GMO foods a good thing or bad?

Sorry, they are nothing like what we used to eat. They are the result of centuries of selective breeding and meddling. Bananas as you know them did not even exist in the market until around the 1500's. (If you don't want to look it up, here's an easy way of seeing if this is true - find the seeds in a modern banana.)

Sounds like you won't learn anything from anyone.

You have the classic woo-woo vision of the "natural utopia" we used to live in. We didn't eat meat because we chose to, we ate it because we ate whatever we could to avoid starvation. That's why our GI tract and our dentition is that of an omnivore rather than a herbivore.

That is very Disney - but not grounded in the real world. Let's look at some real world data. Let's just take age they live to; that's a simple number to compare.

Marmosets live 10 years in the wild and 16 years in captivity.
Toque macaque: Usually under 5 years in the wild, 33-35 years in captivity
Chimpanzee: 30-50 years in the wild 50-75 years in captivity
Gorilla: 25-50 years in the wild, 50-54 years in captivity

Of course. We must have invented dysentery, polio and malaria.

Again, reality tells a different story. See above.

So you figure you'll just eat mushrooms you find in the wild, and rely on your taste buds to tell you which one is imperfect?

Try it. Let us know how it goes.

 

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There is disagreement over what exactly australopithecus ate, Sussman and Harte have PhDs (or are at least similarly accredited) and argue that man was mainly a frugivore or had a plant-based diet in that period in their book Man the Hunted.

As far as I know the seeds are small and you eat them automatically.

yeah exactly. Our favourite food is fruit and we only eat meat sometimes, like all the other great ape.

These figures are completely ballpark speculations, it is really unknown how long any of them live in the wild. This is a known problem among primatologists - we do not know how long any of these animals live in the wild.... or at least can live in the wild if they're not eaten by predators or face some other grizzly end. True, most consider that they live longer in captivity, but this is mainly based on 1) The fact that they face less mortal dangers of predation in the wild and 2) false speculation that medicines etc. must be keeping them alive longer than they otherwise would have.

Such diseases don't exist in the jungle. I don't know what caused them to arise, but it was something about the lack of hygiene in the first civilizations when they moved from the outdoors to living in large cities.

I don't know what your obsession is with mushrooms, I have never considered mushrooms a very natural thing for humans to eat and it's not one of the foods early humans would have eaten a lot of if at all.

But yes, reliance on tastebuds is a very good thing. They are finely attuned to eat the food that's most healthy for the person eating it... that's how your tastebuds evolved.

 

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No, modern bananas have no seeds. They are cultivars, grown only from cuttings; they cannot live in the wild. If you ever accidentally ate a natural banana you'd probably spit it out (which would keep you from breaking your teeth on the large inedible seeds in the hand grenade shaped fruit.)

References:

Sixth Edition of 'Walker's Mammals of the World' show all the above average ages in the wild

Johnathan Wright, UK zoologist: "Wild animals seldom show signs of senility or extreme old age. They rarely approach their maximum possible age due to very high death rates due to infant mortality, diseases, predators, bad weather, accidents, or competition for food and shelter. "

National Geographic: Chimpanzees - Average life span in the wild: 45 years

Research by Dian Fossey: Titus (gorilla) - died at age 35 in the wild
NPR story: Ivan (gorilla) - died at age 50 in a zoo

Well, you can write down the age they die and subtract it from the age they are born; that gives you a pretty good idea. And with Fossey, Goodall, Boysen etc observing primates in the wild for decades you can get that information.

Yes, that's one of the many ways to die in the wild. In the wild, animals and injury can kill them. A wound infection that will kill them in the wild is treatable in a zoo. Once their teeth get so bad they can't eat, a zoo can change their diet to softer/more digestible foods. At a zoo they don't starve when food is scarce or when an injury prevents them from hunting/foraging for a week. Etc.

Malaria doesn't exist in the jungle?????

Right - which is why so many people find Big Macs and pop tarts tasty.

 

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Research by Dian Fossey. Wow, a single comparison, it must be proven so!!! We can conclude P <= 0.5

Do you know of the book How and Why We Age? Hayflick talks about all of this including predation and infant mortality which skew the average lifespan down from the maximum lifespan. Though tracking may seem trivial in a world where we have electronic tags easily implemented into cattle, 50 years ago it was very hard to track a completely wild animal during all that time without doing any interfering. I think there is a wild oranguntan that is around 60 years old, but they are rarely tracked... especially considering the continuous threats of predation. "day 2,322: today our wild orangutan got eaten by a passing leopard. Unfortunately we still have no idea of its natural lifespan."

Civilization did get rid of the threats of most large predators... true. That's something it did do. But most of the time they did live well, and hardly even showed any signs of aging until their death. Chimpanzees for instance lose practically none of their brain mass as they get older. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903999904576468224286877908.html?mod=WSJ_hp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsTop .... that is a human phenomenon caused by the modern world - though it's true that most scientists assume it's genetic for now.

Anyway this is just as an aside to the GMO question and are just my own opinions: I'm not expecting anyone to agree with all this or stating very obvious or whatever like I am about the GMOs. They are two separate issues. The GMOs are constantly going to be eating away at the integrity of real food - that is completely obvious because they are doing things with the DNA that they don't understand. So talking about the realities of primitive man is kind of irrelevant to that argument because you only have to know a tiny amount about evolution to realize that GMOs are totally crazy to allow out there.

Animals don't brush their teeth and they don't get bad teeth in the wild. Don't you find that strange? My teeth have been perfect ever since I started a hugely improved (more natural) diet and started flossing them (true I would have no floss in the wild.. however something is still amiss here). Only when they start eating heavily processed food as humans do do they get bad teeth. Dr. Weston Price, a dentist himself, showed this long ago in his now public domain book . Nutrition and Phyiscal Degeneration

Not to the same extent that it exists in many African regions.

Big Macs and pop tarts are modern inventions specifically designed to fool our tastebuds, but you're right, I should have added that as a clause.

 

Nope. That was just one example out of a list of them.

If orangutans get eaten by natural leopards because they are slowing down naturally, then their natural lifespan is set by that leopard (and all the other ways to die, of course.)

And yet we have uncovered human bones tens of thousands of years old with advanced arthritis. Odd, eh?

OK. So don't eat them. Better yet, move to Kenya and live on the plains where you will live to a ripe old age in comfort and health. Your choice.

Yes, because it's not true. Elephants die when they lose their last teeth, generally from wear:
=================
Elephant Teeth

Elephant dentition is unique. In most animals, including humans, teeth are produced from the top and bottom of the mouth. In elephants however, the teeth are developed from the back and push forward. Elephant have six sets of molars in their lifetime and as a tooth wears out through relentless grinding, another pushes forward to replace it. . . .

The loss of teeth is the leading cause of death among mature elephants. As the final molar begins to break down, it becomes increasingly difficult to chew and digest food. Elephants in this predicament often die of starvation or malnutrition.
=================

That's also why we have wisdom teeth. Believe it or not, we did not evolve to have teeth come in at 21 years of age just to give dentists something to do. They come in that late to replace teeth that have worn/decayed away, which they do in the wild. Since the average age of humans in the wild was around 35 years, you didn't need replacement teeth after that.

If you had been in the wild you would have worn out/broken several teeth by now from chewing fruit seeds, getting rocks and grit in your grubs, gnawing on bone etc.

They're not fooling it. To a human in the Paleolithic era, getting all the fat and sugar he could was a very, very good thing; it would fatten him up and allow him to survive the next winter/next famine/next drought. In this era of abundance, though, it drives us to eat too much.

 

Your confusion of evolutionary change and standard breeding with modern genetic engineering is dangerously ignorant.

Ignorant because it is not informed concerning the nature of the actual genetic alterations being made. ("Genetic change" is not some kind of amorphous category of event all examples of which fundamentally resemble each other. ) Dangerous because it aligns with the propaganda operations of industrial agriculture, and spreads attitudes founded in the ignorance above to politically significant numbers of people.

Not even the secondary premise - that similarity to standard breeding would imply familiarity and therefore a degree of safety - is true.

Before agriculture human teeth lasted long after the 35th birthday on average - as did the humans, if they had survived the hazards of youth. Even the relatively simple and short-range genetic alterations of agriculture had serious side effects for many years, leading to shortened and less healthy lives for entire tribes and populations of people (worth it overall, in the Darwinian sense, for the advantage in military power and reduction of childhood starvation, but kind of hard on the old folks with rotting teeth and malnourished bodies).

The old style hunter gatherers may have been sparse and prone to violence, accident, sudden starvation, etc, - but escaping those misfortunes, based on diet alone, they were taller and stronger and had better teeth and lived longer, healthier lives. The genetic changes of agricultural were not what we would call "good for people" in many respects.

They are so close to what we used to eat that their wild progenitors can be identified and the short list of point mutations and duplications/transpositions involved can be listed by simply comparing the wild variety with the domesticated.

The products of genetic engineering, is what they are nothing like.

 

True, and I conceded that civilization did tend to remove the dangers of leopards and such. One might argue that people getting killed in such ways is a necessary process of evolution... but I'll agree that civilization did do well on this clearly defined macro process which humans do understand - something we do not understand is what happens when we give people vaccines or things like antibiotics.

Yes, though it was really since humans came out of Africa 70,000 years ago that everything fell apart. They had to make do with foods they did not like because those were all that were available. We have practically no fossils or bones from when man lived in Africa, in the savana or jungle, because those places are not any good for preserving such material. That's why Lucy, the remains of a single being that time, has been so important.

I would agree there is some limited natural wear and tear on mammals as they grow older, arthritis, loss of some muscle etc. One might legitimately argue that this can be balanced by their "experience" and "knowledge" of what to do in certain situations. Notably in non-human apes the elders seem to typically have the most influence on group behaviour (influence being different to power).

And you know I'm not arguing that everything was perfect, then suddenly came along and suddenly unnatural behaviour was invented and there were "errors" starting to pop up everywhere, and that humans are the only species capable of acting unnaturally (that would be human exceptionalism... putting a clear division between humans and other mammals). Maybe the fact that reptile-like creatures started to survive on land was where the first "unnatural" behaviour came in. Maybe chimpanzees using tools is an unnatural behaviour. However I can tell you something: humans are the ones that are going to destroy everything vastly faster than some chimp fashioning points out of sticks.

Maybe I will at some point in my life, but as you know there are all kinds of practical drawbacks to such a plan.

I had my wisdom teeth long before 21 years of age. I'm having a lot of internet trouble right now and can't look it up now, I just hope I can post this.

However I can tell you that I went from having to go to the dentist every six months or so for fillings and not even being able to eat apples, to having perfect teeth and never having any problems with them after I started doing this. I would recommend it to anyone.

Before this, my dentist was practically begging me to allow him to take them out!! He was acting like it was completely normal to get them taken out, a simple ordinary procedure. I really recommend you or anyone to try the above, floss and I also take magnesium/calcium tablets... I don't know if they have anything to do with it, but I'm not going to break something that works to find out.

Again, I'm not saying that the jungle was some kind of amazing paradise, but it didn't have these pathological and chronic problems that are going to change everything. If you died back then, at least your tribe would live on.

Nope, all this stuff about preparing for the winter/next famine/drought is a complete myth. It's what you read about when you read the excuses for why people are so fat. In the wild animals NEVER overeat or "fatten themselves up for the next famine", never, never, never. There can be fruit all around but if they've had their fill they will refuse to eat anymore, and remain extremely thin (by today's standards).

The great apes including humans can not and do not store fat in such a way as to keep it for bad things. In fact, a medium sized individual would survive a famine a lot better than a very overweight person. The overweight person is -3500 calories every day under his norm while the lighter individual is far less desperate for calories. All kinds of havoc is created in the overweight individual, stress hormones released full flow, huge shifts of all kinds of physiological aspects of the fat person are created (ever wonder why some people simply cannot lose weight? It's because of these extremely painful shifts and many will never comfortably be thin). Meanwhile, the medium sized person can go into famine-mode without extraordinary stress and in the end last longer.

 

We know they live longer.

That is quite likely. And as technology improved, that knowledge was a bigger and bigger benefit, and thus led to longer lives.

Sure - but you are perfectly free to do it. And if it is how you want to live, then go for it; don't make excuses to delay it forever. If you don't want to do it, that's fine too.

True today as well; your family lives on.

And to expand on your statement, today is not an amazing paradise. But we are living longer, healthier lives overall.

Bears don't eat to fatten themselves up for winter? Squirrels don't get fat in fall? Interesting claim. Have you ever lived anywhere there are both squirrels and seasons?

However, it is definitely true that wild animals do not get _too_ fat. Morbidly obese squirrels, for example, are quickly eaten by predators - which is why there are no morbidly obese squirrels. The same used to be true for humans. Nowadays that is not an issue.

 

Only recently have we managed to get back to the length of healthy life enjoyed by those Cro-Magnons who avoided violent misfortune, and we still (barring the Netherlands) haven't reached the average adult height (probably the best single proxy measure of overall health and good living) of the Cheyenne nation in North America circa 1800.

And this is in the First World industrial countries.

Clearly agriculture itself - the mere domestication of food plants - was originally a tradeoff, of quantity for quality in a sense: more lived, fewer lived well, for the first few thousand years.

The notion that GM techniques are merely another step in a steady progression, an advance added to a history of advances, involves simplistic history as well as a misconception of how these techniques are being used.

 

Not perfectly free. Someone will say they own the land, own the fruit there. Nobody is really perfectly free to do anything in today's society. The concept of property is natural enough - the great apes are territorial creatures and often jealously guard their mates/food/group territory. However it is not natural that one person would own so much and not even have to defend it in any way themselves.

Furthermore, it would be really nice if someone could just leave, but sooner or later the pollution is going to end up in places like Kenya, the environmental effects of the progress of civilization will reach you. The food prices will probably rise.... the GMOs will reach you and start to breed with the plants there. Nuclear radiation if a nuclear plant explodes nearby. For any kids you have it would be the same thing but getting worse. Nobody can escape from civilization, maybe hundreds of years ago people could but not today.

Exactly, they put on a bit of fat and then hibernate. It's mainly the effect of hibernation that allows them to last for so long without food, not because they become fatasses. Unless I've been consistently missing a huge chunk of evolutionary theory and common knowledge over the years, humans don't have the capacity to hibernate. They have a different type of fat and vastly different metabolism and bodily function during hibernation.

You want to see a fat primate? Check out some negligent zoo or owners that don't care about their animals much because that's the only place you're likely to find them, certainly not in the wild.

I have to admit this discussion turned out better than I was expecting, not trying to tempt fate....

 

Not if you go far enough into the savannah. There are still plenty of places on earth where there are simply no (modern) people.

Not so's you'd notice. I spent a month or so in Sandire in Niger and you could go out into the desert and see nothing but sand, hills and bushes in every direction. Even the air is still pretty clean.

What does food prices have to do with living the life of a noble savage, taking only what you need from trees and bushes? Isn't that what you were talking about?

It's as possible today as it ever was. People just don't want to. Sounds like you don't want to either - which is fine.

From a previous post - "In the wild animals NEVER overeat or "fatten themselves up for the next famine", never, never, never."

So I guess that's better phrases as "in the wild animals SOMETIMES overeat to fatten themselves up, SOMETIMES, SOMETIMES, SOMETIMES." Which I agree with.

Oh, there are some very fatass squirrels living around my parent's house come September. They are quite skinny by April.

Agreed! And that's because in the wild, the fatass primates die when they can't escape their predators, or they can't get to fruit in trees etc.

To put this in terms of human society -
If you put all our food sources on top of 1000 foot hills, and required people to walk up the hills to get to their Big Macs, obesity would disappear as well, for two reasons:
1) People would get more exercise
2) The people who couldn't climb 1000 foot hills (the old, the obese, the lame etc) would die and wouldn't be part of your statistics any more.

Note that is even if they ate exactly the same amount of junk food.

 

The way to feed the world is to have better roads, better trucks, better storage depots.
Smarter infrastructure and planning.

Take India for example.
There has been a debate recently over whether foreign supermarket corporates should be allowed to invest,
and so compete with traditional small local shops.
It will make life harder for poor shopkeepers, but the result of the primitive system used at present is that most food is wasted.
It either goes off, feeds populations of vermin, or spills from the backs of lorries.

Because of the scale they work at, and the profit motive, corporates are far more efficient.

For Tesco, Walmart and other international supermarkets it is time to open the bubbly. The Indian parliament has voted to allow 51% foreign direct investment (FDI) – investment into business in a country by a company in another country – in multi-brand retail. This lays the red carpet for foreign supermarkets to partake more fully in India's $450bn (£280bn) retail sector.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-de...ves-multinationals-supermarkets-farmers-india

 

I imagine you're going to get some backlash from a few people here - like Michael, for example - but certainly not from me.

The primary wastage in places like India is not so much from the small shopkeepers, however, it's mainly from the street vendors. Spoilage/wastage and rodent/vermin problems run rampant in those markets that extend for blocks and blocks. They have no refrigeration, of course, and little if any water to keep the area and produce clean. And many fruits and vegetables have been touched and handled by dozens of people. Sanitation is non-existent (and medical treatment is just about as bad).

Supermarket-style stores would certainly eliminate or control many of those problems - like rodents, insects, spoilage of fresh foods - AND offer things like canned goods which would provide an extended shelf-life of *many* orders of magnitude.

All in all, it's a win-win situation for the general population (and LONG overdue).

 

No takers. OK, I'll argue with myself.

First world suppliers also waste food, almost as much as the Indians.
Any slightly marked or odd shaped vegetables are thrown away.
The supermarkets encourage people to buy more than they need with 2 for 1 offers.
When they go out of date, they end up in the purchasers bin.

It is essential that the Indian government ban these malpractices,
otherwise they may end up no less wasteful than before, and with higher unemployment.

I can't understand why the legislators allowed the corporates 51% of the resulting companies.
49% would mean than the companies were based in India.

 

Progress against silly irrational rules about food is slow even in advanced countries like England. For at least 200 years, it was illegal to sell a highly curved banana - the "bendy banana" rule. I think the test was a straight edge held in contact with the two ends could not be more than an inch away from the middle of the banana. Last year the "bendy banana" became legal to sell instead of trashed canned.

 

Maybe. Until they happen, it can't really be known, only speculated.

While I agree wholeheartedly with the choice of analogy, you used the nuclear power analogy wrong by misrepresented the disposition of the "pro" side. The two sides (in both cases) aren't both crackpots, only one is: the con side. The "pro" side is the mainstream scientific view and the misrepresentation is the idea that anyone would consider *anything* "perfectly safe".

 

Other than exposing your motivating worldview as anti-corporatism, there isn't much I can do with that. It's so spectacularly, bafflingly wrong I wouldn't even begin to know how to try to correct it other than to suggest you start researching better sources. Not worth my time to help you: Good luck.

 

Again, both sides have their crackpots. I have heard people argue that nuclear power is perfectly safe. After Three Mile Island they argued that there was no meltdown; it was a normal shutdown, no problem. After Chernobyl I heard them argue that only RBMK reactors can suffer explosions that damage the containment buildings due to safety features inherent in BWR and PWR reactors. After Fukushima they are having a little more trouble with that angle.

Many are. Some are extremists. Generally they are not the scientists (true of the other side as well.)

Agreed. That's where they make their mistake.

 

"Exposing" your own projections into a world of worldviews you know little about, has nothing to do with me.

As far as showing me wrong, that would be dead easy - a list of a few actual accomplishments, not plans and possibilities and potentials and attempts but marketed or widely employed examples, that fit your description rather than mine, would be the simplest.

You will have some trouble coming up with any length of such a list; that is not because the tactic is difficult or would fail to "correct" me, but because I am correct as posted.

GM techniques have extraordinary potential for benefit. What we have so far by way of accomplishment is less wonderful - herbicide resistance, insecticide production, and similar contributions, with net benefits largely confined to the profit margins of agribusiness concerns.

 

Regarding Corporations.
Unless they are closely watched and controlled, they will do anything they can think of to generate a profit.
They aren't evil, just amoral.
If making a profit entailed risking people's lives or damaging their health, they would do that.
Think of how the food manufacturers pack children's breakfast foods full of sugar.
Think of the cigarette manufacturers working to hide the harmful effects of smoking.

Some of the GMO products may be very useful and help mankind,
others will possibly be harmful.
I for one, wouldn't want the corporates making the decision on which was which.

One GMO product of interest is "Golden Rice", a variety rich in vitamin A precursors.
Is it good or bad?

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Golden Rice. Looks nice.