Genetically Modified Organisms

Takao....You spoke the deepest terrors of my heart. Another thing I don't get about the US are Genetically Modified foods. A 2012 Mellman Group poll found that 91% of American consumers wanted GMOs labeled). And, according to a recent CBS/New York Times poll, 53% of consumers said they would not buy food that has been genetically modified. In the U.S., GMOs are in as much as 80% of conventional processed food. Click here for a current list of GMO risk crops.Over 80% of all GMOs grown worldwide are engineered for herbicide tolerance. As a result, use of toxic herbicides like Roundup has increased 15 times since GMOs were introduced. GMO crops are also responsible for the emergence of “super weeds” and “super bugs:’ which can only be killed with ever more toxic poisons like 2,4-D (a major ingredient in Agent Orange). GMOs are a direct extension of chemical agriculture, and are developed and sold by the world’s biggest chemical companies. The long-term impacts of GMOs are unknown, and once released into the environment these novel organisms cannot be recalled and Most developed nations do not consider GMOs to be safe. In more than 60 countries around the world, including Australia, Japan, and all of the countries in the European Union, there are significant restrictions or outright bans on the production and sale of GMOs. In the U.S., the government has approved GMOs based on studies conducted by the same corporations that created them and profit from their sale.

In The US...I was freaked out by the food...Now I just trust the backyards produce

Source for all the naughty ones: http://www.nongmoproject.org/learn-more/



Admin Edit. Discussion has moved far afield, so these post have been split off.

 

There should be a GOOD reason why the US allows GMO's besides profits in sales. They are endangering he health of their civilians and why do they do it un-labelled, what are they hiding?!

BTW: I am not an anti-American just find things weird about and some things brilliant.

 

ALL food is genetically modified. Wheat is just a grass seed. Early people crushed grass seeds to make a poor flour, then began planting to harvest those seeds. Then somebody found seeds in a particular meadow that were a little bigger and planted those. They continued to select seeds for desirable traits and it took generations for different strains to develop until it didn't much resemble the wild grass it came from. So, then somebody further from the water began selecting for a wheat that would grow in a dry area. Somebody crossed that with another wheat that had been developed for a cold area and then had one that would grow in a cold dry area. That's why there are hundreds varieties of wheat, apples, tomatoes, bananas, whatever. And THAT IS genetic modification. With GMO foods you get the same positive traits through direct gene manipulation instead selecting seed for years and years for the those traits.

So, now we have foods that will grow in the most inhospitable climates and world hunger is no longer an issue. If people are hungry it's because of war, politics or some external cause, but we now have enough food for everyone on the planet even though in my own boyhood (with less than half the people of today) a third of the planet was hungry. Most of Asia is living on GMO rice that because of gene manipulation is pest resistant, cold tolerant and produce much greater yield per acre. They are not hungry any more.

 

Sorry what?

1. 
   
   About 21,000 people die every day of hunger or hunger-related causes, according to the United Nations. This is one person every four seconds, as you can see on this display. Sadly, it is children who die most often. Yet there is plenty of food in the world for everyone.
   
   

 

Yes, there is plenty of food, and those that die of hunger do so because of wars cutting off supply, mostly. Yet, if the loons of the world banned GMO crops then billions would die.

 

Billion would die... Seriously? Most of these deaths occur in nations where the agricultural industries are struggling, In part to lack of cash for modern equipment but also in part to richer nations subsidizing their agriculture driving down the global food prices -Nudges to America- You cant make the claim that GMO crops are the sole reason for 'Billions' not dying.

In any case I don't think it's so much the crops being genetically modified that's the issue but rather that they are now using far more dangerous chemicals on them (2,4-D). Hell in 1999 Dr. Arpad Pusztai found rats fed GM potatoes (modified with lectin) showed pre-cancerous cell growth, smaller brains, livers and testicles, partially atrophied livers and damage to the immune system. Yes it was years ago and being a smaller creature probably wouldn't stand up against it was well as a full grown human but it does give the indication at the least that long term consumption could be bad for you. He actually fed others rats with potatoes directly injected with lectin and had no issue with them, So his conclusion was the actual process of making them.

 

Smaller testicles!...That's it, done with GMO's. Nobody messes with the boys unless it makes 'em bigger.

But seriously- Do they even test the modified foods on humans over a significant amount of time before introducing them into our diet?

Message in a bottle super B. Just will it there. Urqh will appreciate the unique means of communication.

 

From what I can find the US testing requirements for GM food is no different then that of standard food. On paper seems fair but based off of research (2009 Austrian study found GM corn fed to mice reduced fertility) GM food's do seem to have a consistent negative effect of animals that test them. Humans being bigger might be able to cope with the issues but over the long term there is no testing requirement or eve knowledge of the effects on a human.

Not against GM products if it is used for a none food source (Several plants are being used for alternative fuels so GM engineering being able to get more fuel per plant is a good thing) but for a food staple it should be at the least banned until an animal can eat said GMO food without negative effects occurring.

 

The difference of course is, that the natural way (selecting seeds for years) produces natural plants. The artificial way (genetical manipulation) produces unnatural ones, the true nature of which we are not aware of, since the effects of GM are not totally known. While we think we only do good things with the GM we actually might do a lot of harm at the same time - we just don't necessarily know it.

 

You say that as if "natural" had some sort of objective meaning, but of course it doesn't. Even wild plants and animals are the result of random genetic mutations which have produced positive traits contributing to survival. The food you eat every day is all genetically modified by humans who wanted pest resistance, greater yield and so on. In looking at a DNA chain, you couldn't tell if a particular gene was 'spliced' in or the result of a mutation.

 

Uh yeah, and Puztai was roundly criticized and eventually fired because the study was flawed in every aspect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81rp%C3%A1d_Pusztai

 

I defined what I meant by natural and unnatural. As I wrote we don't know enought about the real consequencies of man-made GM.

 

We've been eating man-made GM foods since agriculture first began. Right now, Vitamin A deficiency leads to appalling numbers of deaths and blindness in nations where rice is the predominant food, yet the anti-GMO movement is fighting to prevent the introduction of rice strains modified to carry vitamin A. This is nuts!

http://www.goldenrice.org/

 

It's no surprise that if the variety of your diet is very limited you don't get all the necessary vitamins. It's not the fault of e.g. the rice, it's the fault of not eating enough of anything else.

As I already wrote, we don't know what we end up with, if we try e.g. to artificially add vitamin A to rice. The better solution would be to eat something else (which has vitamin A) in addition to rice.

 

Uh yeah, Wiki only gives a basic account, Read further into it and you will find that the Royal Society only reviewed an incomplete internal document, The full and final publication was only released after the Royal Society made there 'findings'. The actual working group that reviewed Puztai was made up of 4 people who had signed a letter condemning his release of his finding via TV (They were biased) while another 4 members of the working group including the chair of said group were part of an earlier group that published a report supporting GM foods.

So in short the Royal society review was heavily biased and rushed before Puztai had even put forth all of his findings and facts.

In fact a larger then normal group of scientists that later peer reviewed his full work found it to be sound. In fact Puztai's method's were approved before hand by the Governments Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council.

 

Note that you are talking about the most impoverished people in the world. They can't go to the grocery store and buy organic carrots to get extra Vitamin A. That article states that millions of children die lingering deaths because the anti-GMO hysteria prevents the simple replacement of unfortified rice with the newer fortified variety. Also note the leading cause of blindness in most of Asia is simple lack of Vitamin A. So, how many children are you willing to condemn to death or blindness before you would allow them to have proper nutrition?

 

To me, it would be weird eating purple carrots but that was one of the colours of the wild variety. There is a bit of a comeback of late but carrots and many other vegetables in their original state would have been small and weedy. Ditto cereal plants such as wheat, corn etc.

 

Got that. Maybe a better solution would be to grow something else too, in addition to rice they already cultivate. Maybe more education would be an answer to this problem too.

If there ever was a straw-man this is it...


What I do know is that there's enough money in the world and enough nutritious food too for every poor person. The problem is that the food and the hungry/needy do not meet. At the moment GM is not being used to improve the situation of the world's poor, but the situation in the wallets of the farmers of the pro-GMO "fanatic" countries. (the word "fanatic" being used to compensate the usage of the word "hysteria"...)

 

The poor don't have any land to grow "something else" and they don't have the money to buy something else, and if they do have a little land they grow what produces the most calories because to do otherwise means hunger.

By this you mean Syngenta in Switzerland? Of course they have handed all over financial interests to a non-profit organization, so whose wallet are we talking about?

This article quantifies the human damage that the anti-GMO movement is causing, just with Golden Rice alone: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2014/03/15/golden-rice-opponents-should-be-held-accountable-for-health-problems-linked-to-vitamain-a-deficiency/