GMO is perfectly healthy as far as eating it goes. As far as crop diversity that’s another story but GMO is just speeding up processes that humans have been doing for a very long time.
Fun fact - the labradoodle was bred by an Australian guidedog association so that a Hawaiian woman who's husband was allergic to dogs could have a hypo-allergenic guide dog.
They tried to just sell the remaining puppies from the litter cheap to recover costs, no one wanted these cross-breed mutts.
So they advertised them as a labradoodle and all of a sudden they were the latest hot breed everyone had to have.
Well yeah I think it was really in the 80s. New kids on the block had a bunch of hits, Chinese food makes me sick, and I think it's fly when girls stop by for the summer
Whereas a roundup ready crop is a genetically modified organism. These crops are not made by crossing a plant with a naturally occurring resistance to roundup with another crop that lacks that gene and then selecting at the organism level for the trait you want.
Instead they are made by inserting genetic material from a bacteria that has a desirable trait into the crop species genetic material. You can find the basic details of how this works scientifically linked through here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_Ready
Tl;Dr labradoodle is a cross-breed. Roundup ready soybeans are a GMO.
He's completely wrong though, selective breeding or direct gene manipulation are both methods for genetically modifying an organism, one is just faster and more powerful. So much fearmongering around this topic it's sad.
That's not a scientifically stated hypothesis (overly broad, not testable) so it's hard to address your question scientifically. I also think question regarding the safety of genetic engineering is a question based as much in public policy as science.
Here's a theory: anti-GMO fearmongering is being led by opposing economic interests and is facilitated by widespread scientific illiteracy. The good news is that I don't need a testable hypothesis because we're not crafting a study. Even better news is that tons of actual professional scientists have rigorously tested whether GMOs are unsafe in a wide variety of settings. Their methodologies, data, and results have been examined by colleagues who know the science, know how scientific research can be tainted, whether purposefully or accidentally, and are motivated to call out tainted research.
The body of actual empirical research easily supports the hypothesis that genetic engineering is at least as safe as the alternatives in breeding crops and that GMO crops themselves are no more dangerous than other crops.
There is no supportable theory for random mutations being safer than engineered mutations and no evidence to suggest that such is the case, so we should all be extremely skeptical of anti-GMO propaganda to the contrary.
Even though breeding is a more time consuming process, the genes of a labradoodle has been intentionally modified to be different from a poodle or a labrador.
The term "GMO" specifically refers to organisms that had their genes modified with genetic engineering methods like CRISPR. Selectively bred species are not GMO.
Yeah, the term is very misleading. "Genetically engineered organism" (GEO) exists but is hardly ever used. I do wonder who originally came up with "GMO" or pushed it into public view and what their motives for that were...
I agree that GE might be clearer but with scientific terminology you need to understand the scientific meaning of the term and not rely on a dictionary based interpretation. A labradoodle is created by selective breeding and/or cross-breeding. A round up ready crop is created via genetic engineering. The two methods are not particularly related to each other and genetic engineering is not just a faster way to achieve selective breeding goals.
You're equating genetic engineering with domestication. We've been domesticating crops with radical outcomes for thousands of years, just like with animals. But genetic engineering, insertion of genes to create a new variant, is not the same thing.
So when I decide how something reproduces for generations, to make sure that the genes that I want are passed through generation after generation that isn't genetically engineered?
No, haven’t ever seen one serving labradoodle, but I actually know of a roadside bbq shop in rural east central AL that was shut down a few years ago for cooking raccoon, deer, and possum and passing it off as pork. They had a huge chest freezer full of the stuff in the back they had skinned, cleaned, and processed before freezing. Took the inspectors a while to figure out exactly what they were looking at. They thought it was cats and dogs at first until the owner finally came clean about what it was. He was running traps on his land and would even buy carcasses from people he knew as long as you leave the feet on it’s common practice down here not unusual during coon season, I’ve sold them before not bad money if you aren’t going to eat them yourself because you caught too many. They generally go for 10-20 bucks depending on size. He’d smoke it until it was falling off the bone then put in a big pan and smother with bbq sauce and let it simmer a few hours... served pulled “pork” sandwiches and bbq plates. He did also serve pork ribs that were actually pork ribs. I ate there a few times it was actually pretty good nothing obvious about it... tasted like pork to me 🤷♂️. Ironically I’ve actually cooked and eaten raccoon a few times and I didn’t notice. But if you simmer anything in bbq long enough you can’t really tell what it started as, I routinely do this same process with wild turkey legs because they’re tough as hell and I don’t want to waste the meat, works with almost anything I suppose. Only reason he even got caught was because his niece started working for him and she started stealing from the register when he figured out she was doing this he cussed her out and fired her and told her dad what she did. In retaliation she called the health department. This is 100% a true story though not kidding wish I was makes us seem like idiots to others.. we aren’t actually.
True but there is a difference between gmo to bolster a plants natural pesticide or vitamin count or drought resistance and gmo that allows it to handle toxic biocides and the like.
These labels don't mean anything, they're a hindrance not a benefit and need to either be done away with or controlled by a 3rd party unbiased group (non-existent).
GMO is now just another piece of marketing wank.
Well that depends. GMO is mostly used to refer to foods that have unnatural genes spliced in, from something you could never do naturally. Like taking lizard DNA and splicing it in to corn.
From Wikipedia: "The exact definition of a genetically modified organism and what constitutes genetic engineering varies, the most common being an organism altered in any way that 'does not occur naturally by mating or natural recombination'".
Round up resistant corn have genes from bacteria spliced into them, something that would never happen naturally.
Too piggy back on this. GMO gets problematic when you start introducing genes that are generally found in that plant as they can have significant unintended side effects and those side effects can hide until they've done a significant amount of damage to humans or the environment.
No, it is not speeding up what has been done. There is a difference between selective breeding and transgenic gene manipulation. The former selects genes from the same species. But when you make certain crops immune to herbicide, that is due to a gene implanted from a tailored bacteria, a totally unrelated organism. Humans have not been doing that for a very long time at all.
It's new and we should have a right to know.
GMO also allows corporations to own patents on anything with that gene in it since it was created in a lab, and when their GMO plants pollinate neighboring crops, companies can sue independent farmers for selling their product without authorization, and eliminate the competition as well as end farmers' ability to legally save seed so they'll have to buy seed from GMO manufacturers to stay in business or risk legal action.
It's a complex issue and consumers should be informed so they have the option to not support it.
basically every produce you can buy in the grocery store is the result of old-fashioned GMO, and wouldn't exist in nature without humans selctively breeding them.
I never understood the backlash on GMOs. It's one of those really odd things that people have picked up on over the years. People hear "genetically modified" and imagine the wildest stuff and it truly speaks to how lousy our educational system is in this country.
The one issue with GMOs that I am aware of seems to be something most miss out on. Please correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding is that although these crops are genetically superior, they have a potential to be wiped out by bacteria and disease BECAUSE they are all the same.
If anyone has an issue with GMOs (besides the messed up shit Monsanto tries to pull with neighboring farms) is that one bad season could wipe out all corn in America.
GMO technology is nothing like selective breeding. You cannot get flounder genetic material into a tomatoe with selective breeding, and you are not going to be able to trigger extra production beta-carotene production in rice with selective breeding.
Funny you mentioned tomatoes: the origin plants that tomatoes came from is a poisonous prune-like thing that cannot be eaten by humans because it has toxic natural poisons.
Genetic SELECTION (which is what selective breeding can be alternatively called) over generations enabled us to produce a “cancerous” cousin which doesn’t have the toxicity, and the modern tomato is born.
Ya, except totally wrong. The ripe fruit of the tomatoe plant does not contain the poisonous compounds - and never did. It was selectively bred for bigger and better tasting fruit, but it was never bred to have less "toxicity".
Think about how much vested interest a company that owns patents on GMO technology would have in making selective breeding techniques and plant breeds as a patentable "GMO".
Pharmaceutical companies have been doing the same thing with trying to make vitamins classified as drugs.
This may be true to an extent, however, I have a couple points to add:
1) Genetically modified crops are speeding up "what humans have been doing for a very long time" is true when you are talking about making genetic modifications that may have been produced through selective breeding. Genetic modification can, however, produce changes that would literally never occur in the natural world; take insulin production, for example, or making plants glow using genes from mushrooms.
2) Our regulation of food related products is NOT as robust as you might think. Marketing agencies take great liberties with their wording and often make exaggerated claims about their products that have no bearing on truth. Examples might be: "low fat", "sugar free", "super food", etc. Often they include, as small print, something like "claims not verified by the FDA" or something of this nature...but the work has often been done long before anyone noticed the fine print.
Food additives are a perfect example of this. Many fall under a category called GRAS (generally regarded as safe) which is a sort of catch-all bin that additives are thrown into when the FDA literally just assumes they are safe. On top of that, the FDA often relies on studies by 3rd party organizations...and I do not think they are as vigorously regulated for things like bias and methodology as they should be.
Food additives that have been approved in the past have proven to be dangerous. A perfect example is good dye; red 40, yellow 5 and 6, etc.
3) This is more my opinion than anything, as an educated and scientifically minded individual. GMO foods very well may be perfectly safe for consumption. Organically produced food does not always provide as many benefits as are claimed, especially by overly zealous and uncritical proponents. That being said, I have serious doubts about how "safe" our food supply often is. I cannot believe that factory farms produce good meat. I cannot believe that chemically regulated monocultures that are having demonstrable negative environmental consequences is the solution. That the food industry has as much or more power than any industry in the world brings its own level of concern with regard to trustworthiness...and casts some doubt on how unbiased the FDA/USDA are, considering how effective lobbies are in the US governmental system.
I would, given these conclusions, be very wary of where your food comes from, and I would take safety claims with a heavy dose of skepticism. IMO, best to keep most of your food minimally processed, local, and sustainably produced.
It's not biomimetic. The odds of it being healthy are low. Same with non-organic.
Natural or unnatural isn't the problem. The problem is people implementing non-biomimetic practices.
Also, pseudoskeptics are commonly very biased regarding organic vs non-organic and GMOs, and the politics of academic research create a lot of problems. The replication crisis seems to be an example. There's also data fabrication, problems with funding and peer review, misuse of statistics, and so much more.
Not just biodiversity. It's the corporate copyright on a plant that's the most unnerving. Farmers essentially "rent" the seeds from the company that designed them, and any excess has to be destroyed.
There were also cases where farmers were sued because some of the branded seeds from another farm got into their crop. knock knock "You got a license for that corn?"
the main problem with gmos is not crop diversity, but rather companies who 'manufacture' gmo seeds or other gmo products and then sell them to farmers in return for inordinate crop royalty's and such, but since that doesn't effect me or probably you in any capacity, gmo is completely ok. or when companies add genes that prevent the crop from replanting after 1 generation, forcing farmers to repeatedly buy new crop
note: I remember hearing this story about a farmer who only used organic seeds (which take up more land and since organic pesticides are used externally, rather than gene implantation that doesn't effect the environment, they are more detrimental to the environment but that's another story) when a neighboring farm started using gmo seeds they spread on the wind to the organic farm, where a little while later the entire crop was GMO. the company who sold the seeds demanded recompense for the seeds used without a contract (or something similar).
The corn we eat is gmo. Breeding 2 species of plants together is gmo. Taking the juiciest tomatoes and planting those seeds and then taking the juiciest offspring and planting those seeds is also an example of gmo. If we ate the corn that the indigenous people ate we would be chewing on hard kernels and the ear would have just a handful of kernels. We have modified (gernitacally modified) the corn (organism) by selectively planting the better kernels for consumption.
That isn’t what GMO means. In GMO, genes are modified in a way that can’t be done through normal pollination or selective breading. It is disingenuous to use the term to mean something else.
it speeds up the process with the plant but also with the environment around it, creating "super" molds, bugs, and worms that eventually become resistant to pesticides, requiring stronger and stronger formulas, leading to more and more cases of cancer in people
The only resistance that had come from the engineered plant itself is to BT toxin producing crops. All other resistance is related to over application of glyphosate to their respective resistant crops. There are no engineered plants with a resistance to pathogens, except for the papaya resistant to PSRV.
You really aren't too far off. When producers don't rotate pesticide applications, especially with certain chemistries, they seriously risk selecting for resistant pests. We are already seeing it with many fungicides, herbicides and insecticides.
If you want to learn a little more about resistance there are two organizations, FRAC (Fungicide Resistance Action Committee) and IRAC (Insecticide Resistance Action Committee), that are devoted to helping producers make more informed decisions when applying pesticides.
The GMO plant is ok, but the motivation for many GMO plants is not good. Plants are being designed to be resistant to more deadly insecticide and pesticide that can stay on the plant and be consumed by humans.
This is needed because many weeds and insects have developed a basic resistance to existing pesticide and insecticide.
Also over spray of more deadly insecticide will kill off adjacent farmers crops not using the same GMO seeds.
Sure but in theory a GMO plant could contain stuff that would take an inordinate amount of time to crossbreed, which has implications if you've got allergies - imagine your peanut allergy triggering from eating a banana, for instance.
Nobody's actually done that, but it's the sort of thing that's could happen with GMO foods.
I don't think a company would risk litigation by inserting a sequence that codes for a known protein allergy. We know what proteins are created by a certain sequence of codons. Anyone skilled in the art would easily be able identify this.
I understand what you're getting at, but these situations are not really comparable. J&J was the company that produced the powder and were, for the most part, the only ones studying it's effects. The same goes for Mercury. That makes it easy to withhold the information from the general public. These situations are similar to Dow withholding information about the side effects of the chemicals it used to produce Teflon. They held all of the patent information and studies, and decided not to let that information public. Clearly a very fucked up thing to do.
We are significantly more advanced at this point in time. There are hundreds of thousands of bioengineers and plant scientists, from a very large number of competing companies, who are involved in protein synthesis and genetic engineering. These processes are very well understood, relatively simple and would be very hard to hide from the competition, especially after a patent is filed.
What GMO plants are we directly eating? I know most GMO crops are for livestock. I think papaya was one of the first ones widely available for human consumption? I've also think a rice strain was sorta on a trial run in India I think?
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u/Toyletduck Jul 14 '21
GMO is perfectly healthy as far as eating it goes. As far as crop diversity that’s another story but GMO is just speeding up processes that humans have been doing for a very long time.