I am guessing you only got as far as the abstract. This article clearly cites an established case of genetically engineered canola hybridizing with a wild Brassica. (p 123)
There are other examples the most notable being contamination of wild maize in Mexico from GM corn. It is a big controversy - the findings were denounced by the Mexican government, and eventually retracted by Nature, the journal it was first published in. Other researchers went on to find the contamination after that retraction, and the Mexican government has since expressed deep concerns about it. nature
Before I even click on the link, let me take a guess at what the study involved. They had a control group of rats where they fed them a properly balanced diet and let them run and play and be freeeeeeeeeeeee little rats. Then they took another group of rats and force-fed them huge amounts of GMO corn while strapping them down and forcing them to watch cat videos on youtube 24/7.
Yes thatâs exactly what the study involved. No need to read any further. heck they probably just slapped a âthis is scienceâ sticker on their report and called it a day. Or, maybe itâs an peer reviewed study that discovered some pretty disturbing stuff about the food we eat. Guess youâll never know.
How scientific of you. I think it is smart to be skeptical of animal studies. I am (including this one). But only if you apply that across the board, even when the animal studies support your side of an argument. Is that what you do? Maybe it is.
For those interested here is the study: IJBS GM corn
Agreed. But we donât have to give GMOs a blanket exemption from fair labeling even if the (highly doubtful) claim that GMOs are required to feed the planet is true, eh?
Momsanto cured my tentacle disease with genetic engineering.
It used only 20 control rats in a study with 200 rats. The other 180 rats were split into groups of 10 (9 male groups and 9 female groups) and then exposed to various amounts of either Monsantoâs GMO corn (grown either with or without Roundup applied to the field) or water laced with Roundup.
What makes GMO plants scary? Nothing except silly people who believe in unscientific woo-woo like not getting immunized and then hoping that theyâll be protected from disease, among other things.
This is the organization Coryâs involved in, and I think that most people should be involved in, too:
Here is a more likely guess of what the study involved:
The authors took a bunch of critters and set up the experiment in a way which would cause most critters to get sick or die. (In this case, they used Sprague Dawley rats, which tend to die from cancer in a year or so, and ran the experiment for two years.)
They compared all sorts of parameters between the GMO-fed groups and the control groups, without any prior hypothesis of why GMO feed would effect those parameters.
They then used some highly unusual statistical method to determine which differences were significant. âSignificantâ in a scientific study usually means âcould happen purely by chance about once every 20 experimentsâ; that means an experiment comparing hundred parameters will find around five wich differ significantly. Proper statistical tests correct for this, so anti-GMO activists donât use them. (Neither did Seralini et al. And - Iâm quoting from their study here - âthe significant differences are around 5% of all comparisons for each GM cornâ. In other words, exactly what you would expect to happen by chance.)
Once they had a few parameters for which the GMO-fed group performed worse by chance, they come up with some ad hoc explanation of how that is possibly caused by GMO (doesnât matter if it is pure bullshit - no one is ever going to investigate them, anti-GMO groups donât actually care about the stuff, just need the fake air of credibility), and optimize the study and its publication for media impact. (Like filling it with images of rats deformed by cancer - caption: rat fed by GMO - versus images of healthy rats - caption: rat fed by traditional corn. Never mind that cancer is pretty much the normal condition for old Sprague Dawley rats, and that there wasnât much difference in cancer ratio between the two groups.)
This is a standard recipe for anti-GMO activists to create fake media scares. Compare, for example, with the pig feeding study by Judy Carman et al - exactly the same script.
âfair labelingâ means that the decision for what to label and what not to label is based on some sort of objective relevance criteria - put the most important dietary information on the can. GMO labeling is hardly fair.
Wikipedia has a nice list of foodborne illness outbreaks by death toll. Notice there is not a single case related to GMO; most are related to improper processing of the food, like lack of pasteurization. So the information that is most relevant for your health is how the food is processed (and by whom, and who audited that); unsurprisingly, no one campaigns for putting that on labels.
Did you know that potato contains a deadly poison called solanine? New potato strains (created by traditional breeding methods) can have much higher than normal solanine content, and thus be insuitable for human consumption. (Yes, that did happen.) Even existing strains can have abnormally high solanine concentration due to certain weather conditions. Unsurprisingly, no one campaigns for labelling potatoes with solanine content.
The list could go on⊠there are lots of details about the composition, production and processing of foodstuff which are important for assessing health risks. No one cares about those. GMO content is, to out current knowledge, irrelevant for assessing health risks. So I call bullshit on people claiming labeling GMO content, and only that, is important to help consumers make an informed choice. The truth is the opposite of that. It is like putting âcontains thiomersalâ on vaccines, or âevolution is a theoryâ on schoolbooks: a factually true statement is used to mislead through the readerâs implicit assumption that it would not be there if it wouldnât have some sort of relevance.
Sure, making all details of what a food contains and how it was manufactured available to the consumer would be cool (especially in a machine-readable format), even if it is probably not very realistic. But singling out the GMO issue is just disingenuous.
The thing is that anti-GMO (and pro-GMO) is dumb. Some GMO (Golden Rice) is unambiguously good - healthier food, everyone wins. Other (Roundup Ready anything, Bt-producing corn, those freakishly large salmon) is unambiguously evil - overuse of pesticides/herbicides leads to resistance in weeds/pests, and all for short-term profits.
The reason that thereâs a lot of anti-GMO is that for years, there has been almost nothing but use of GMO for evil in the world. There was a tomato that was okay, but pretty much everything else was how you would use GMO if you were actively trying to destroy the worldâs food supply. Now that there are some non-evil GMO crops coming out, theyâre getting tarred with the same feather.
The only reasonable approach I see is to highly regulate GMO crops, and not allow any to be used commercially that would have a dangerous impact on the food supply. Currently (in the US), the only thing thatâs really considered is whether the GMO is safe to eat, not whether itâs safe to grow. Honestly, though, given the current market, that would be almost the same as an outright ban.
We can argue about whatâs fair, but when most of the world wants labeling and youâre part of a minority who opposes it youâve got an extremely difficult argument on your hands. People want information - specific information - and you are saying they cannot be allowed have it, because it would cut into profits too much. Itâs usually amoral scoundrels who want to prevent others from learning, so you start with a handicap in how youâre going to be perceived.
Wikipedia⊠If the world is flooded with GMOs that nobody knows they are consuming, how exactly will Wikipedia know that these secret unknown substances do or donât cause problems? Thatâs nonsensical - and it fights against your argument, because labeling is the only real way to prove that GMOs are not a problem - if thatâs indeed a fact. We cannot learn anything to support your position when we are actively prevented from knowing what weâve consumed - you put everyone in the position of trusting corporate and government paperwork that claims studies have been done, and that is again a tough argument to sell when you are actively preventing people from being able to learn for themselves.
As for solanine, yes I eat the green potato chips (havenât died yet) and I am familiar with the nightshade family. But comparing a known regulated poison to GMOs is again not doing your position any favors. If that sort of thing interests you, though, I can recommend a book about solanaecea that I enjoyed.
Iâm fairly sure most of the world doesnât care much about labeling. For example, less than half of those eligible for voting bothered to participate in the GMO labeling vote in California, which puts labeling proponents to around 25% of the population.
Personally though, I donât care much if it is 1% or 25% or 99%. I suppose that comes down to what you think the role of the state should be - whether it should tend to the objective or the subjective needs of its citizens. If 80% of people thought cell sites cause cancer, but objectively we knew they donât, should we require mobile companies to put up red tape in a hundred-meter circle around the sites? There are some good arguments for both positions, but ultimately I favor science over self-determination. I think the state should only regulate for objectively valid reasons. Smoking is a good example of that: even if the majority of people prefer smoking, it is still valid to require restaurants to set up non-smoking areas to protect the minority which would prefer not to inhale carcinogens, because they are objectively harmful to health. On the other hand, if some new age guru says that the color green causes cancer, and the majority of people start to believe it, that would not be a valid reason to force restaurants to set up green-free areas. Such things should be left to market forces: if most people prefer restaurants which have nothing green in them, that market pressure will result in such restaurants being created. The same way, if enough people need GMO-free food, and are willing to pay more to cover the extra costs, there will be such food. No need for the state to intervene.
That said, I would be easier swayed by self-determination arguments if the position they are arguing for would not be so obviously deceptive. People want specific information, you say. But the big GMO labeling campaigners push for labels like âcontains GMOâ. That is not âspecific informationâ, that is uselessly generic information. It is completely useless for all the purposes you claim it would be good for, such as identifying adverse health effects. It does not give you any real information on what the food contains. So why are they not pushing for labeling that - while still being mostly pointless - would at least make some sense, like putting MON810 on products made out of Bt corn? The only answer I can think of is that the leaders of the campaign are motivated by completely different interests (like Seralini, whose rat article was published in the middle of the launch campaign of his newest book and movie), and the rest of the supporters are left playing the useful idiot.
