say no to gmo

dmacell said...
Its funny in that article how they interview Nestle...A company who practically steals water from communities drains their lakes and spring for almost free (a one time fee) then sells the water for more than 5000% markup. Check out the documentary "water wars"! Most interviewed in the article are part of the problem just pointing fingers at everyone else. I do agree with some of the points though.
I am way apart from mainstream, but hope one day to be joined by others who see things as I do.

No, they interview a woman called Marion Nestle, who has nothing to do with Nestlé the company.

As for being apart from the mainstream, I'd say you're fairly on the par for this board. I'm not entirely unsympathetic to your point of view, but I won't be joining you. 1) It's too late for me, the damage has already been done, and 2) Crohn's goes back thousands of years; it long predates modern agriculture and all the rest.

Pick out false arguments,certain extreme views/individuals or bad arguments from the other sideband broad rush the entire concern.

Companies that produced products or used methods that were questioned that later turned out to be bad regularly use the evidence of safety and not enough evidence of harm argument. It works because we really know little about how the world works and absolute safety impossible.

Breeding plants to resist the effects of herbicide has already been proved to greatly increase herbicide use and residue in the crops. Roundup is safer but good questions exist as too how safe it is. The risk doesn't appear to have much benefit. Agribusiness have a long track record. The government helps them lots because the have centralized power. The quality of food from large producers of meat, poultry, milk who rely on feed produced with high tech chemicals and patented plants , has been going down hill for decades. Farmers aren't doing better and the customer is getting a worse product.

Now if we were actually starving, risks might be worth taking but we aren't and the percentage of the family budget going to food is lowest ever.

One alarming thing about the cost of food at the supermarket is the total disconnect from what farmers are paid for food , and how profit margins have evolved. Produce is marked way up and a huge amount is tossed. Meat, dairy and processed foods often have a tiny mark up and little is wasted. I don't believe in conspiracies. I think supermarket chains make more money on produce by having a huge selection, stabilizing prices and selling less produce at a higher price to fewer people. They rely on large suppliers that provide a consistent(but often crappy) year round product. That puts local farms out of business and means more food imports and centralized production in Florida and California. Which means more chemicals. Try gardening without chemicals in Florida.

Go visit a laying operation, a feed or dairy "farm" especially in the southwest, or hog barn then tell me we are headed in the right direction. I don't have a PhD but I worked on farms in the 1970s and I have toured dozens of modern farming operations in the US and Europe. The animals are not healthy and level of chemical use on crops scares me. The people driving this bus aren't trustworthy and they aren't helping us. They may just be blind to the truth by self interest. The government defaults to their views because of lobbying and $$$$. People need to protect themselves and question modern AG.

I've never really understood the GMO thing. Organisms have been modified from the beginning of time. That's why there are so many species of everything. It's called evolution.

Do you have any idea how many different species of humans as well as proto-homo sapiens died out in the millennia before our particular species flourished? I'm not just talking about Neanderthals, there were many branches of our tree that didn't make it. The same is true for other organisms. It takes many hundreds of thousands or millions of years for a plant or animal to evolve and many are dead ends with that organism or plant dying out.

Are you equating the quick-switch of gmo's to Darwinian evolution?
We have no idea how these changes in the plants and animals we eat are affecting our own bodies and we may not know until thousands of years from now because it will be hard to figure out whether the problem is the gmo's, the polluted water (fracking, oil spills, chemical pollution, environmental pollution), the polluted air or anything else.

I hope we keep up with space exploration because the future of this planet does worry me a bit.

So as long as you dont eat it for more than 90 days....youre good!
If its organic its not gmo for sure. But cross contamination is getting worse as time goes on. Organic farmers need larger and larger buffer zones to prevent it.

I' m trying to say at least in my case it was the trigger, and still is. If i deviate from my wholesome diet the symptoms will start to come back. Its slow but i know the symptoms real well. So i dont and stay symptom free.
Diseases have been around forever and are more prevalent when we are nutritionally deprived or are over exposed to toxins. So by avoiding as much exposure as possible is the best course.
I certainly like to make people think about what they are eating. Its something you have control of...living near a fracking site might not be so much of your choice.

No, Bt corn is not considered organic. To be organic, it must not be a GMO crop. Now, Bt can and is often used as a spray in organic crops, so even if you're eating organic, it might have Bt on it, depending on what the grower used. Remember that organic does NOT mean pesticide-free.

And yes, that's the study to which I was referring. Not only was the sample size not large enough, the rats they chose to use for the study have crazy-high tumor rates in their "natural" state, if they're left to live long enough. Some of the data was just not discussed in the paper, such as the fact that the rats fed the highest amounts of GMO corn lived longer than rats fed the lowest level. Then there's the problem that rats that drank Roundup (it was added to their water) lived longer than all of the other rats, including ones not exposed to Roundup.

So yeah, this paper was just as much about Roundup as it was about GMOs. But there's still no data to suggest that GMOs themselves are dangerous.

Genes do move across species naturally, though. It's not terribly common, but it DOES happen. Here's a snippet from wikipedia describing it.

Gene flow between species

Main article: Horizontal gene transfer
Horizontal gene transfer (HGT) refers to the transfer of genes between organisms in a manner other than traditional reproduction, either through hybridization, antigenic shift, or reassortment is sometimes an important source of genetic variation. Viruses can transfer genes between species. Bacteria can incorporate genes from other dead bacteria, exchange genes with living bacteria, and can exchange plasmids across species boundaries. "Sequence comparisons suggest recent horizontal transfer of many genes among diverse species including across the boundaries of phylogenetic "domains". Thus determining the phylogenetic history of a species can not be done conclusively by determining evolutionary trees for single genes."[6]
Biologist Gogarten suggests "the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research". Biologists [should] instead use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use the metaphor of an intertwined net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of horizontal gene transfer.[7]
"Using single genes as phylogenetic markers, it is difficult to trace organismal phylogeny in the presence of HGT. Combining the simple coalescence model of cladogenesis with rare HGT events suggest there was no single last common ancestor that contained all of the genes ancestral to those shared among the three domains of life. Each contemporary molecule has its own history and traces back to an individual molecule cenancestor. However, these molecular ancestors were likely to be present in different organisms at different times."[8]

The trouble is, where does it all stop? Where do we draw the line? It's not fair to just automatically codemn and find guilty things just because we THINK they could possibly cause harm and that there is no "proof" that they don't cause us harm. Do we get rid of all cars? Do we get rid of all microwaves, cellphones, televisions, soaps, cleaning products, clothing, etc., etc., etc.? Do we outlaw big business farms and grocery stores and mandate that everyone have their own gardens? Do we outlaw every single business that sends particles into the air?

It might have been in this thread where I brought up where decades ago extremists warned us that cigarette smoking caused health problems but at the time there was no evidence to support it and now everyone knows that smoking does indeed cause many health problems. BUT, does this mean that every single warning from extremists is going to eventually be proven to be true? Of course not. You can't just find something guilty with no trial and no proof just because a certain group has a fear of the unknown. Some may eventually be found to be harmful. Many will not. I really don't think the answer to disease is to outlaw everything and go back to wearing animal skins and hunting Wooly Mammoths, eating berries, and drinking water from streams or wells.

"I really don't think the answer to disease is to outlaw everything and go back to wearing animal skins and hunting Wooly Mammoths and eating berries."

This is the sort of comment you would get from a spokesperson for a chemical company or someone that is politically opposed to all regulation. Lame attempt to define anyone that believes in cautious approach to adopting potentially harmful technology as a radical. The radicals are the people that think the way to judge a products safety should wait until the bodies start piling up like they did with cigarettes.When the bodies did pile up the cigarette companies went on a propaganda war and bought politicians to help them. You need to look at potential positives and negatives, and the need for what the product offers. Example: medicine to treat a serious disease might have less safety testing and adverse health effects on the consumer would be more tolerated than a new type of sweet corn. We have a political climate where attempting to draw a proper line is so difficult that tossing out the baby with the bath water is sometimes the best option. GMOs have a higher potential upside in medicine with lower downside than in food production which not a sign that GMO in food is a wise path. Strengthening patents on seed is probably the prime motivator for Monsanto. That is a negative for everyone else but sellers of GMO super seeds.

Post Edited (AZYooper) : 4/1/2014 11:47:05 AM (GMT-6)

Nobody even answered my question. Talking GMO's being bad IS extreme. So if we're going to go to that extreme then why not get rid of all the things I mentioned in my previous post? It's an extremist viewpoint to label GMO's "trash foods". It's like McDonalds is OK but don't eat corn or that tomato or that fish and we use arguments like "The preliminary data suggests". Preliminary? Suggests? This is supposed to be the rock solid evidence that GMO's are bad for you?

I can assure you that I am not a spokesman for a chemical company. I could give a rat's butt about any of them and I am not opposed to regulation at all. I'm glad there's regulation. Funny how people who want to defend regulation and then accuse the FDA of being worthless. "Lame attempt to define anyone that believes in cautious approach to adopting potentially harmful technology as a radical". Seriously? Refer to my first paragraph. BELIEVES in CAUTIOUS approach? POTENTIALLY harmful technology? Again, this is the rock solid evidence that GMO's are bad for you? And now the cigarette argument does come up - just because of the cigarette thing every similar situation is just automatically guilty?

I don't think for one second that government will take care of us. There's a lot of examples where it doesn't or hasn't. I also don't believe that big business cares about us but big business is not automatically the enemy either. It's also an extreme view to say that ice cream is going to kill us so we should never eat it. Trusting no one is ridiculous. How do you know you can trust organic foods, etc? Carrageenan is just another example of extremist viewpoints.

Once its labeled you can choose to eat it all you want.
I wouldnt eat mcdonalds or ice cream. Lol!

After reading many of these posts i dont feel so extreme now.

I eat bread. I make it myself from organic ingrediants. No added yoga mat in my bread.