GMO foods a good thing or bad?

I wonder how the peanut would fare in such a test. Also, given that peanuts can cause allergic reactions, should they be banned?

Given that so many foods have been genetically modified by selective breeding and hybridization, even dating back to ancient people, I wonder how the demarcation might be made between modern techniques and those of antiquity.

I agree that it's highly unlikely that some carefully reengineered DNA sequence might affect fetal development. Eating DNA is a completely different than infusing it into a healthy cell nucleus the way a virus does. Besides, we should have already seen mass mutations just from eating the DNA in conventional high protein foods, including wild game.

 

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no. there are many allergies and only very small amounts of a protein "not you" can trigger them - much less than the liver would notice and react to.

The immune system is almost unbelievable: a good approximation of the "antigen" (I think that is the term) of every compound that has ever existed or ever will exist is in you body´s immune system! When it reacts even weakly with the invading protein, and cases a great increase of closely related antigens to be produced, some of which will attack the invader better. They will in turn make a great number more antigens that closely resemble them, etc. until soon you have rapidly growing number of optimized antigens for that "not you" protein. It is a non-random selection amplification process - not a Darwinian selection process.

Unfortunately immune system goes after things that it should not, even proteins that "are you" - one common and very troublesome case is arthritis.

I´m not sure, but if memory serves me correctly, the thyroid is where information about "what is you" protiens is stored. It is all nearly impossible to believe!

 

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Why is that bad?

Good article/speech from a former anti-GMO "environmentalist" (reformed):

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013...modified-crops/?intcmp=HPBucket#ixzz2HLjyixsp

 

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It's obviously bad to significantly and irreversibly change food from what we're evolved to eat to something with a significant amount of random and unknown elements in its place.

Relatively little is known or understood about how organisms end up using food. If food scientists were as knowledgeable and precise as some people seem to believe, then they could simply make food themselves from raw materials without any biological input. Rather what they're doing is just manipulation rather than engineering, they are just taking a chance.

A good analogy might be trying to hack with some a computer software that has very sophisticated AI by opening it with something like notepad and editing values here and there, along with lots of knowledge and experience from others. Then putting it through very limited testing later on to check to see if the AI appeared to remain at the same level after the modifications.

Sure, maybe nothing about the AI will be damaged. Maybe all it did was really change the colour of the plant. However GMO scientists can never know since they are inserting, deleting and replacing large chunks of DNA while having little clue of the consequences.

Interesting. I would definitely agree that there are a lot of people out there who proclaimed themselves as being anti-GMO who damaged the credibility of the people behind the concerns of the technology. The genuine concerns are concrete and legitimate.

 

If you know what they are. So far we can't make changes to a genome and know with any certainty what they will do.

So you have a new millet that you want to test. It's been genetically engineered to survive in drought areas, and can survive in saline soils and in warmer climates. Save the world from hunger! Only good can come of this! So you grow some in your lab in Wyoming and test the heck out of it. None of the proteins you find are toxic so you ship it off to Africa.

Turns out that the very heat-shock proteins that help it survive, and are not expressed in cooler climates, _are_ toxic, and you don't find out for a few years. It bioaccumulates until it becomes deadly, at which point there's not much you can do.

So you pull it off the market. Turns out, though, that it's been cross-pollinating with domestic millet and now 10% of all the millet in Africa expresses those proteins when it's hot out. They are out-competing other millet, of course, because they are hardier. (Which after all was the point.) You're responsible for fixing the problem you created here. What do you do?

That's an extreme case, of course. But saying "it can be easily tested for toxic effects" isn't true. Of course it can be tested, but it has to be a rigorous and exhaustive (read: expensive and long) test.

Of course not. That's a strawman argument; no one suggested that.

 

I wouldn't waste my breath billvon, that guy has no idea what he's talking about.

edit: great post though, maybe it takes less effort from you than it would from me.

 

GMO food is anything but random or unknown. It is engineered and tested. The only semi-viable argument about the "unknown" is the length of time it is tested. But the longer we go without significant problems, the lower the probability gets. "Random", however, is a completely inapplicable word here.

Genetic engineering has changed our food has changed for the better. That's a good thing.

Neither of those is true and there is no reason the second should need to be.

I don't care much for arguing about labels, but "taking a chance" is a mis-characterization. They aren't randomly combining genes, they are selecting specific genes/traits to splice together.

That's a good analogy for your characterization and a good demonstration of why your characterization is wrong. And it is obviously wrong: the genetic code is complicated enough that it wouldn't be possible to do genetic engineering with random manipulation. They have to have some understanding of what the code they are splicing does in order to be successful.

Very few actual scientists consider the concerns to be genuine or legitimate. The concerns you are raising about creating toxic compounds and then not finding them Until! Its! Too! Late! are hypothetical at best. GMO food has been around for quite a while now and in extraordinarily widespread use. And the longer it goes, the lower this hypothetical risk.

Given a choice between an obscure, hypothetical risk and a known benefit, I choose the known benefit.

 

That would be true if we were not making new GMO's. We are. Thus we are increasing risk with new foods at the same time that risk is decreasing with more established foods.

They are trying. Keep in mind though that the science is nowhere near precise; a biologist might have to create 10,000 cultures to get one with the new trait. And quite often it is inserted in a completely random location in the target genome, and quite often the new genetic material kills the organism. It might take another 100 to get one that survives. It is far from selecting a location on a target genome, hitting the "insert" button then reaping the resulting healthy organism.

They are quite legitimate. Genetic modification of organisms can indeed have deadly consequences.

This argument is devolving to two sets of extremists arguing unreasonable positions. It reminds me of the arguments about nuclear power, with one faction arguing that it is perfectly safe and nothing can happen to a modern nuclear plant, with the other faction telling us that inevitable meltdowns will kill millions. Scientists, in general, hold neither one of those foolish positions.

GMO's, like nuclear power, are a powerful tool we can use for good. We can use it to improve yields, grow food in more areas, bring better nutrition to people etc. It is also a remarkably dangerous technology, and must be treated with the utmost care and clear knowledge of the harm it can do.

 

If the GMO has been intentionally imitating a standard breeding program, one way to tell would be by the presence of the auxiliary code stretches used to insert it and check on its successful implantation – significant risk factors in themselves (inter-phylum, even, mobility; antibiotic resistance spread; etc)
If the GMO is one of the common ones now being marketed, the code would not only be framed by auxiliary code easily spotted, but would itself be nothing like anything one would find in such an organism – like an ant in Hawaii or a goat in the Galapagos or syphilis in Genoa in 1493, it would stand out as a new and alien factor carrying qualitatively different possibilities of behavior and effect.

They are clearly labeled, by law. They are not added to food products cryptically, concealed.

That is dangerous bullshit. Nothing like this GM stuff has ever been done by people before now. It ‘s a completely new field of endeavor, it’s a huge and multifaceted field, and nobody has familiarity with even a single aspect of it.

No, they aren’t.

The thread topic is GMO foods.
Example: in the most common GM soybeans, molecules derived from bacterial breakdown of the herbicide complex stored in the plant are sometimes released into the small intestine. Some possibly hazardous aspects of the herbicide itself are thereby able to bypass the denaturing by the stomach acids, formerly a defense against simply swallowing small quantities of the herbicide directly. Also, the herbicide itself is more intensively applied, and exposure is higher.
Example: Monsanto at one point had distributed to market quantities of soybeans modified to include Brazil nut code. Only a voluntary effort driven by the curiosity of an accidentally informed researcher unconnected with Monsanto or any governmental agency caught the stuff, and the discovery that the modifications involved did trigger nut allergy in people came as news to the corporation.
Nut allergy can kill. People who suffer from it have to be careful to avoid exposure – but how can one avoid exposure when it’s hidden in some completely different crop or food ?

Maybe, maybe not – depends on what they are. And will they be? They haven’t been so far. Meanwhile, the code itself is not necessarily harmless even in the limited arena of direct harm to human health – the antibiotic resistance genetics often used by the techies as markers of successful modification, for example, are now available to the bacteria in the human gut during digestion, specifically engineered to abet mobility – that strike you as safe?

Unless by “better” you mean more profitable for the patent owners, it hasn’t. Not yet. There is lots of good potential , but the accomplishments so far are in other directions.

No. It is very new – the oldest employment is less than thirty years, and the majority of the employments less than fifteen. It took more than forty years for the genetic flaw (some uniformity of code) in the Irish potato crop to be revealed – whereupon it killed or evicted half the population of the entire country in three years. And that was a simple flaw already known to the people who had experience with potatoes.

Only this past year, for example, we discovered that the GM crops widely planted across North America don’t handle drought as well as the older standard bred varieties. That was not predicted, by the proponents of these crops. They don't know even the basic responses of the entire plant - the aspect of GM tech they have the most experience with - in the real world. Never mind the fancy new stuff.

 

Posts #68 and #69 would get a 'thank you' or 'like' from me if this forum had such a feature. The points raised align with the reading that I have been doing. Some benefits to be had but a lot of unknowns and definitely concerns about some of the regulatory process not being transparent and accessible.

 

I'm not really opposed to GMO foods but I would like to know they will be safe before they are being sold in every store across the nation, and will vote for mandatory clear food labeling for all GMO foods.

The link below has a list of GMO free brands. Can't say I'm familiar with any of them.

http://nourishedkitchen.com/gmo-free-food/

 

I'm familiar with some of them and am presently using Bob's Red Mill flour, Thai Kitchen Coconut milk, Nature's Path Mesa Sunrise cereal, and Lundenberg Risotto Mix. Our store also carries Walker's Shortbread cookies, Imagine gluten free cookies, Vitasoy Soy milk, Garden of Eatin chips and Kettle chips. Of the one's I am using, I find them to be good quality foods with excellent attention to detail and shelf dates.

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Just because you abuse your own body don't expect everyone else to. Disgusting list of foods even without the GMOs. Have fun with your diabetes and possible cancer in a few years time.

 

I expect everyone to make their own food choices. Currently, I am researching the gluten free diet and the four products listed that I use are gluten free and form a very small percentage of my diet. The other products are carried by the store and I do not consider them to be excellent foods, even though they are GM free.

The topic of this thread is GM foods and not opinions on what others eat.

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Genetic modifications of foods have produced huge benefits with few if any known problems in the last 10,000 years. It was a slow trial and error or random Darwinian process (with man, not "nature," doing the selections) until a few decades ago.
As data presented here: http://www.sciforums.com/showthread...thing-or-bad&p=3032852&viewfull=1#post3032852 shows the yield of wheat production per acre has increase ~40 fold, typically being 8.5 long tons per hectare now from the "Natural wheat" yield of only 1/4 ton per hectare. In countries short of crop land, like China and New Zeeland*, more fertilizer, etc. is used for significantly larger yield. NZ currently holds the record (China did until a few years ago) with more than 15 tons / hectare. That is 60 fold increases in food production, thanks to genetic modification man has made.

The old methods were tested for safety by having people eat the produced new proteins, but now Monsanto, etc. test more safely with chemical screening for known toxins, animal test, etc.

I put "Natural wheat" in quotes as it does not exist. As discussed at the link above, Wheat is the accidental cross between two wild grasses which then crossed with still a third species and finally that three way species cross was many times incestuously crossed with the original three (and their derivatives) to improve it from man´s POV. The two biggest improvements were: (1) Japanese made a dwarf variety that did not waste so much energy and resources in making tall stocks that the wind could blow over and ruin the entire field in one rain storm & (2) much earlier genetic modifications, by trial and error selection, developed a variation that did not drop the grains.- It could not re-seed itself. Prior to this some grains dropped off and were lost before others were ripe. (Modern wheat is so "un-natural" that it can not survive without man harvesting and replanting small part of the harvest.) Much of genetic engineering has been to develop fruits that all matured at the same time and had longer "shelf life" in the grocery store. - Huge reductions in economic losses and lower cost of your food.

It is possible that some new proteins may cause allergic reactions, almost always in less than 1% of the population, that animal testing cannot predict. The allergic people can learn what not to eat, instead making 99+% of the population pay 10 to 50 times more for completely natural food. In the case of fully "natural wheat," the cost reduction which a genetic modification has delivered is much more than 10 fold. The same people opposing genetic modified foods are often those complaining about the cost of food.

I would agree that GM food should be so labeled for at least a decade of mass consumption testing but see no need of that if after more than a decade in which no problems have been detected. Everything man has developed, even fire and gasoline for IC engines, has risks, but when the benefits are 50 or more times greater than the costs, and the ill effects can be avoided, it is STUPID, almost criminal, to out law these advances. If we went back to truly natural foods (genes in them that existed 10,000+ years ago before man began to make genetic modifications by crude chance processes) eliminating the better crops and animals made via genetic modifications then at least 90% of the globe´s population would need to die.

I.e. outlawing all but true natural foods is about a STUPID as it gets. What sort of rules would you permit for genetic modification? For example do you advocate only ignorant chance change be permited, etc.?

* NZ is not "short of crop land" but finds it more profitble to use it for sheep pasture - As I recall, there are something like 20 sheep in NZ for every person living there!

 

Ignorant chance change eh?

How about no change at all. We are evolved to eat such foods, therefore we should not mess with them. One might raise the philosophical argument that they have always been changing therefore we should allow them to change slightly over time. However what you're suggesting doing is 1) To routinely do something where even one of your interventions would likely take millions of years to occur in the wild.... once again QUANTITY AND RATE ACTUALLY DO MATTER! and 2) To routinely do things that would be literally impossible to ever occur through any evolutionary process all in one go.

Every organism has an ideal environment - the one that is closest to what it has evolved towards. If you change the human environment (and by environment I am including foods as a highly important part of that) then by definition the organism isn't going to be doing so well. I think this pretty obvious paragraph should be in every school textbook since even though evolutionary scientists know it very well, many individuals seem to have strange mental blocks towards it.

Your entire post is about economic issues and yields of GMOs, something which I have zero interest in and would make no claims about.

You didn't mention anything about these foods not fitting correctly with humans because they have been tampered with in an arbitrary fashion, upsetting many systems and changing all types of quantities and formations of nutrients in the process.

You sure do write a lot for someone who was mixing up eating plants and eating their gametes on the previous page. Some joke.

 

We did not evolve to eat any of the foods you consider natural. Corn, rice, beans, apples, pineapples - all look very, very different than the food our ancestors ate.

You have that exactly backwards. Our NATURAL environment included dysentery, plague, starvation and high rates of infant mortality. Death through contaminated water and rotten meat was common. That's why we have pretty capable immune systems; our ancestors taxed them to the limit, and even then a great many died.

The reason we are doing so well now (i.e. you can reasonably expect a child to survive to their teens) is because we screwed around with our natural environment so we could live longer and survive more reliably. We have done that by radically changing our environment, which includes what we eat, what we drink, how we protect ourselves, how we prepare food etc etc.

Want to live in your "natural" environment? Eat carrion, forage for food, eat mushrooms without regard for whether they are poisonous or not. Poop in a pond and use that as your water source. Discard your unnatural house and live outside. And depending how far back you want to go, get rid of either all your clothing or any clothing not made from uncured animal skins and bark. Give birth on a dirt floor. How well are you (and your children) going to do?

And you seem to have the standard misconception about what our "natural environment" was - that it was a utopia of free modern foods, where you picked plump ripe apples off a healthy tree and washed them down with cool spring water. It wasn't anything like that.

 

We have evolved very little in the short span of last 10,000 years, but 100% of all man made changes in the food he eats has occurred since them. Almost all of our evolution took place over millions of years, prior to 10K years ago. Natural selection by the environment is a very slow process, but rare now that man has been actively selecting during the last 10K years. Look how may dog types he has created from the wolf ancestor of all in the last 10K years.

If you want to eat the only foods we evolved with (foods with same genes as those of more than 10,000 years ago) then you will be very hungry - no wheat, rice, bean, potatoe, corn, etc. products, none of the fruits and vegetables you find in the store, etc. - Man ate mainly wild tubers, some grasses, and when he could some proteins, like grubs, snakes, etc. that are easy to catch plus when his tribe got lucky a larger animal or the left overs of some tiger´s kill etc. if and when they could drive the true owner of the kill off with rocks. Our ancestors brought back to their caves the long bones that the tigers and lions could not open but he could. There are many caves known where only the long bone fragments are found - not the lesser bones the tigers etc. could crack with their jaws. Apes and some monkeys probably learned by watching man how to use a chewed stick to get termites out of their hive and into his mouth. I hope you don´t starve before you get good at catching termites, roaches and other beetles, etc. Quite a few nutritious things, especially earthworms, live under rocks - don´t forget to look for them.

 

Don't talk to me about "what you consider natural". I do not consider those foods natural to the human diet at all, apples may be reasonably similar to what humans ate. Figs, oranges, bananas grapes are the types of natural foods humans ate.

billyvon I'm going to be straight with you here: I will not learn anything from you, okay? You will learn stuff from me. I know anyone can say that, but I'm just trying to be honest.

Contaminated water and rotten meat were not problems for our earliest ancestors, because they lived in the savana and previous to that the jungle and ate a diet of predominantly fruit which contains more than enough water. They only needed to eat meat rarely, and they certainly wouldn't have eaten rotting meat.

That's just not true. The apes in the jungle today, when not encroached on by humans, are doing far better than humans. I'll grant you that these myths persist in popular culture. However in the jungle there is fruit as far as the eye can see most of the year. There is almost no disease... that came with the start of civilization and reached a peak during the middle ages.

We are not surviving longer or in better shape due to civilization and we never have. Life expectancy only plummeted at the start of the neolithic period (ie. when agriculture came about), before that we don't know how long humans lived but if we go by how long apes live in the jungle today it would have been their full limit of lifespan most of the time.

They would do brilliantly, apart from some untrue rhetorical devices you've thrown in there, that is how we're perfectly evolved to live. They would get the perfect amount of exercise and would enjoy it, they would be eating only fresh, raw organic fruit. If the fruit is imperfect they would TASTE that it's imperfect and find a different one, instead of stupidly adding flavouring to it to fool their body into thinking it's good food. It's only EXTREMELY rarely that people were starving in primitive times, it's a myth that civilization has done anything at all to improve the circumstances of any of humanity. In the wild animals don't get obesity, they don't get macular degeneration, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular disease (some apes do when they are put on human foods, tooth decay (same as for cardiovascular disease), asthma and so on. It's so obvious it's ridiculous.

Oh yes it was, and you can still see it today. It's really extraordinary how much fruit you can find in a single metre square of the canopy, enough to feed someone for well over a day. Fruits also exist and are available the whole year around in the forest, it's another terrible illusion that they're not. Apes are rarely hungry, they play with each other, have fights of varying degrees of aggression and have all sorts of social and sexual situations. They only ever start to get hungry when humans or other species are encroaching on their land.

I don't have any "standard misconception". Hardly anyone thinks it was the way I'm saying. The typical conception is of hunger and short lifespan (even though there is zero evidence for that).

And yet there is still only one dog, he has not evoked speciation in even one animal (as far as I know, certainly not the dog), something extremely common in nature.

The fruits available in the store are quite similar to what primordial man ate. Humans have always selected fruits even before civilization (as have all the other apes). Artificial selection after the start of agriculture did pervert fruit a bit, but it's still tolerably similar to many wild variations of the fruit that are found in the wild today.

This is all nonsense.

Man ate mainly fruit, as do all the other apes. He ate the most delicious fruit you could imagine.

Man never ate "some grasses" except maybe when he was extremly hungry and starving.

Man also would never eat wild tubers except when he was extremely hungry and starving OR after the invention of fire. We evolved very little after the invention of fire.

 

typical animal give some support for your romatic idea that primative man had year round fruits and vegitables to eat. Here is what some PhD scientist who have researcher the question have to say:

The article is by a pro natural diet group and titled: "NATURAL HYGIENE DIET." The goal of the organization is "Scientific approach to health based on the natural laws fo life" but they are honest Ph.D scientists, not imagnative dreamers like you making implausible postulates about what food the enviroment offered.

BTW, even today, very hungry people eat dirt.