toldailytopic: You are what you eat. How do you feel about genetically modified organ

[doloresistere]

Wrong. They can actually reduce pesticide use and allow less harmful pesticides to be substituted.

This is utter nonsense.
The US population has been eating GM corn and soy for more than two decades now and no adverse effects have been confirmed. GM crops are the most extensively tested crop plants ever bred. GM crops utilize biology rather than synthetic chemicals to resist pests, weeds and in some cases increase nutrition. The "additives" of GM crops are proteins, which are non-toxic, and in some cases, these same proteins approved for use as pesticides in organic agriculture (you didn't know organic agriculture is allowed to use certain pesticides did you?).

I'll take a novel, well tested protein over pesticide residue any day.

It is nice to see that not all left wingers are as goofy as eemeece. Some people can care about the environment and yet be sensible at the same time.

 

[Doormat]

Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize

Highlights

► A Roundup-tolerant maize and Roundup provoked chronic hormone and sex dependent pathologies. ► Female mortality was 2–3 times increased mostly due to large mammary tumors and disabled pituitary. ► Males had liver congestions, necrosis, severe kidney nephropathies and large palpable tumors. ► This may be due to an endocrine disruption linked to Roundup and a new metabolism due to the transgene. ► GMOs and formulated pesticides must be evaluated by long term studies to measure toxic effects.

Answers to critics: Why there is a long term toxicity due to a Roundup-
tolerant genetically modified maize and to a Roundup herbicide

Our recent work (Séralini et al., 2012) remains to date the most detailed study involving the life-long consumption of an agricultural genetically modified organism (GMO). This is true especially for NK603 maize for which only a 90-day test for commercial release was previously conducted using the same rat strain (Hammond et al., 2004). It is also the first long term detailed research on mammals exposed to a highly diluted pesticide in its total formulation with adjuvants. This may explain why 75% of our first criticisms arising within a week, among publishing authors, come from plant biologists, some developing patents on GMOs, even if it was a toxicological paper on mammals, and from Monsanto Company who owns both the NK603 GM maize and Roundup herbicide (R). Our study has limits like any one, and here we carefully answer to all criticisms from agencies, consultants and scientists, that were sent to the Editor or to ourselves. At this level, a full debate is biased if the toxicity tests on mammals of NK603 and R obtained by Monsanto Company remain confidential and thus unavailable in an electronic format for the whole scientific community to conduct independent scrutiny of the raw data. In our article, the conclusions of long-term NK603 and Roundup toxicities came from the statistically highly discriminant findings at the biochemical level in treated groups in comparison to controls, because these findings do correspond in an blinded analysis to the pathologies observed in organs, that were in turn linked to the deaths by anatomopathologists. GM NK603 and R cannot be regarded as safe to date.

 

[Doormat]

I'll take a novel, well tested protein over pesticide residue any day.

"...a full debate is biased if the toxicity tests on mammals of NK603 and R obtained by Monsanto Company remain confidential and thus unavailable in an electronic format for the whole scientific community to conduct independent scrutiny of the raw data.

 

[Doormat]

GM corn set to stop man spreading his seed

Scientists have created the ultimate GM crop: contraceptive corn. Waiving fields of maize may one day save the world from overpopulation.

The pregnancy prevention plants are the handiwork of the San Diego biotechnology company Epicyte, where researchers have discovered a rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm.

By isolating the genes that regulate the manufacture of these antibodies, and by putting them in corn plants, the company has created tiny horticultural factories that make contraceptives.

'We have a hothouse filled with corn plants that make anti-sperm antibodies,' said Epicyte president Mitch Hein.

'We have also created corn plants that make antibodies against the herpes virus, so we should be able to make a plant-based jelly that not only prevents pregnancy but also blocks the spread of sexual disease.'

Contraceptive corn is based on research on the rare condition, immune infertility, in which a woman makes antibodies that attack sperm.

'Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm,' said Hein. 'They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.'

Normally, biologists use bacteria to grow human proteins. However, Epicyte decided to use corn because plants have cellular structures that are much more like those of humans, making them easier to manipulate.

The company, which says it will not grow the maize near other crops, says it plans to launch clinical trials of the corn in a few months.

What could man do with the capability? Perhaps the history of project Coast can tell us.

Daan Goosen, the managing director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories between 1983 and 1986, told Tom Mangold of the BBC that Project Coast supported a project to develop a contraceptive that would have been applied clandestinely to blacks. Goosen reported that the project had developed a vaccine for males and females and that the researchers were still searching for a means by which it could be delivered to make blacks sterile without making them aware. Testimony given at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) suggested that Project Coast researchers were also looking into putting birth control substances in water supplies.

 

[Doormat]

...The "additives" of GM crops are proteins, which are non-toxic...

Former Monsanto Employee Exposes Fraud

Azevedo graduated with a biochemistry degree from California Polytechnic State University and started working for the chemical industry doing research on Bt (or Bacillus thuringiensis) pesticides. Around 1996, he became a local market manager for Monsanto, serving as a facilitator for GE crops for the western states. He explained to Food Nation Radio how he had assumed that California cotton that was genetically engineered for herbicide resistance could be marketed as conventional California cotton (to get the California premium) since the only difference between the two, he believed, was the gene Monsanto wanted in the crop. However, one of Monsanto's Ph.D. researchers informed Azevedo that "there's actually other proteins that are being produced, not just the one we want, as a byproduct of genetic engineering process." This concerned Azevedo, who had also been studying protein diseases (including prion diseases such as mad cow disease) and knew proteins could be toxic. When he told his colleague they needed to destroy the seeds from the GE crop so that they aren't fed to cattle, the other researcher said that Monsanto isn't going to stop doing what it's been doing everywhere else.

 

[doloresistere]

Doormat. Isn't Monsanto the problem instead of GM foods?

 

[Doormat]

Doormat. Isn't Monsanto the problem instead of GM foods?

If GM foods are unsafe and Monsanto is negligent, it follows that both Monsanto and GM foods are the problem.

What are the legitimate and necessary benefits to GM foods for human or animal consumption? God's design works fine, in my opinion.

 

[doloresistere]

If GM foods are unsafe and Monsanto is negligent, it follows that both Monsanto and GM foods are the problem.

What are the legitimate and necessary benefits to GM foods for human or animal consumption? God's design works fine, in my opinion.

I'm not convinced that GM foods are unsafe. The world would be a lot more hungry today than it is if GM foods were never invented. God's design (nature) genetically modifies food all the time. What is wrong with learning from nature and doing some of it on our own?

 

[Lon]

toldailytopic: You are what you eat. How do you feel about genetically modified organisms (GMO) and genetically engineered (GE) seeds and crops?

Er, I think my body has been so subjugated by them at this point in life that the best I could demand is that I remain alive if frozen in an ice-cube or that that gills will sprout from my great-grandchildren so that they do not drown

 

[Doormat]

The US population has been eating GM corn and soy for more than two decades now and no adverse effects have been confirmed.

How could those adverse effects be confirmed if they occurred, and what system is established for monitoring? Currently, GM products are not required to be labeled as such in the United States.

Proteopathies like Alzheimer's disease and diabetes mellitus have increased significantly over the last two decades. Since seeded induction of proteopathy can occur, the potentially toxic protein byproducts of GM foods need to be ruled out as a corollary to the increase in some protein diseases.

 

[Lon]

Er, I think my body has been so subjugated by them at this point in life that the best I could demand is that I remain alive if frozen in an ice-cube or that that gills will sprout from my great-grandchildren so that they do not drown

...or that I glow in the dark...

 

[Doormat]

I'm not convinced that GM foods are unsafe.

I'm not convinced they're safe, and I've posted a couple of bits to ponder.

The world would be a lot more hungry today than it is if GM foods were never invented.

GM crops promote superweeds, food insecurity and pesticides, say NGOs: Report finds genetically modified crops fail to increase yields let alone solve hunger, soil erosion and chemical-use issues

Genetic engineering has failed to increase the yield of any food crop but has vastly increased the use of chemicals and the growth of "superweeds", according to a report by 20 Indian, south-east Asian, African and Latin American food and conservation groups representing millions of people.

The so-called miracle crops, which were first sold in the US about 20 years ago and which are now grown in 29 countries on about 1.5bn hectares (3.7bn acres) of land, have been billed as potential solutions to food crises, climate change and soil erosion, but the assessment finds that they have not lived up to their promises.

Failure to Yield: Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops

For years the biotechnology industry has trumpeted that it will feed the world, promising that its genetically engineered crops will produce higher yields.

That promise has proven to be empty, according to Failure to Yield, a report by UCS expert Doug Gurian-Sherman released in March 2009. Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, genetic engineering has failed to significantly increase U.S. crop yields.

Failure to Yield is the first report to closely evaluate the overall effect genetic engineering has had on crop yields in relation to other agricultural technologies. It reviewed two dozen academic studies of corn and soybeans, the two primary genetically engineered food and feed crops grown in the United States. Based on those studies, the UCS report concludes that genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report finds, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.

I'm not convinced we need GMO crops.

God's design (nature) genetically modifies food all the time. What is wrong with learning from nature and doing some of it on our own?

Since organic grown crops have higher yields during periods of drought and torrential rain, and organic farms produce from 2-10 times the yield of conventional and GMO farms, it follows that we can learn from God's design and follow it instead of modify it.

 

[Alate_One]

a full debate is biased if the toxicity tests on mammals of NK603 and R obtained by Monsanto Company remain confidential and thus unavailable in an electronic format for the whole scientific community to conduct independent scrutiny of the raw data.

I recall reading about that particular study and it's instructive to read the letter to the editor to which your quote is replying.

First the choice of the rat breed, Sprague–Dawley, the duration and the uncontrolled feeding used in the study. These animals were maintained for 24 months and fed ad-lib. This specific breed of rats is well known to be prone to develop cancer with age and especially when there is no dietary restriction. For example, Prejean et al. (1973) noted a spontaneous tumour incidence of 45% in 360 Sprague–Dawley rats (179 males and 181 females) in an 18-month series of carcinogenesis experiments. The percentage of female rats with tumours was almost double that of males. Durbin et al. (1966) reported a mean incidence of 71%, the peak incidence in normally aging rats were age-related with abrupt increases in the rate of development of mammary tumour, one occurring at about the 500th and the other at about the 660th day of life, with the median age at 671 ± 41 days. Harlan, the company that marketed the animals, describes the high incidence of 76% of mammary gland tumours (predominantly fibroademonas) in females on Life-span and Spontaneous Disease of Sprague-Dawley. Keenan et al. (1995) describes spontaneous tumours in up to 87% of females and up to 71% of males fed ad lib. Dietary restriction significantly reduced the incidence of tumours. Uncontrolled ad libitum feeding significantly contributes to a high variability and poor reproducibility of a study limiting its usefulness in risk assessment (in Keenan et al. (1999)). The number of rats in Séralini et al. (2012) developing tumours fall within the history of reported spontaneous tumour rate in this breed of rat. Séralini et al. even mention that control animals survived on average less than 24 months but it is not explained about their death in sufficient detail.

Also the original abstract (the paper the letter addresses) appears to be poorly written from first look, plus the study used only ten animals per group when at least fifty is typical.

Both round up and round-up ready crops have been already extensively tested. Complaining about a particular strain's data not being released is just being picky at this point. I wonder why anyone would even be interested in round-up ready maize as weed control is usually achieved by canopy cover relatively rapidly.

Additionally, round up ready crops simply contain an enzyme from a soil bacterium that is resistant to inactivation by roundup (glyphosate). This enzyme is part of the pathway to synthesize aromatic amino acids and isn't found in animals so there's nothing to inactivate. In terms of pesticide toxicity, it is one of the lowest.

 

[Stripe]

In other words you're a waste of time, no surprise again.

Yeah, it's a waste of time for liars to speak to me.

There are always tradeoffs in biology.

I know. If you'd quit lying right off the bat and just agreed with me we could have avoided all your nonsense.

That doesn't mean wild plants and animals are perfect and all modification is "bad".

Nothing about the morality of it in this debate.

I've no blanket opposition to hybridisation, genetic tinkering or whatever it is you want to do. I just prefer a rational and systematic approach to the science behind it.

It's odd you're posting on a forum and yet won't deign to offer an actual opinion on the issue at hand.

Back to lying again. I've presented, in this thread, my idea.

 

[eameece]

Wrong. They can actually reduce pesticide use and allow less harmful pesticides to be substituted.

Or else they encourage pesticide resistant superweeds to grow which require MORE pesticides.

The US population has been eating GM corn and soy for more than two decades now and no adverse effects have been confirmed. GM crops are the most extensively tested crop plants ever bred. GM crops utilize biology rather than synthetic chemicals to resist pests, weeds and in some cases increase nutrition. The "additives" of GM crops are proteins, which are non-toxic, and in some cases, these same proteins approved for use as pesticides in organic agriculture (you didn't know organic agriculture is allowed to use certain pesticides did you?).

But most research has been suppressed. Organic "pesticides use biology, so therefore they are not chemicals, but natural means such as other organisms. GMOs change DNA, so calling them "proteins" does not get to the issue.

 

[Alate_One]

How could those adverse effects be confirmed if they occurred, and what system is established for monitoring? Currently, GM products are not required to be labeled as such in the United States.

And the proteins themselves that were added to GM foods have been extensively tested for safety.

Proteopathies like Alzheimer's disease and diabetes mellitus have increased significantly over the last two decades. Since seeded induction of proteopathy can occur, the potentially toxic protein byproducts of GM foods need to be ruled out as a corollary to the increase in some protein diseases.

Lots of other things have increased over the past two decades. Considering diabetes has been linked to increased obesity and increased consumption of refined starches and sugars, which usually are nearly devoid of the proteins in question, a causal link would seem to not have any support.

That and all a consumer has to do to avoid GM foods is eat only organic. So if there's a reduction in these conditions in people that eat organic foods, I'm sure we would have heard about it already.

In terms of safety for consumers, I don't see any issue with current GM products. That said, there are downsides to certainly downsides to GM technology heavy reliance on a single trait and the possibility of gene escape. These can be minimized with proper use and regulation. But I don't see conventional crop production as necessarily superior.

Organic agriculture has its own drawbacks, low yields under many conditions, bacterial contamination from using manure based fertilizer, plus some organic pesticides are worse toxicity wise than conventional ones.

I don't think it's wise in a world that will soon hit 10 billion people to stop using any technology simply because some of us are uncomfortable with it. Remember, GM is just a technique, the label says nothing about what's actually been added to the plant.

 

[Alate_One]

Or else they encourage pesticide resistant superweeds to grow which require MORE pesticides.

But without the GM crops, you have to use those nastier second line pesticides in the first place anyway. What needs to happen, is something similar to round up, with a different mode of action needs to be invented so that farmers will not be reliant on ONE herbicide crop combination.

But most research has been suppressed. Organic "pesticides use biology, so therefore they are not chemicals, but natural means such as other organisms. GMOs change DNA, so calling them "proteins" does not get to the issue.

The DNA in question makes proteins, that's the functional part of the modification.

And "changing DNA" isn't specific to GM crops. Breeding changes DNA. And breeding changes DNA in a much less precise fashion. When conventional breeding is done, there are many more changes to plants of which nobody is aware.

You eat DNA in every unprocessed food you consume. People have done it since the beginning of time.

 

[Alate_One]

Former Monsanto Employee Exposes Fraud
However, one of Monsanto's Ph.D. researchers informed Azevedo that "there's actually other proteins that are being produced, not just the one we want, as a byproduct of genetic engineering process." This concerned Azevedo, who had also been studying protein diseases (including prion diseases such as mad cow disease) and knew proteins could be toxic. When he told his colleague they needed to destroy the seeds from the GE crop so that they aren't fed to cattle, the other researcher said that Monsanto isn't going to stop doing what it's been doing everywhere else.

That's not fraud. It's well understood as part of the process by anyone that's made GM plants. I am confident it was mentioned in the original patent/ field release applications.

 

[Gurucam]

I'm delicious, a little english muffin.

On whose menu?​

 

[Gurucam]

The TheologyOnline.com TOPIC OF THE DAY for May 17th, 2013 05:00 AM

toldailytopic: You are what you eat. How do you feel about genetically modified organisms (GMO) and genetically engineered (GE) seeds and crops?

Take the topic above and run with it! Slice it, dice it, give us your general thoughts about it. Everyday there will be a new TOL Topic of the Day.
If you want to make suggestions for the Topic of the Day send a Tweet to @toldailytopic or @theologyonline or send it to us via Facebook.

Seems that genetic changes to crops and other food put them out side of our own human evolved capacity to deal with, recognize, digest and use them as food.

In some cases these 'new' food just pass through our system undigested. However in other cases it seriously frustrates our digestive system and goes into our body where it wreck havoc there in many ways. These include some ways that very destructive to life and cannot yet be reversed.

Seems that genetic engineers are artificially accelerating the evolution of crops and animals. They are refining food beyond the elementary ways of simply cooking food. They are refining food into forms that our humans systems cannot even recognize and/or digest properly.

This is putting humans at serious risk for survival. Humans are lagging far back in theur evolution. They remain at their much slower and natural rate of evolution.

Under the hands of these scientist crops and animals that supported life before are becoming not supportive (poison) to human life.

Up to very recently the greatest challenge to our human digestive system was msg.

Msg was widely used to preserve the shelf life of food, by making food highly resistive to the the natural breaking down process which must and do render every thing dust to dust.

This directly challenged and frustrate our digestive system. It also challenged and frustrate and so in some cases by-passed the inherent defense system of our digestive system.

Absorption in our digestive system is anchored and relies on this natural process of nature whereby, the body of every thing that is dead goes dust to dust.

Msg is used to frustrate this natural law. Cooked food is enable by the use of msg to hold it form for a much more extend period after it is cooked.

However msg does not stop working when we start to eat the food. It continue it devoted work of preserving the food well into and after the food enters our digestive system. Our digestive system require that food be absolutely available for God's natural breaking down process. Our digestive system cannot function other wise.

Msg does not care about this need of our digestive system. Msg just goes on doing it thing of not letting the food break down. And so this food passes through our system poorly digested (poorly absorbed), if at all.

Crop and animal genetic scientists are simply using other techniques to take our food to higher, broader and deeper levels of what was and continue to be achieved by msg.

Today, in some quarters, they are being celebrated for doing their thing. The question is will they be recognized by future generations, to be 'curses' or 'curse bearers', of our present world?

This work of genetic and msg scientists may not be a bad thing. This can separate goats (left brain operators) from the sheep (right brain operators). They are themselves left brain operators or goats. It is other left brain operators who are most at risk. They are burying their own kind. (like in the dead burying their dead). I am sorry to be the one to tell you, however left brain operators are 'the dead', in Jesus' statement, 'let the dead bury their dead'.

Fact is everyone is not equally at risk. Essentially human evolution is a highly individual things. We are all as different as our dna. We are different even in how our body deals with these new challenges which are thrown to us by these modern scientists. Indeed some people can and will rise above the digestive and abortive challenges of genetic engineered food and even msg enhanced food. These people are the few. They are the one whose physical body functions are very well and intuitively informed by Omniscience (i.e. through the Spirit of Truth). However this is another post for another time.​