<insert witty sig here>
[[I assume you were trying to be funny rather than snotty, so I’m sorry to disappoint you.]] nemo1
It wasn’t really meant to be snotty. But it was your example and, I mean, what could you possibly order along with the fries at McDee’s that wouldn’t be even worse for your health? Plus it was a cheap shot I couldn’t resist.
As for your acetametaphin example, one of the benefits of our system of drug testing and regulation is that one can consult the Physicians’ Desk Reference (PDR) and read about which health conditions preclude the safe use of a particular drug, which other drugs are contra-indicated while using it, every side effect that’s ever been experienced by anyone using the drug and even what percentage of the time one could expect them to occur. (It can be scary to read that oral contraceptives are associated with fatal blood clots, but if you read further, that risk is primarily for older women who smoke and it’s still even rarer than the likelihood of such a woman dying from pregnancy related causes.) For most herbal remedies, on the other hand, it’s still pretty much a crap shoot what the risks are.
Jill
To Cecil: I’m grateful for the link to your column on aspartame; it’s from before I had net access, and it hasn’t been reprinted in the books, facts which I offer in extenuation of my having let myself be misinformed. Yeah, it sure looks like there’s no sound reason to jump on the stuff, and I apologize for bringing it up. Indeed, it’s come to my attention that aspartame has come under fire from right-wing Christian fundamentals, a group not noted for deep scientific insights, and one I would disassociate myself from right quick, so please forget I mentioned it. If I’m to be adjudged a wigged-out extremist, let it be on my own merits.
Since you’ve asked, I’ll restate this: Because you dismissed the original questioner’s concerns about food safety in one sentence, I felt it should be said that since ordinary consumables are sometimes certified safe while still carrying certain risks, the same would be true to a greater degree with the products of genetic engineering, because (and here is where we seem to disagree) not enough is known about them to know exactly how to test them or what to test them for. For the third (or is it fourth?) time, I would not advocate a fear of new technologies in general, and I accept measurable risks associated with them. For the third time, I agree that it doesn’t seem likely there’s much, if anything, to fear about food safety with these crops. I say only (for the third time) that in the specific case of genetically-engineered food crops, there is less reason than usual to be satisfied with ordinary assurances of safety, and the matter perhaps deserved more than a single sentence in your column. Clearly, you disagree, and I’m content with that. The things I seriously consider scary are the possible environmental impact and the “friggin’ Monsanto” issues, matters you and Mr Margulis have addressed admirably well. I think we agree more than we disagree, except as to matters of degree.
To smegmum: The same concerns JillGat raises about herbal remedies would apply to plant hormones if they’re not properly tested. Concerns have been raised about bovine somatotrophin, aka recombinant bovine growth hormone, a product that, used in sufficient quantities, has been known to cause mastitis and other health problems in dairy cattle. It’s the dubious assumption that anything of biological origin will behave as you expect it to in unfamiliar contexts that’s at the heart of the environmental concerns.
To JillGat: Agreed. I wouldn’t dispute the idea that these herbs can also be dangerous. Testing standards are virtually nonexistent. As I said, I like my risks measurable.
Sorry to be so long-winded. Have a nice day, all.
smegmum V wrote: “If I understand what I’ve read correctly, Monsanto’s plants produce the same hormone that’s in Roundup.
That is not an Herbicide per-se but a plant growth hormone. The plant grows it’s way past It’s resources.
What could be more natural or wholesome than a plant hormone?”
I don’t know what you’ve been reading, but the active ingredient in Roundup is a chemical called glyphosate, which kills plants by blocking an enzyme pathway that would normally allow plants to synthesize certain essential amino acids. There’s nothing “natural” about this. Roundup formulations also contain so-called “inert” ingredients, many of which also cause toxic reactions.
Monsanto’s “Roundup Ready” (RR) plants are genetically engineered to withstand application of Roundup. Roundup cannot enter the enzyme pathway in RR plants, so they remain unaffected by the herbicide. This allows farmers to spray crops directly with Roundup, a nice arrangement if you want to sell more of the chemical. This also leaves more glyphosate on the food we eat: Monsanto successfully lobbied EPA to raise the allowable residue levels of glyphosate on soybeans while their RR soybeans were in development. So the “safe” level of the chemical in our food went overnight from 6 ppm to 20 ppm! The very same process is now underway for sugar beets and grain crops: an EPA ruling last week similarly raised the glyphosate residue levels on these, again at Monsanto’s request.
A Swedish study reported in the journal of the American Cancer Society last month (Cancer, March 15, 1999, vol 85 #6), found that patients with non-Hodgkins lymphoma were 2.3 times more likely than healthy people to have had contact with glyphosate. Chemicals in our food, brought to us by Monsanto and EPA – naturally
Someone up there, or several, brought up the safety of genetically altered foods. NATO has brought us a wonderful opportunity to test these new foods on hundreds of thousands of refugees. Why not? It’s been done before.
Cecil, I have been a loyal reader of your column for aeons. Keep up the good work. Was very interested in your recent column on GE foods. I am a genetics PhD with substantial environmental/ecological, molecular biology, regulatory and science policy experience. I work in the biotech industry because, as a passionate environmentalist and a relentless skeptic, brutal cross examination of the facts led to one inescapable conclusion: that biotech is humanity’s best promise to help bring Wallace Stegner’s vision to pass that humans will learn to “tread more gently on the land.”
With one exception, your column was a brilliant condensation of a lot of complicated information and got to logical and defensible endpoints. The one exception was your closing note, in re BT crops and the potential that their use in large scale production agriculture could deprive organic farmers of a vital tool.
On economic grounds, one could wonder about the wisdom of sacrificing substantial environmental benefits of the use of BT in large scale production agriculture to preserve what is, at best, a boutique economic ghetto, organic production. (I know how fast it is growing, but at the end of the day/decade it will still be minuscule, and will never feed the world, although I am glad it is there, if only to shame the nozzle heads into thinking twice before they reach for their spray guns…) Cotton farmers in the US cotton belt over the past three years have avoided spraying, conservatively, 850,000 gallons of pesticide on their fields thanks to BT crops. That’s about 48 railroad tank cars of potential endocrine disruptors that environmentalists should be delighted did not get into the global hydrological cycles. The beneficiaries include every mammal downstream from those cotton fields, i.e., every one on the planet. Imagine the improvements to the environmental sustainability of production agriculture worldwide if we can increase the adoption of such agronomic practices.
On biological grounds, the threat to organic farming of resistance to BT in the insect pests targeted by genetically engineered BT crops is close to zero. If you look at a map of the US and plot the distribution of organic farms, and the distribution of large scale production agriculture, they are almost completely disjunct. So even if the types of insect pests being targeted were identical – and in most cases they are different species, making the issue emphatically and inarguably irrelevant – the risk would be significantly reduced. Factor in that biotech companies have the greatest vested interest in product longevity, the numerous measures they are taking to prevent or delay the evolution of resistance, and this is a classic molehill the organic community is laboring to make into a mountain out of naked economic self interest. The principal threat BT in agriculture poses to organic farming is the threat that some of the most valuable tenets
of organic farming (environmentally sustainable approaches to pest control) will be infiltrated into mainstream ag, something environmental guerillas around the world should rejoice at. (Remind me to tell you the story about how potatoes were introduced from the Americas into French agriculture…)
I could go on for hours, but I have other stuff to get to, and don’t want to bore you with my enthusiasm. And I hope you will forgive me for not being able to round out your encyclopedic knowledge of life, the universe, and everything by contributing one small nugget.
Just a few comments.
It’s safe to say organic farmers would object to being described as a “boutique economic ghetto.” Whether organic farming will ever become more than that is hard to say, but destroying the usefulness of Bt is a good way to ensure it won’t. We can argue about how much of a threat GE crops pose in this respect; I can only tell you that people with considerable experience in the field and no obvious economic axe to grind are worried about it.
You say that the distribution of organic farms and large scale productions farms is “disjunct.” I suppose what you mean by this is that there aren’t a lot of organic farms in the Corn Belt. Maybe so - and if Bt crops result in Bt-resistant pests in those regions, there never will be.
You say that Bt crops lessen the need for dangerous chemicals. This would be a more persuasive argument if Bt crops were part of a larger industry strategy to reduce chemical dependence. I see no evidence that this is so. Monsanto’s Roundup/Roundup Ready combo if anything increases chemical dependence.
You comment: “The principal threat BT in agriculture poses to organic farming is the threat that some of the most valuable tenets
of organic farming (environmentally sustainable approaches to pest control) will be infiltrated into mainstream ag.” Sorry, I’m not buying it. Genetically engineered Bt crops in effect use megadoses of the stuff, which is completely contrary to the principles of sustainability. In organic farming, as you know, Bt is sprayed on, knocks out pests, then biodegrades and isn’t used again for a while. Pests don’t have time to build up resistance to it. With Bt crops, Bt is always present in the plant itself, so there’s a greater chance of building up resistance.
I’m not saying Bt crops are a sure disaster for organic farming, but I’m not about to blithely dismiss the danger either.
All of this underscores yet again my main point. The problem is not genetic engineering per se, but how it’s used.
Can you get food allergies from this altered stuff?Do food allergies affect behavior?
Just a few comments in response to Mr. Margulis’s last post.
First of all the active ingredient in Roundup is Glyphosphate, not glyphosate. At first I thought it was just a typo, until I stumbled upon a web page from Purdue Universities Horticulture 250 class. If this is where you got your information on Roundup, you need to find a more reliable source. The article(?) is chock full of basic mistakes which would put everone to sleep if I went into detail. Needless to say, I don’t think the person who wrote that is a Biochemist.
Secondly, I would be more careful on how you bandy about the phrase “essential amino acids”. An essential amino acid is by definition one that cannot be synthesized by the organism. Since all 20 amino acids are synthesized in plants, they are all unessential. The synthesis pathway blocked by Roundup produces 3 aromatic amino acids: Tyrosine, Tryptophan, and Phenylalanine. This pathway does not exist in humans. Phenylalanine and Tryptophan have to be ingested (from plants mainly) and are therfore essential, and Tyrosine is synthesized from the hydroxylation of Phenylalanine. Therefore Roundup itself couldn’t hurt a human in that way. Whether or not Roundup is toxic in some other way, I don’t know; but I’m not going to drink it to find out.
I don’t post this to be just picky and mean; but, I think it is very important to have credible information if you are going to sound credible.
One last thing. As you should know, a correlation does not necesarily imply cause and effect. It certainly warrants an investigation to see if there is a causal relationship; but, to base policy or actions upon an initial correlation is foolhardy at best.
Squid Vicious wrote:
“First of all the active ingredient in Roundup is Glyphosphate, not glyphosate.”
No, it’s glyphosate. Look at Monsanto’s annual report if you don’t believe me. I’ve never heard of glyphosphate. I’ve never seen the Purdue article you mention.
My phrase “essential amino acids” referred to their function in the plant, not in human health. These are compounds that are essential to the plant’s growth, that’s why blocking them kills the plant. Obviously this does not equate with harming human health, something I did not argue. The Cancer article, on the other hand, should give pause. I did not argue that this shows causation; I do believe that increasing our exposure to this chemical in our foods is a risky policy that is unwarranted given the dubious “benefits” of permitting more Roundup in the environment. According to US Fish and Wildlife Service, Roundup use already threatens 74 endangered species.
Just two quick comments to Coyote: the world was fed by “organics” for thousands of years before the advent of chemically-based agriculture – without the toxic effects. Organics are the fastest growing segment of the food industry; in several European countries, 10-20% of the produce is already grown organically. Cuba feeds its population adequately with an agriculture that is virtually all organic, unlike many of its Caribbean neighbors, who are still faced with starvation and poverty, and export-based, chemically-intense agriculture.
Coyote also says “biotech companies have the greatest vested interest in product longevity.” In fact, the industry thrives on planned obsolescence, whereby every 7 years (the average life-span of agrichemical products) the last “miracle” product outlives its usefulness, as nature adjusts. In fact, the industry admits that Bt crops are a short-term strategy: when the NY Times asked a Monsanto spokesperson about Bt crops wearing out, he replied, “We have new products in the pipeline. Trust us.”
Charles Margulis
OOPS, sorry charles,
It turns out that it’s both. Glyphosphate is the actual active ingrediant (N-(phosphonomethyl)glycine). Glyphosate is the isopropylamine salt of this acid. This is what happens when biochemists don’t use IUPAC nomenclature when naming compounds. My appologies.
Jesse Miller
[[Just two quick comments to Coyote: the world was fed by “organics” for thousands of years before the advent of chemically-based agriculture – without the toxic effects. Organics are the fastest growing segment of the food industry; in several European countries, 10-20% of the produce is already grown organically.]]
I must say that I’m stunned by the fuzzy-headedness of the above statements. Yes, the whole human race used to subsist on ‘organic’ produce and hunting. So what? For the entirety of human history until relatively recently, the vast majority of people have subsisted WAY below what we consider the poverty line and struggled to achieve even substinence-level nutrition.
‘Fastest growing segment’ is such a ridiculous phrase, it should come with a laugh track. If .01% of a market ‘jumps’ to .02%, this is not a big deal, yet it has grown 100%! Whoopie! Hell, even the word ‘segment’ is suspect… What counts as a segment? Organic vs. beet farmers vs. pecan growers? When the amount of organics grown (measured in tons of food) increases faster than the rate at which all non-organics increase, then that’s news.
That brings us to ‘produce’. If (and that’s a big if) produce refers to all edibles a country produces (some people don’t count grains as produce), then that might be something to crow about. But, let’s face it, most of the world is fed by fields of wheat and corn and rice, only a minute portion of which is legally organic. Feed 10-20% of the population of some sizeable country like Russia, the US or China on organics (as compared to some minute european nation), then come back and talk.
All that said, I applaud that some people want to grow organic food and that others are willing to pay a premium for the privlege of eating the same, but fatuous statements and non-facts are poor tools when trying to convince discerning audiences.
In response to John Karakash: to clarify, the organic food industry is growing by 20-30% a year. That is NOT its growth as a percent of the market share, which is still small in the US (about 1-2%). So your example of a jump from 1 to 2 percent does not relate to my contention.
The issue is whether organics can produce as much food as industrial agriculture. In a 15 year study comparing organic production with chemical-based and energy intensive agriculture, soil ecologist Laurie Drinkwater and colleagues found that organic yields were equivalent, without the adverse environmental impacts (Nature, Nov 18, 1998). Similarly, a 1980 study of 22 rice-growing systems found that indigenous agriculture (the organic production you denigrate) outperformed industrial production in terms of yields, with less energy and labor inputs (Vandana Shiva, “The Violence of the Green Revolution,” pp. 78-79).
Charles Margulis
[[In response to John Karakash: to clarify, the organic food industry is growing by 20-30% a year. That is NOT its growth as a percent of the market share, which is still small in the US (about 1-2%). So your example of a jump from 1 to 2 percent does not relate to my contention. ]]
Ah, but it does! A 20-30% growth in a 1% industry is fairly insignificant. "Fastest growing segment" says nothing, while the numbers given above at least have some rigor to them. To put it into perspective, the best way to say it is, "Organics have been increasing their market share by .2% a year, up from 1-2%." Less impressive, to be sure, but a LOT more accurate and meaningful.
Sorry if my language was strong, but I get very heated about people using fluffy statistics to prove a point... usually to the contrary of actual fact. There is no need to add to the pile of dreck when accuracy is just as easy (even if less convincing).John Karakash writes, “A 20-30% growth in a 1% industry is fairly insignificant.” It’s significant enough to catch the attention of several major food companies, and major Wall St investors. Tha San Francisco Chronicle late last year headlined an article, “Investors Craving Organic: Booming Food Business has Wall Street Salivating.” The paper reported that traditional supermarkets revenue growth is 1-3%, with profit margins of 3-5% – contrasting with organic revenue growth of up to 20%, with margins of 8-10%. I agree that the in this country, organics remain a rather insignificant portion of the overall food market. I believe this has more to do with government policies and support for industrial food production, and less to do with the food choices people would make if there were a level playing field and organics did not have to compete as a higher-priced, less subsidized “boutique” option.
Re genetically engineered food, you might want to look at the case of Dr. Arpad Pusztai (or Puztai), a researcher in Aberdeen who was experimenting with genetically modified potatoes. (they’d had a snowdrop lectin patched in.) Dr. Pusztai found that the rats fed the potatoes had serious organ damage, particularly liver. He reported his findings – and was promptly relieved of his post. Follow up study by 4 other researchers of Dr. Pusztai’s work showed he was, indeed, correct – but no one wanted to hear the bad news.
Scary stuff.
Dana
Is there some good reason why genetically engineered foods should not be labeled as such?
Many folks are concerned that consuming GMO’s is not a healthy pursuit. Does genetically modifying soybeans, for example, have any effect on the way the naturally occuring phytochemicals help prevent some cancers and lower cholesterol? Aren’t GMO’s banned in Europe?
Does anyone know what kind of testing, and to what extent, have been conducted on humans who consume large quantities of genetically modified foods. Most processed foods produced in the USA have some ingredient which comes from a genetically modified plant. This practice was begun and continues without the knowledge and/or consent of the public at large. The only way to avoid consuming GMO’s is to eat only certified organic foods. But even then there is risk. The genie is out of the bottle. Why is everyone so freaking nonchalant about this???
Is there some good reason why genetically engineered foods should not be labeled as such?
There’s a lot of bureaucratic things that go on without your consent or knowledge, like your credit report.
I’m guessing, but I’d say there aren’t any missing natural chemicals in the altered foods, maybe some new ones, though.
Could we make the scientists who design the stuff eat it, grow it, and wear it for five years before putting it on the market? Even better – make sure all the company cafeterias use it first, and that the CEO’s and assorted managers have to use it too?
I know I’m dreaming, but isn’t it a NICE dream?
“. . . and all places are alike to me.”
–R. Kipling
This is kind of interesting. Estimates are that 250 million children around the world are vitamin A deficient and millions are blinded as a result. With all the focus on exotic diseases causing morbidity and mortality around the world, simple Vitamin A supplementation could save up to a million lives a year and cut deaths of children in developing countries by as much as 30%, according to USAID.
Doctors began doing research into vitamin A supplementation in Indonesia in the early 80s, to see if periodic high doses would prevent blindness in children. What they discovered was that children who received even one capsule had a significantly higher chance of survival than those who did not. The scientific world didn’t believe these findings, so two more studies were done in Nepal in 1989 which confirmed those conclusions. This is amazing: 23 percent decrease in death rates among children who had received just a single vitamin A capsule. Turns out it doesn’t just prevent blindness; it “strengthens the immune system and promotes a healthy epidermal barrier necessary to combat and prevent infection, the leading cause of death for children in the developing world. For a cost of about 50 cents per child per year, Vitamin A is the most cost-effective way yet found of preventing child deaths.” (Global Health Council)
Hillary Clinton is leading a coalition assembled by USAID of corporate executives from international companies including Kellogg, Cargill, Proctor & Gamble and Roche, and NGOs such as CARE and UNICEF. One of the goals is to find a variety of ways to get more Vitamin A into the diets of poor people around the world, by adding it to foods these people already eat.
How is this related to this thread? I think it is interesting just in general to see a responsible corporate response to a world health problem, but also I read that Monsanto is going to genetically engineer some crops to produce higher natural levels of Vitamin A and its precursor, beta-carotene.
Jill