across the US.
“General Mills worked with Veseys Seeds and their experts on this program,” the company said in a statement. “It has been field-tested and is known to attract honey bees, bumble bees, and other native bees such as mining bees, leafcutter bees, sweet bees and long-horned bees.”
Modern Agriculture: The Bigger Picture Stings
Let’s make it clear, massive conventional farming with its monocultures and chemicals is not an act of kindness. Crop fields are sprayed with insecticides that can harm bees, and herbicides that kill the weeds that bees depend on. We use 5.6 billion pounds of pesticides per year designed to kill living things that also wants to feed on (our) growing food. Poisons are not picky.
There’s more to creating a bee-friendly habitat than just planting flowers. These need to be organic and people need to understand –since home pesticide use is just as grave a problem — that if they spray pesticides on or near the flowers, the bees are in danger.
Chronic exposure to pesticides also is harming humans. They have been linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, hormone disruption, developmental disorders, and sterility. Farmers and agricultural workers, communities living near plantations, indigenous communities and pregnant women and children are particularly vulnerable to pesticide exposure and require special protections
How about using a campaign to overturn the myth that “pesticides are necessary to feed the world and create a global process to transition toward safer and healthier food and agricultural production.”
“Nutrition: That’s the Cheerios Tradition.”
Yah right.
Watch Ellen And People Going Cheerios Over Cash.
