The Pros and Cons of Genetically Engineered Food

Here's the big problem. We already are eating some of this food already but don't even realize it!

 

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I can imagine two different types of dangers with GM foods - one of which applies to GM activities in general, but that does not mean the risk/ benefit ratio is not attractive.

(1) GM foods are eaten so there may be a risk to health.
(2) GM activities may produce "cross breads” impossible in nature -E.g. plant genes in animals etc.

The risks associated with (1) do not seem to me to be very significant for three different reasons:

(A) Animals, (humans included) digest their food. I.e. they take the complex molecules and break them down into much smaller ones - typically amino acids and sugar, I think, but this is not my area. I.e. what went into the stomach is destroyed and what is in the small intestines is sort of the same (with differ percentages) regardless of what you eat. (For example steak will make the amino acid % higher relative to the sugar % and potatoes do the converse.) Obviously there are important exceptions. I.e. a heavy metal ingested will remain a heavy metal and do you harm. Poisons exist, but it seems to me just changing the sequence of the molecules in a DNA chain (I.e. modification of a gene) that does break down would be harmless.

(B) The walls of the small intestine, where these small amino acid / sugar molecules are absorbed and pass into the blood stream have some selective ability. I tend to think that to some very significant extent these walls take what the body needs preferentially. Certainly, man evolved with much poorer diet than he eats today in most of the world - for example may have lived on one type of root, some grubs / worms and some insects mainly for 50,000 years in some region. Certainly his food did not travel an average or 1500 miles to reach his table as in the US. (One of the many reasons why in the expensive fuel era, Americans will have cause to regret covering the good farm land around their cities with suburban sprawl.)

(C) Some of the effects of GM food may be beneficial in the small intestines. For example, I think by far the greatest GM activity is related to making crops able to cope with the agro-toxins applied to kill insects. I.e. in some way modifications are made in their genes (DNA sequences) to make the plants less injured by these agro-toxins. As my main concern about the food I eat is the agro-toxins they may contain, some modification which gives protection from agro-toxins in my diet does not seem like a bad idea to me. Unfortunately, probably this protective sequence will likely be destroyed by digestion also.

SUMMARY of A, B, & C: There seems to be little reason to think GM food will have any significant effect upon the eater and if it does, there seems to be at least as good and argument that the effect would protective as that it is damaging. Certainly, no significant effect has been observed in the dozen or so years in which more than a 100 million people have been eating GM food. Nor has any one suggested a creditable reason why any effect should be possible.

The only basis I have heard for rejecting GM food is: "We do not know everything - so change nothing." That would apply to the introduction of agriculture by our ancestors - we should all be hunter and gathers still, with life expectancy of 25 years, if lucky.

I am not strongly opposed to that idea. I think the world has far too many people living on it. Humans are sort of a cancer out of control on the bio-sphere. This was made quite clear in a photo recently taken in western part of Brazil from helicopter. You may have seen it, if not see it here:

http://www.economist.com/world/la/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11496950

Two Indians* are protecting their camp with drawn bows, arrows aimed at the helicopter. (It is a classic photo that will long be remembered -ever educated person should see it.)

In the long run, their life style (now doomed by first contact with "civilization," steel tools, etc.) is probably better - more likely to be stable - than ours based on oil etc. At times I think AIDs and other STDs may be blessings in disguise but one needs a POV of thousand of years to think that. Nature does seem to have tendency and means to restore the stability man is currently destroying in the bio-sphere.

Now for point (2)

Making crosses that nature cannot is not necessarily bad for man or other animals in this long view. In general, I think there is much to be said for increasing the diversity of life forms. I suspect that the plants may also be better off with some animal genes in some of them also. My major concern in this area is that exactly the opposite is being promoted by man. Instead of diversity, mono-cultures of the "best" varieties are driving dozens of less commercial variants into extinction annually. The world now lives on a few varieties of rice and wheat. - That is scary. The main grain of the Romans was millet. When was the last time you ate some? It is making a small come back in India, where labor is cheap. (It is labor intensive - hard to harvest with machines etc.)

SUMMARY:
Fear of GM foods, fibers, and other GM items seems to be entirely based on ignorance and desire to keep things are they are, while not recognizing that man is changing things and destroying life forms at the fastest rate in history -WITH NO PLANNING OR THOUGHT ABOUT THE PROCESS. GM foods are in contrast a planned change with objectives that from the short term POV seem to be better. I support them just from the facts cited above, and especially their demonstrated ability to make more food, and give at least the crops some protection from agro-toxins. (I wish they could modify me to give me that protection too.)
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*The one on our right is the smarter. Note he is "leading" the helicopter, not aiming directly at it. Also I saw the photo about 10 days before the Economist published it in much larger size in my local newspaper. There it is not possible to be sure, but that small brown "stump-like" object just NE of the straw colored area appears to be a pet monkey watching the helicopter also. I bet it is straw for stating up fires.
There is a lot of arogance in calling them uncivilized, IMHO - In capabable of messing up and permanantly damaging the Earth's ability to support many diverse forms of life - Yes. "uncivilized" - No, but that is just my opinion.

PS Unlike the article in Time about a month ago the {i]Economist[/i] has the corrrect POV as to the reason why the Amazon is being cut down. I.e. the demand for pretty woods from rich countries. Individual trees are cut - value each between US$ 500 to more tha $1000 - and then to hide the crime a whole section of the forest is set on fire. This mkakes it impossible for the natives to live by stealing parots small monkeys etc. to sell so they try to farm - mainly few pigs, lots of chickens perhaps a cow or two grazing between the partially burnt stumps. The soil is poor and they can not aford to fertilize so in couple of years they sell to some rich abstntee owners who can then it is an economical cattle ranch - never any sugar cane as Time implied as it is about ~1000 miloes from the alcohol markets. (Cane is so bulky and of such little value per truck load that hauling is 100 miles is big way to lose money. All the fields of cane are far form the Amazion for economic reasons. - As I have explained many times before, years ago.

 

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You're assuming that the body can distinguish between molecules that finely. Or that molecules in breastmilk are filtered to cater to the (lack of) sensitivity of the infants intestine. Trans fats and their consequences are a good example of how molecules that are almost, but not quite the same can almost but not entirely replace what we should be eating.

 

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I did not. I said: "have some selective ability" (refering to the small intestine walls)

But yes I do assume the the body as a whole can make very fine distinctions, between quite similar molecular structures. - You just just supplied a good example of this (with "transfats")

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Hmm it doesn't. The body cannot distinguish between trans fats and cis fats. Hence the "movement" to ban it.

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You know more than me about foods but obviously are not thinking clearly here. If the body can not tell any difference, why ban it?

 

If the body could tell the difference, it would realise that both cis and trans forms are not interchangeable, eg in the plasma membrane. However, it cannot, and replaces hydrogenated trans fats for cis fats in the body easily, leading to changes in membrane permeability, which accumulate and damage cellular processes.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/09/030924055334.htm

 

A GMO is made of all the same chemical building blocks as any other organism, their is no new fundamental chemical in them.

 

Neither are trans fats. We're just not supposed to eat as much of them as industrial processing of unsaturated oils leads us to.

 

That sounds like they make a big difference in the body to me. Perhaps we are disagreeing over the meaning of "tell the difference" You meaning “discriminate against bad stuff “and me meaning that if they effect the body differently then clearly the body is "telling them apart."

Lets agree to drop this and get back to my point. I was suggesting that the transport across the small intestine wall has some selectivity and that it is varied depending upon what the body needs. For example (but not to suggest it is a fact) if the blood sugar is low then I would expect the rate of sugar transport from the small intestines into the blood (with a fixed sugar concentration in these intestines) may be higher. I suspect this without any proof or evidence as I am very impressed by the "wisdom of the body."

Do you this adaptively does not occur at all? I have learned a lot about the complexity of cell surfaces and the dozens of different specialized structure they have. Perhaps I am over generalizing to think this is also true and even a short term variable of the small intestine walls?

PS all of this detour has pushed Post 22 down. I think that unfortunate as it has a logical structure that would help rational discussion.

 

GMOs are biological not industrial, GMOs can't produce transfats anymore then you can.

 

Never implied they did. Trans fats were also only biological until industrially engineered. And you no more know the effects of a GMO than anyone knew about transfats.

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No, not really, there is no wisdom in the intestine. Unfortunately, our dietary decisions are formulated on base impulses like taste. Otherwise everyone would eat more broccoli and less cake.

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Your ignorant of the different between a industrially modified biological chemical and a biological chemical produced through GM tech, one makes a fundamental chemical difference the other does not. We cannot engineer an organism to produce chemicals that were not biologically possible to produce anyways: for example we can't accidentally engineer a pig that makes transfats, it would be difficult to even do it on purpose!

True any process can have unforeseen consequences, any, we have the choose if the possibly of problems out weigh the benefits.

 

You're assuming that trans fats are not "natural". They are naturally present as bacterial products of ruminant digestion for example. Just not in the quantities they are when artificially engineered.

Unlike foreign DNA transcripts, for instance. One can easily stop manufacturing transfats and ban their consumption, but a hybrid DNA sequence, once released cannot be recalled.

One makes assumptions that if it is safe in animals, it will be safe in humans.

Reference:Ermakova I. Influence of genetically modified soya on the birth-weight and survival of rat pups// Proceedings “Epigenetics, Transgenic Plants and Risk Assessment”, 2006, pp.41-48

Why?

http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/healthscience/060330a.aspx

 

to engineer and organism to make transfats would require finding fatty acid sythesis enzymes that make transfats and inserting them in an organism, I would require intentional action, it would not happen by accident. Most of all modifying fatty acid synthesis can result in failing to producing viable organims (creature to sickly to live or make good food stock) if the organism is make a fat that is incompatible with it fatty acid metabolism pathways, so other changes would need to be made thus multiplying the difficulty.

Incorrect, simple sterility can fix that problem.

This is how we test products, their no other way around it, if a problem is detected after marketing the problem can be recalled, even if the hybrid organism is not sterile removing it would be as easing as changing animal breeds, if black roses were found to be cancerous they could be removed rather fast. Most of all domestic food crops are rarely viable in the wild so their is little chance of them spreading out of human control.

Show me those results repeated by a third party.
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v25/n9/full/nbt0907-981.html?lang=ja

 

I gave trans fats as an example of lack of knowledge of adverse effects of unknown products of manipulating the food supply, not deliberate genetic engineering. And I gave the Ermakova example to show you that only if adverse effects are seen in animals, we consider them to be relevant to humans. You seem to keep missing the point. Unintended consequences are not comparable to deliberate poisoning.

Changing the food supply of a population based on such little information and mostly a lack of it, seems unethical and premature to me.

 

Our food supply has always been changing, and for the most part for the better, todays life style and population would not have been possible with the plants, animals and processes of 1800. You or I would never even had been alive had it not been for constant changes in a food supply. The information is out there, we do test these things, it simple ignorance of the peoples part on a new technology being dangerous or unknown. Just as the people fear atomic power when coal power plants have released more radioactive material then nuclear power plants, it fear based on misunderstanding and fallacies of logic: generalizations and appeals to nature.

 

Appeal to the past is appeal to emotion, not logic. There are many things done in the past which we would not repeat today, so that argument is fallacious; we're going to live in the future, not in the past. We have the capacity to improve food distribution and change market forces globally today, which was not possible before. Plus, looking at everything from the narrow vision of human benefits overlooks the importance of the ecosystem to a sustainable agriculture. e.g. the toxic effetcs of transgenic maize on Monarch butterflies led to a more cautionary approach on releasing pest resistant GM foods before testing them for nontarget invertebrates. Such extensive testing is necessary before forming a one size fits all rule for GMOs.

 

Not the pasted but the trend of the pest, present and future: food production efficient must go up in order to supply world demand.

I'm not for a "one size fits all rule for GMO" either, but if you want to forbid GM tech then your are.

 

Back your respective corners for two minute break, Ladies, then come out fighting again, but remember no biting, no hair pulling.

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I will be watching and learning.

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