GMO foods a good thing or bad?

In your ignorance you probably think we evolved while eating things like the fresh, locally grown corn and tomatos that you buy in the grocery store in summer plus milk, pork and chicken with fruits like apples and oranges etc.
On an evolutionary time scale, almost nothing we eat now did we evolve with. For examle:

I might add that cows rarely gave milk and then not more than the new calf needed, Or that chicken, like most birds laid a few eggs once per year, and were scrawny - not more worth trying to catch for food than the crow is today. etc. etc. ...

Go back to eating your wild roots, grasses, some grubs and termites, etc. plus a few fish (and rotting carrion left over from a tiger´s kill, after the tiger´s belly was full and it left the kill for you etc.*) your humanoid ancestors evolved with if you don´t want to eat foods man has greatly modified. Main difference today is the GMO modifications are quicker and better tested for safety. BTW the lastest man made modification to corn can reduce the rate of esophageal cancer - read point (1) in the third quote of my prior post.

Even as recently as Roman times, millet was the main grain available - do you eat millet? - I bet you don´t even know what it is and why it is rarely grown in the developed world now, despite being a very good food - highest of all grains in energy content, etc. Wheat is the natural acidental cross (and back-re crosses) between three different grasses species, but only about 100 years ago, the Japanese modified it to make the grains hold firmly to the shorter shaft they also made (less energy wasted making the shaft). The pre-Japanese mod wheat ripened and fell off the shaft over weeks producing much lower yield per acre. Now the wheat you eat is so badly modified, it cannot even re-seed itself! - Man must harvest and plant it.

* Lions hunt in packs so if the game was killed by a pride of lioneses, there won´t be much left for you, even if you can drive the buzzards off, but do like your distant ancestors did - collect the bigger bones and drag them back to your cave where at leasure you can crack them open to eat the marrow inside. (Many caves have been found in which cracked open long bones are present with out any of the animal´s smaller bones present.)

 

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So you'd prefer millions of people die, rather than be proven wrong.

We have far more to fear from people who believe such things than from GM foods. I will always go with the scientists trying to save people than the political types who hope for holocausts.

 

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I'm sorry, did you just say you hope everyone who eats GM food dies from eating GM food?

...to convince people that GM food is bad...

...because if no one ever dies from eating GM food, how will anyone know it is bad...?

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...because it won't be!

So really, you want GM food to be bad (even though you pretty much acknowledge that you know it isn't). Why? Why don't you want it to be good?

Those two statements contradict each other. I'll let you guess which one is wrong.

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Agreed!

Still, calling someone an idiot is a lot easier than explaining why their argument is wrong. I'd like to see your explanation.

 

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god, I might as well be trying to put my head through a concrete wall.

 

Maybe you should!

 

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It's not a matter of who you trust, it's a matter of whether you are paying attention.

None of your links and quotes there support your contentions over mine, and several if read carefully support mine over yours (they are among the sources of my opinions, after all, so their agreement is not strange). The yield comparisons you present, for example, are not from per acre accounts matching comparable varieties comparably farmed - when that is done, the normal 5-15% cost in yield from the plant expression of these large blocks of inserted code is obvious and acknowledged and not at all mysterious. Neither are they long term - partly for the very good reason that this new stuff hasn't been around long enough for long term observation, and partly because things like pesticide resistance or drought vulnerability or economic disaster tend to show up after a few years, and the corporate interests financing these studies don't want to record that kind of stuff.

This is obvious upon reading them - you would have no trouble noticing such matters yourself, if you tried.

And you keep posting stuff like this:

The personal jab is unworthy, OK? And you are wrong, blatantly and repeatedly: I do not and never have advocated banning GM foods, the weasel wording about "well documented death" should make you stop and think rather than assert, the GM peanuts that are supposed to be non-allergenic do not yet exist on the market and may never pan out -> and that is one of my major points, repeated over and over: the naive proponents of GM are overlooking the reality of what is actually happening, the real life doings of Monsanto et al, in favor of a potential and a possible future of wonderful benefits that nobody is denying but which does not yet exist and is not the problem here.

Do I even need to repost the famous incident in which Brazil nut allergen was engineered into soybeans and actually got to retail - when caught, which was by accident and not by any of the corporate scientists or regulatory watchdogs, the beans had to be recalled from feed stores and other retail outlets where they had been shipped. No one knows whether anyone died from that - they didn't get it all back, and it would have been lethal to anyone with a severe peanut allergy, but there was no "well documented death". Just another example of the reality so far of GM, this peanut allergy business - the potential is wonderful, what's happened so far is not so good.

And continuing, like this:

Never mind the slippery deflection of my arguments into a narrowly defined food safety argument, although it's irritating - we'll just ride with that a minute: So if you actually read what's written there we have less than ten years of widespread consumption of GM food products to look at, and that's lumping each different genetic modification in dozens of different plants consumed in hundreds of different ways by all kinds of people (from drought resistance to herbicide sequestration to pesticide expression, from oil to condiment to raw whole plant eating, from pregnant women and high-calorie children to immune compromised elderly), into one undifferentiated lump. That solidly supports my "opinion" above. Not yours. The stuff is new, untested, unfamiliar, therefore unsafe. That's just ordinary common sense, based on your posted documentation.

In other words, you appear to be taking unwarranted implications from your cursory and obviously unconsidered linkage, rather than attending to the actual content. Here's another:

That almost sounds as though you think the GM modification is what made it non-poisonous. That would be untrue - the plant was never very poisonous (if at all, the matter is uncertain and the plant had been consumed by the needy for centuries) originally, the oil even less so, and even the potential for poisoning (along with the disagreeable flavors and high acid content of the original plant) were bred out in the 1970s by Canadian agricultural researchers at a public university using standard varietal crossing and backcrossing means (other improvements in nutrition and cultivation were made at that time, as well). The GM stuff came much later, and was for disease and drought resistance, not edibility or nutrition. The GM stuff does not benefit you the consumer in the least - although you do run some extra risk now, from lack of experience with the effects of the engineered code insertions (all the varietals used in the 1970s crosses were familiar).

Just to emphasize: the Vitamin A rice is in beta - it might work, it might not, it's one of those potentials that GM proponents prefer to dwell on while 90% of the US soybean crop is handed over to two or three corporate friendly GM clones that pack themselves with herbicide complex. Meanwhile Golden Rice is being promoted partly in lieu of promoting whole grain ("brown") rice consumption, used for leverage on local farming economics and politics, and developed partly in lieu of standard or modified breeding of more nutritious but unpatentable landraces of rice - part of the nutrient problem with rice is a widespread polycultural bias favoring white rice, and a yield bias favoring a couple of varieties hit on as better suited to industrial agriculture. That bias in promotion and development is certainly - if statistics mean anything - killing people, but not in any "well documented" way.

And so forth. This is not rocket science - the risks are obvious, not arcane hidden things; the research into them is not rich and public and well distributed but sparse and concealed and glossed over; the people dominating the public discussion are actively promoting what is clearly a corporate profit center and primarily agribusiness benefit, only incidentally and potentially a public good, only by good fortune even reasonably safe.

 

Hello to all,

There is one thing which is very true that genetically we eat such modified food like crops etc.........even all our vegetables are in the form of the natural sources produce,all its genomes are modified.This is very beneficiary for the body in all sense.

 

Why should I pay attention to your totally un referenced assertions? You forced me to search for the facts, and I found your assertions to be proven false in approxiamtely 100 scientific studies, which were condensed into two meta-studies that I gave links to and quoted the most important parts of in bold text in post 159. Try to find scientific support contradicting even one of those post 159 bold text quotes from the many scientific studies that refute your unsupported, unreferenced, assertions. Your unreferenced, unsupported assertions are no more valuable than an ice cube at the North Pole!

This totally conflicts with the results of many dozens of scientific studies that on average show very significant yield increases. If you think not give links to at least one meta-study that has found that on average the yield decrease.

I admit that there may be in the 100 or so tests of GM seed yields some cases with no GM benefit demonstrated. For example my referencece noted that in developed world some field tests crops with GM changes to the seeds to make the plant more insect resistance had no significant benefit. - Those tests showed significanly less benefit than same tests in the third world. I.e. the improvement on average was much less than in Africa etc. The developed world cases with no improvement shown did not tell how completely the insect problems were also solved by heavy use of pesticides, which developed world farmers were accustomed to using. (You can only kill the bugs once.)

If I were a rich US farmer, planning an insect resistant GM crop for the first time, I would be inclined to still use the pesticides I had always used - just to be sure I would not lose my crop, with small corner of the field not treated with pesticide to test the effectiveness of the GM seeds. If that untreated corner´s yield was just as good, next year I would same some money and buy less long lasting pesticide (and pollute your tap water less.)

Also, note it is by their free choice that every year more farmers are switching to the more costly GM seeds because their net effect is to increase yields and lower pesticide costs, making greater production at lower total cost. You seem to think they are switching because the Monsanto rep has a gun to their head. Perhaps a few are switching as they do not like polluting their own water well with long lasting pesticides.

Also totally without any support is you claim that the effect you believe is real is due to “large blocks of inserted code.” How do you know that? In most cases the DNA inserted by GM techniques is very short. – And typically more than 10,000 times shorter than section of “coping error duplications” that have made great repetitive sections of your DNA over the many thousands of years of evolution or the other long sections, which as of yet have no known function. “Large blocks of inserted code” do indeed exist in your DNA but, contrary to your unsuported claims, they seem to just be ignored and do no harm.

Non-Scientific Nonsense. Beta carotene is a molecule that prevents blindness when person´s diet lacks Vitamin A. It does not make any difference if that molecule was made in a chemical factory (like in the multi-vitamins I take daily) or by a non-GM carrot or by some GM yellow rice. Your statement is as stupid as saying my distilled H2O is less dangerous than your distilled water. Molecules are molecules with no memory of how they were made.

You ignored my request to give link to even one well documented case of a human death caused by a GM food, by calling well documented "weasel words."
OK I´ll repeat the request without those words:
Give even one case where well qualified medical examinations even suggested that the death may have be caused, even in part, by eating GM foods.

I predict you will again find some way to weasel out of answering my new worded request as to quote from one of the sources given in poast 159: (the National Academies' National Research Council.) "The committee that wrote the report emphasized it was not aware of any evidence suggesting foods on the market today are unsafe to eat as a result of genetic modification.


I want to contrast the thus far observed safety of GM foods with the 100 or so deaths non-GM peanuts cause each year, to get a little perspective on the subject. In a prior post, I have admitted that there may be a few people with unique set of genes that are made sick by eating some GM food, but that is no reason to ban them and let peanut still be sold because they are not GM-modified. Even peanuts have a large net benefit to cost ratio as they have a good for heart oil and are source of non-animal protein. Animal protein has fats that are bad for the heart and are directly implicated in the deaths of the main killer of persons - heart disease. Should meat be banned?

 

Billy T, will you please stop bolding or at least putting in bigger font, parts of the text that you believe are worth emphasizing. It's highly annoying.

Like I have stated many times, it's not so much the "safety" of GM foods that are at issue. Diet coke is perfectly "safe" to drink, but we don't consider diet coke to have anything like the nutritional value of brocolli.

 

You are in a minority. My posts tend to be long and several have thanked me for facilitating their skim of the highlights. If you just read the bold, you get my main points and save a lot of time. Why is bold annoying to you? Do you know or it just is?

One or two others have complained about my larger type inserts, especially if they disagree. Quadraphonics has noted that "Shouting" (big type, he means) does not make it true. So I will try to restrain my self on the use of big type inserts. Thanks for your comment.

On your nutritional comment, I don´t think there are any cases where GM foods have lowered the nutritional values and several cases where missing proteins or vitamin have been added. This is especially important is third world country diets that often have little variety and lack one or more of the essential amino acid or vitamins.

The fact that companies making GM foods want to make profits, keeps them from making much effort in places like Africa where they could save many lives. The GM yellow rice that can annually prevent thousands of cases of blindness because it contains Beta Carotene, (a vitamin A precurser), which is absent from many diets was made by Bill Gate´s medical foundation. - A not for profit "do gooder" organization.

 

Because they are supported by your own research and every link you've posted yourself? Because they make perfect sense to anyone with even a passing knowledge of biology and agriculture, which you have?

Not one of those studies even contradicts single one of my assertions, and several of them (such as the one you quoted, about the short time of experience we have with this stuff) solidly support my posts here - perhaps you are reading them and me with the same comprehension glitch that had me advocating the banning of GM foods?

Will you please pay attention? I shouldn't have to repeat the obvious over and over and over with you. Nobody at all, least of all me, has claimed that Vitamin A is not very helpful, that beta carotene is not a valuable dietary precursor that would, if included in the diet of the poor, be of very great benefit. The issue is the actual net benefit from Golden Rice, which is not yet established - the stuff may or may not work, there have been serious problems actually cultivating it, actually getting it into people's diets, not wrecking existing agriculture and doing net harm, and so forth. I've been following it for years, as it was first ballyhooed and then dropped by the biotech corporations, picked up by idealistic promoters and charitable foundations, tried and failed and tried again, and I will be the first to praise it to the skies if it ever works, but so far it falls into the category of potential benefits from GM technology. Not actual benefits. You can't count stuff that hasn't worked yet and might not as an actual and realized benefit of GM, to balance the actual and realized harms and the actual and realized risks and the actual and obvious threats.

And that is the story with essentially every one of your asserted benefits - as I pointed out, they are almost entirely potential, great potential, wonderful and encouraging and much to be supported potential, but not reality yet. The reality of GM, as your example of peanut allergy highlights, is not yet wonderful in that fashion. There are serious problems, including borderline criminal enterprise, corrupt science, exploitative economics, corrupt politics, and potential disasters of many kinds (economic, political, nutritional, ecological, agricultural) at least as likely as massive blindness relief from Golden Rice to actually happen.

Now you are confusing lack of evidence with observed safety - c'mon. Do you really not see the careful wording there, as some scientist tries to avoid offending his funding without giving his reputation hostage to future discovery and experience? We have almost no experience with this stuff, we've done little research (and much of that corporate controlled and secret), it's very common for problems with unfamiliar dietary factors to show up only after many years (even generations), you know all this, you can read.

Meanwhile in addition to my major objections to the heedless rollout of haphazard GM organisms, I have posted perfectly sensible pieces of evidence, that you or anyone can recognize for yourself and need take no one's word for, that we are running some serious risks in the way we are marketing GM foods and filling the shelves with such untried and unfamiliar and untested stuff. One would be the presence of herbicide complex in the foodstuffs obtained from crops engineered to resist glysphosphate herbicides, or expressed pesticides in the plants used for food, or the various chemicals of drought resistance etc - these chemicals and genetic codings have never been thoroughly tested in actual human consumption, have never before been present in human food in anything like these quantities; unpredicted and unexamined factors have been showing up (such as the release of some of the engineered DNA and herbicide supposedly sequestered and so forth by bacteria in the human gut) and we have only a few years of very poorly monitored consumption experience to inform us.

Lack of evidence in that matter is not reassuring, but quite otherwise. There is no safety in ignorance, and considerable danger in ignorance facing obvious threat.

 

To the anti-GMO people, would you rather we switch to lower producing crops, and then be forced to make up the remainder with imported food? Perhaps food that was grown on former rainforest land? GM doesn't alter the food to such a degree that humans can't digest it.

 

There are no differences in nutritional value between currently available GMO and non-GMO foods. All the genetic changes have been to improve resistance to pests and disease, and increase resistance to herbicides; they do not change the nutritional profile of the food. (There are also no nutritional differences between ordinary crops and organic crops; that's another common misconception.)

 

Bold seems a little strong to use all the time, I think italics is a good way to emphasize most points which is what it's for, just wondering why not use that. I'm glad you are revising your use of bigger fonts, they are disorienting also when reading.

The "nutritional profile" of a food is not the full story of what a food is. Food is not a bunch of vitamins and phytonutrients and calories and proteins thrown together, it is more than the sum of its parts. They could create foods from scratch that have wonderful "nutritional profiles" but that a human couldn't live on. They have spent billions trying to create synthetic foods from powders that astronauts or soldiers can live on exclusively but have huge trouble doing so (and still use natural foods to make those powders). Adding vitamin A to GM rice is about the same as just giving someone a vitamin A supplement instead. And even though you can't live on supplements + calories + whatever antioxidants etc. you can find, most of them are previously derived from natural food to begin with.

In the grand scheme of things, humans know very little about how food is actually made up or how it works, any person learned on the subject will tell you that. If you're going to tamper with the integrity of this, it's obviously not going to be easy to spot downsides to it. The part plastics analogy is a good one - you won't notice it... of course yes, they will probably be able to weed out the GMs that are doing horrible harm to people... but it's the ones that noone could ever prove were doing harm, that's the ones they will irreversibly impose on humanity forever more. It might be 99% tomatoe one year, then 96% tomato later... it's continual wearing away of the integrity of the food.

 

Yes. And none of that has anything to do with GM foods. GM foods are foods that have been modified to add a trait. They are not " bunch of vitamins and phytonutrients and calories and proteins thrown together." They are the original (i.e.e already heavily hybridized and modified) corn with an additional genetic trait that confers resistance to something.

Yes. And such GM rice is NOT on the market. If it were it would have a better nutritional profile than regular rice.

Agreed. We do know, however, that it is the same nutritionally as the original food.

At this point that tomato is already 1% tomato. The changes have been made through hybridizing over centuries. So we're not going from 99% to 96% tomato, we are going from 1% to .999% tomato.

 

Mmmmmmmmmmmm. Tomacco.

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No it's not. No matter how much breeding you do you will never turn a tomato into something completely different, not for millions and millions of years. We went over this.

Look at the dog example: you can have massive differences in the types of dogs we have and yet they will still all have 99.99%+ the exact same DNA, still be able to interbreed with each other and so the same species etc.. This is after centuries of intentional breeding a certain way.

Making something bigger or smaller through breeding is easy. A few areas on the genome will change, that's all. Then you reach Great Dane size or Chihuahua size and you cannot go any further because the base genome won't support it (unless you do millions of years of such breeding). What they've done with breeding is nothing compared to what they can do to species instantly.

 

We did. Corn, tomatoes, apples, grain . . . none of it looks anything like its "natural" form. If you think that it does, you have never seen its natural form.

Yep. Now take hundreds of centuries of very careful selective breeding of crops. Now the genome is only 98.1% similar - and the phenotype is only 1% similar. With GMO's you have an organism that is 98.0% similar - and the phenotype is .999% similar.

Agreed. Changing the taste is a little harder. Changing its growing cycle is even harder. Changing its resistance to frost, its shippability, its shelf life - harder still. All those things have been done with hybridization. Ever eaten wheat? Grapefruit? Peppermint? None of those things existed in nature.

Engineering elephant sized dogs now, are they?

 

For the last freaking time: So far, almost every GM crop in commercial release is lower yielding per acre - that's lower, not higher - than the comparable non-engineered varietals. The herbicide resistant varieties, the Bt expressing varieties, the flavr savr tomatoes and disease resistant rapeseed and all the rest, pay for their desired capabilities with slightly lower per acre yield. Golden Rice is lower yield per acre than the non-engineered version of the same variety. This is not rocket science, folks. This is simple, straight ahead weights and measures and tradeoffs. There is no free lunch.

We hope to maybe get larger per acre yields than we are getting now from these crops in various ways, but that is not why they are being promoted - they are being promoted because they conform well to the needs of industrial agriculture and therefore produce more profit per invested dollar from the promoting corporation.

Completely misleading. The parts and pieces of standard bred plants are individually familiar in their context, not code never before seen in this kind of organism, the genetic code shotgunned into more or less random places in the engineered genome is completely alien, brand new in this context, set up to be mobile both within and between disparate genomes, and not nearly as predictable in its total effects.

We have no reason to be wary of standard bred plants being suddenly more likely to transfer their new code to other species, insects, bacteria, or viruses, for example. That's a problem you don't get from standard breeding. It's not the same thing.