The ancient Chinese tradition of drinking tea dates back thousands of years to the early Chinese dynasties and aristocrats who drank the beverage for its medicinal properties. In ancient times, leaves from the Camellia Sinensis (the tea plant) were either ground into a powder or placed as loose leaves directly into water to infuse it with herbal essence. Unfortunately, modern-day tea is nothing like the unadulterated version of old tea. Many of today’s tea brands are operating under the guise of providing health benefits and promoting clean living, but are actually laden with pesticides, toxins, artificial ingredients, added flavors, and GMOs. One in 20 flowering plants is naturally transgenic, carrying bacterial DNA within their genomes. The added genes can make them produce unusual chemicals, and the species they have been found in include tea, bananas, and peanuts. Many of the beers contain one or more possible GMO ingredients. High Fructose Corn Syrup (Guinness – unable to provide an affidavit for non-GMO proof) Corn syrup (Miller Light, Coors, Corona, Fosters, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Red Stripe) Dextrose (Budweiser, Bud Light, Busch Light, Michelob Ultra) Corn (Red Stripe, Miller Coors Brand, Anheuser-Busch Brands) Most beers brewed commercially are made with more GMO corn than barley. Agrobacterium is a bacterium with special properties: it has evolved to be able to insert its DNA directly into the genomes of a wide variety of plants. In sweet potatoes, this happened naturally, centuries or millenia ago, long before humans were cultivating it. But then we came along, and (apparently) we liked the taste of these naturally transgenic sweet potatoes, so those are the ones that we chose to cultivate. As a result, all the sweet potatoes we eat are GMOs, although it happened naturally. Here are the natural GMO foods, all of them transgenic, with the common name followed by the formal species name in brackets: bananas (Musa acuminata) beer (hops) (Humulus lupulus) cranberries (Vaccinium macrocarpon) date-plum (Diospyros lotus) guava (Psidium guajava) peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) pomelo fruit (Citrus maxima) Suriname cherry (Eugenia uniflora) sweet potatoes (Ipomoea species) tea (Camellia sinensis, which is used for most teas) walnuts (Juglans species) yams (Dioscorea alata) Anti-GM dogma is obscuring the real debate over what level of genetic manipulation society deems acceptable. Genetically-modified food is often regarded as something you’re either for or against, with no real middle ground. And let’s be clear, with global population set to hit nine billion by 2050 and the increasingly greater strain on the environment, GMOs have the potential to improve health, increase yields, and reduce our impact.