I much prefer it when the mutagen is a natural source, like cosmic rays. So what if we sped Mother Nature along with radioactivity? It’s not like the resulting wheat is radioactive.
Sorry, I’m being testy. My wife, who used to be scientific and smart, went on a gluten-free kick for herself. She’s back to eating it, but now claims that nobody and no animal can digest gluten at all. I really don’t know where she gets this shit because she doesn’t go online much these days.
Gluten-free products are wonderful for people who allergic or sensitive to gluten.
This seems like a logical conclusion, but some of my more … illogical friends are so anti-GMO that anything but organic food that they grow themselves are somehow suspect. I wonder how we allowed such a wild shift to nuttiness and woo that we have seen in the past 50 years. Perhaps, it is a reaction to the ‘world of the future’ concepts that we were all immersed in as children back in the middle 20th century. Return to nature is a nice sounding idea, but in reality nature is red in tooth and claw and quite dangerous.
It is as if nobody remembers that virtually everything we eat of terrestrial origin has been strongly and profoundly modified from their original species.
Maize and bananas come to mind, but there are so many that cataloguing them would be pointless. And arguing about this is equally pointless when the other party is unable to accept the data available. It makes me sad sometimes.
If you’re eating the same number of calories and expending the same number of calories, you will not lose weight.
If you only want to lose weight, stop worrying about what you eat and just eat less of it.
This is an over-simplification.
For example, it has been indicated in some studies that some diet drinks actually increase your appetite. Some substances affect your metabolic/digestive systems in ways other than direct calorie consumption–such as their effect on insulin production, their effect on the mechanism that indicates you have had enough to eat, etc. It sometimes does matter what you eat.
I’m not going to link to any of these studies because you can find studies that come to opposite conclusions just as well. An interesting point to note is that some people have observed the outcomes of the studies are strongly correlated to who funded them, as mentioned here:
“Studies that do not support a relationship between consumption of sugared beverages and health outcomes tend to be conducted by authors supported by the beverage industry,” Brownell wrote in a 2009 New England Journal of Medicine article supporting a soda tax.”
I’m not sure there were any studies that linked increase in appetite to diet sodda consumption. It was a hypothesis at one point, but the only actual study I’ve seen does not support it at all. And it wasn’t “conducted by authors supported by the beverage industry”.
Appetite is irrelevant unless you act on it and eat extra calories. Metabolism doesn’t vary enough to make more than a miniscule % difference. Eat at a deficit and you will lose weight, no matter what you’re eating.
Long-term health is another story, of course. Soda should be avoided more for what it does to your teeth than for what it does to your gut. Try drinking water. It’s delicious.
Why? I would get sick frequently, never linked the episodes. When I was being tested for something else (liver), celiac was a screening test. That lead so a upper GI and biospy that confirmed celiac. There was a time when I ate lots of wheat, before I was aware of the problems it was causing.
Interesting perspective you have.
Like I said, you can find studies that come to opposite conclusions.
This fact is frequently trotted out in favor of GM, but there are several arguments against it. For now let me just point out that there is much evidence that humans’ pre-agriculture diet was in fact much better than the post-agricultural diet. I don’t have the energy to track down the best cites for this; here’s one about wheat by a Ph.D. in neurobiology that showed up at the top of a Google search.
I draw a distinction between Hybridization and what we commonly now call Genetic Modification. Hybridization relies on internal mechanisms that control the range of possible variations. Genetic Modification through direct insertion or modification of genetic material bypasses these mechanisms.
If this were computer software, it would be the difference between hacking and using the provided API. Using the API provides a level of assurance that the results are supported by the design and minimizes the occurrence of “unexpected results”.
My neighbour theorises that it was this that made her boyfriend become an atheist.
We don’t have that many religious people around here, so I was a little curious how he came to lose his religion. So one time, when she mentioned his parents, I asked her if she knew. She grew up with Catholicism in Easter Europe (not actually religious, but that was what she knew), and she said: “I didn’t realise this about Calvinists, but they see snacking as evil indulgence.” She said that as a kid he never got any snacks at all. At all. Not like, “don’t eat a whole bag of Cheetos right before supper”, but like, no snacks ever. He was decently fed at mealtimes, but spent the entire time in between ravenous, the way only teenage boys can be ravenous. According to her, and she admits that his version would probably be a little different, his persistent hunger as a child made him lose faith first in his parents, and then in his god. For the lack of snacks he lost his religion!
So there ya go: seeing food as sinful is dangerous stuff, kids. 
Outside of the GM argument, there is a strong argument that the processes making wheat into flour are simply awful; stories of the Chorley-Wood process in the UK making bread from something fulfilling and good for you into something actually bad for you (basically filling but empty calories with all the bad left in and all the good taken out) are quite scary.
I don’t buy into the sudden anti-gluten crusade or the health benefits of it, but I like making bread at home and try to use full-grain wheat, or at least cold-rolled flour instead of mass-produced cheap flour, as much as possible. It’s a whole different eating experience, even buying whole-grain supermarket bread, and I find that one slice fills me up like 3-4 slices of store-made would before.
I’m a bit of a food snob, but it’s all about taste for me. My home made sourdough knocks the spots off any store-bought bread ever once I got the recipe and starter working well.
That study does not come to the conslusion that diet sodas increase appetite. In other words, it does not come to the opposite conclusion.
This doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the GM debate. You’re comparing modern food to pre-agriculture food. That doesn’t do anything to inform the argument about modern non-GM food vs modern GM food. It’s a different debate.
You are correct. The study does not conclude this. It does, however conclude that diet soda consumption is strongly correlated with obesity in ways that the researchers admit are not well understood. My original point was that it does matter what you eat, not just the caloric content,.
Perhaps. But when one argues against GM food the pro-GM side always trots out the idea that agriculture is a form of GM.
Did you miss Surreal’s post above, or do you consider irradiating seeds and looking for random beneficial mutations “using the provided API”?
No, I do not consider those techniques “using the provided API”.
That’s known as mutation breeding, not GMO. GMO’s are created by genetic engineering, which is “the direct manipulation of an organism’s genome using biotechnology…New DNA may be inserted in the host genome by first isolating and copying the genetic material of interest using molecular cloning methods to generate a DNA sequence, or by synthesizing the DNA, and then inserting this construct into the host organism. Genes may be removed, or “knocked out”, using a nuclease. Gene targeting is a different technique that uses homologous recombination to change an endogenous gene, and can be used to delete a gene, remove exons, add a gene, or introduce point mutations.”
Mutation breeding simply speeds up the natural process, and while it may lead to unexpected and concerning results for the environment, doesn’t cause the *same *concerns among educated people as genetic engineering, which really is essentially hacking DNA.