GMO Foods; What's the general scientific opinion?

[b33fj3rky]

I know that there is no 100% agreement among legitimate scientists about GMO foods. However, what is the general consensus? Do the vast majority of scientists say that GMOs are safe? When a scientist says that he or she has evidence that GMOs are not safe, is that treated much the same way a climate-change denier or an intelligent-design proponent would be?

 

[John Jones]

I know that there is no 100% agreement among legitimate scientists about GMO foods. However, what is the general consensus? Do the vast majority of scientists say that GMOs are safe? When a scientist says that he or she has evidence that GMOs are not safe, is that treated much the same way a climate-change denier or an intelligent-design proponent would be?

I don't know if they are safe or not. I analyze them for amino acid content among other things. I don't feel qualified to make a statement on their safety. I know that my work has become more challenging since the introduction of GMO sources of protein.

For example: Hydroxyproline is an amino acid normally found only in animal connective tissue. If we found it in something else, we'd do an automatic retest in duplicate to rule-out lab errors. D-amino acids have been found in biological sources of protein when it was long thought that only L-amino acids existed in nature.

Now you never know what you're going to find.

 

[Red Baron Farms]

I know that there is no 100% agreement among legitimate scientists about GMO foods. However, what is the general consensus? Do the vast majority of scientists say that GMOs are safe? When a scientist says that he or she has evidence that GMOs are not safe, is that treated much the same way a climate-change denier or an intelligent-design proponent would be?

There can never be a consensus on GMO foods because it is such a broad category.

It would be like asking what is the consensus on pharmaceutical drugs?

In general sure , we have drugs to heal illnesses. They work good and have helped many people around the world. Of course other drugs have failed or had unacceptable side effects. GMO's are no different. In fact most GMOs are made for drugs, only a very few are approved for food.

You just have to test on a case by case basis.

 

[b33fj3rky]

There can never be a consensus on GMO foods because it is such a broad category.

It would be like asking what is the consensus on pharmaceutical drugs?

Interesting point! I hadn't thought of it like that.

I'm curious about a consensus because there definitely are some people who say all GMO foods are bad, period, end of story. I know folks who claim their health has dramatically improved by cutting out all GMO foods from their diets. It reminds me of people who claim that gluten is terrible and their health dramatically improved by cutting it out (even though they tested negative for celiac disease.)

 

[b33fj3rky]

I don't know if they are safe or not. I analyze them for amino acid content among other things. I don't feel qualified to make a statement on their safety. I know that my work has become more challenging since the introduction of GMO sources of protein.

What kind of work do you do?

 

[Sceptic-PK]

There is broad scientific consensus that food on the market derived from GM crops poses no greater risk than conventional food. No reports of ill effects have been documented in the human population from GM food

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food#Controversies

 

[jasonpatterson]

This topic is very much like climate change or smoking safety or any number of other subjects in terms of the difference between the actual scientific consensus and the perceived scientific consensus.

The overwhelming majority of the studies that have been done on the GMOs that are currently in use in the food supply chain show that they have no adverse effects. There are a few studies done almost exclusively by people with a bias against GMO that indicate otherwise (like the one here.) These few studies are publicized enormously to create the image that there is a strong, reasonable, science-based opposition to GMO.

If you live in the US and you don't grow all of your own food, you're almost certainly already eating GMO corn/soy and have been for years.

 

[John Jones]

What kind of work do you do?

I'm a chemist. More specifically, I break-down proteins into their individual amino acids, and report the same. The quality of protein depends on the level of certain essential amino acids.

 

[ThunderChunky]

The consensus is there. All the major regulatory bodies and prestigious scientific organizations have recognized that GMO foods are safe.

The anti-GMO kooks are deniers. Plain and simple. If they aren't as bad as creationists or climate change skeptics, they are damn close (but thankfully they wield less political power).

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...are_skewing_the_science_to_scare_people_.html

But they have come to the point where they are destroying field trials and holding back potentially important crops.

http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-destroy-golden-rice-field-trial

 

[The Don]

I'm not an expert on GMO but from what I've read the issues in the main do not relate to GMO per se but in terms of what GMO allows humans to do like:

• Patenting organisms and then enforcing those patents against some poor farmer who accidentally grows some GMO crops (although there are other less poor farmers who are gaming the system too)
• Selling seed for sterile GMO plants which means that farmers need to buy seed each year
• Weedkiller resistance which allows for greater use of more poeten weedkillers resulting in a monoculture
• Overpromising/underdelivering on GMO benefits

None of these are unique to GMO but GMO makes it easier.

 

[GlennB]

• Selling seed for sterile GMO plants which means that farmers need to buy seed each year

My recollection was that this 'suicide seed' technology was not in use, and wiki seems to confirm that.


I presume such 'suicide genes' could drift into non-GM fields and cause sterility there?

 

[The Don]

[/LIST]
My recollection was that this 'suicide seed' technology was not in use, and wiki seems to confirm that.

Thus demonstrating my lack of expertise

I presume such 'suicide genes' could drift into non-GM fields and cause sterility there?

I don't know, maybe they cannot but in any case as you've demonstrated it's currently moot.

 

[catsmate]

I know that there is no 100% agreement among legitimate scientists about GMO foods. However, what is the general consensus?

Safe and potentially highly beneficial to both humanity and the planet Earth.

Do the vast majority of scientists say that GMOs are safe?

Yes.

When a scientist says that he or she has evidence that GMOs are not safe, is that treated much the same way a climate-change denier or an intelligent-design proponent would be?

Pretty much. Anti-GMO nuts tend to either fail to produce evidence for their claims or else present a handful of long debunked crap studies.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

Since it's been virtually impossible to eat a non-GMO food since the advent of agriculture and we seem to be doing fine, the general consensus is that GMO foods as such are fine to eat.

Most debate centers around the applicability of patents, monopolies, mono-culture problems and the effects of over using pesticides

 

[GlennB]

Since it's been virtually impossible to eat a non-GMO food since the advent of agriculture and we seem to be doing fine, the general consensus is that GMO foods as such are fine to eat.

We often hear that line of argument in these debates but, at best, it just muddies the waters.

In modern parlance GMO <> a hybrid strain developed over many years from what was naturally available.

No natural crossing of tomatoes and cranberries is possible, either in the wild or in the greenhouse, in order to create purple tomatoes with plenty of <whatever it is that's supposed to be good about cranberries>.

Splicing cranberry genes into tomatoes, in a lab, then propagating from the resulting plant, is what we understand by 'GMO'.

 

[Aepervius]

The consensus is there. All the major regulatory bodies and prestigious scientific organizations have recognized that GMO foods are safe.

The anti-GMO kooks are deniers. Plain and simple. If they aren't as bad as creationists or climate change skeptics, they are damn close (but thankfully they wield less political power).

http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...are_skewing_the_science_to_scare_people_.html

But they have come to the point where they are destroying field trials and holding back potentially important crops.

http://news.sciencemag.org/asiapacific/2013/08/activists-destroy-golden-rice-field-trial

Such over generalization is what makes people suspicious and with good reason.
GMO are safe, as long as the gene content are tested before putting on market for allergy (in case you put gene of species to which people are allergic to, fish, peanuts), and similar other case. GMO are safe, because they are tested. GMO are not safe "in general".

 

[Cuddles]

I'm curious about a consensus because there definitely are some people who say all GMO foods are bad, period, end of story.

In that case, the consensus is that such people are about as wrong as it's physically possible to be. No sensible person will ever claim that all GMO food must be safe; since it's possible to modify things to produce poison that obviously can't be true. But it's equally nonsensical to claim that all GM food must be bad all the time.

There are legitimate worries about genetic engineering. If people just modified everything willy-nilly and threw it out into the wild with no thought for what might happen, we would almost certainly end up with all kinds of damage to ecosystems and probably plenty of food that turned out to be harmful. But that's not what happens. Scientists don't just randomly mix up genes and see what happens, they make very specific changes in order to produce a specific outcome, and carry out extensive testing to make sure that the result is actually what was intended. That doesn't mean mistakes are never going to happen, but it does mean that fears founded on the assumption of the former attitude just don't make sense in the real world.

Scientists as a whole are not trying to deliberately poison you nor are they so reckless that such things can be expected as a matter of course. Concern over specific issues in specific cases may be entirely justified, but it just doesn't make sense to assume that all scientists will do everything wrong all the time.

 

[Old man]

[/LIST]I presume such 'suicide genes' could drift into non-GM fields and cause sterility there?

I've seen this question raised any number of times. Please explain the mechanism by which a genetically determined sterility can spread through a population.

 

[Old man]

We often hear that line of argument in these debates but, at best, it just muddies the waters.

In modern parlance GMO <> a hybrid strain developed over many years from what was naturally available.

No natural crossing of tomatoes and cranberries is possible, either in the wild or in the greenhouse, in order to create purple tomatoes with plenty of <whatever it is that's supposed to be good about cranberries>.

Splicing cranberry genes into tomatoes, in a lab, then propagating from the resulting plant, is what we understand by 'GMO'.

The bolded part is true enough, unless you count the chemical and radiological mutagens that were used in plant breeding programs in the 1940's and 50's.

 

[Lukraak_Sisser]

We often hear that line of argument in these debates but, at best, it just muddies the waters.

In modern parlance GMO <> a hybrid strain developed over many years from what was naturally available.

No natural crossing of tomatoes and cranberries is possible, either in the wild or in the greenhouse, in order to create purple tomatoes with plenty of <whatever it is that's supposed to be good about cranberries>.

Splicing cranberry genes into tomatoes, in a lab, then propagating from the resulting plant, is what we understand by 'GMO'.

Horizontal gene transfer. Just because we co opt the mechanism to make things go as we want doesn't mean it doesn't exist or happen.