He’s stated several time he is not in favor of banning or mandatory labels. However, I’m kind of wondering what the purpose of what he’s doing here is if he doesn’t favor those options.
But if they aren’t safe, then what must we do? Eat them and realize that at some point in the future, we may develop an Alien chest-burster because of them?
Declaring something unsafe is usually the first step towards an action.
Spreading FUD abut GMOs has consequences, beyond the unsupportable delays in getting golden rice to the people who need it.
There’s the example of Zambia, whose leaders decided in 2002 not to distribute badly needed corn to people during a famine, because it was GM corn and gee, we-just-don’t-know-what-the-future-implications-are.
Indeed - better starve now than maybe get cancer decades down the line.
Seriously? This? This is the sum total of your response to my post about your epigenetics argument? And then you go on to continue to post the same type of crap I debunked? “Oh, we don’t know enough! Must keep studying!” Blah blah blah.
If any evidence were still needed, this is more than sufficient to prove you are not debating in good faith.
Have I ever stated we should label or ban GMO’s in general?
Seriously, I’ve stated my position on that over and over and still you make the mistake of implying that is my position?
Have you not read my posts where I stated my position clearly on those two points?
The only statements I’ve made in that regard is labeling for allergic reactions and banning if something severe like causing cancer.
How can it possibly be ludicrous?
You think that everything can be categorized in a binary fashion always?
If there are mixed results with testing, meaning some show negative side effects and some don’t - how can you possibly just rule out the negative side effects as if they didn’t happen?
This portion of your post is completely illogical.
Sure they have.
For example, peanut allergy in soybean which didn’t go to market due to detecting the allergen in testing.
1 - Do you think all consumer products have the exact same profile of risk level, possible danger, unknowns, etc.?
2 - How many tv’s in the last 20 years didn’t make it to market because they failed the testing for allergens/toxicity/etc.?
We know some of the things to test for with gm foods and based on the new things being discovered all the time (new allergens, cross reactions, impact on gene expression, etc. etc.) the only logical conclusion is that we do not fully understand everything we need to test for.
Consider the new allergens and cross-reactions discovered in the last 10 years - how would it have been possible to test for them prior to discovery?
Thank you for stating that, I’m not sure if people don’t read all the posts, but it seems to be missed frequently.
That I’ve also stated multiple times. I object to overstating our knowledge.
Blanket statements like “GM foods are safe” overstate our knowledge.
Most complex issues aren’t binary.
If I object to blanket statements like “GM foods are safe” that doesn’t mean I support the same error in the other direction by saying that “GM foods are unsafe”.
Both statements imply knowledge we know we don’t have yet because we can see the trajectory of new information that has been gained recently and will continue to be accumulated regarding a complex topic.
“We know precisely what changes we’re looking to make, and what those changes are supposed to do.”
Did they predict the peanut allergy in soybean?
Maybe they thought it’s possible enough to check for it, but they sure didn’t know in advance how that would play out, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone through the exercise of trying it and testing it.
"is there any realistic reason to believe that GMOs are more prone to this sort of problem than any other food out there? "
As I’ve stated many times in this thread: great question, don’t have a counter, haven’t really investigated to try to counter it and maybe there is no counter, not sure.
But stating that hybrids and gm foods are the same doesn’t actually increase our knowledge gap with allergens/toxins/epigenetics/etc.
And it becomes a nice thing to say, but it is not very useful, as your sources report on the whole: “Based on current knowledge, the broad scientific consensus is that the GE crops and foods approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are safe”. The “safe” part comes thanks to the testing that was done and will continue to be done.
It is not good to claim that we are not actively looking for the knowledge. So far it is clear that the dangers can be identified. And tests will continue.
Well, depends, are we talking about known unknowns or unknown unknowns? Honestly, I feel like this is a colossal waste of time. Smeghead is pretty much on-point.
:rolleyes:
Yes, and if I ignored everything said in this thread, I could come to the conclusion that GMO foods are a health risk! Of course, I’m not gonna, because I like to participate in discussion rather than just repeating the same fallacious argument, the same equivocation fallacy, again and again, but hey. That’s just me.
This is a phony issue pushed by anti-GMOers.
*"In this case, when it became clear that the transferred protein (was) potentially an allergen—remember nobody has ever eaten this (GM) soybean or suffered an allergic reaction—the project was stopped. The soybean never made out of early stages in development; it was never submitted to regulators nor was any attempt ever made to market it. This is exactly how the premarket safety assessment is supposed to help developers ensure that only products that are as safe as any other food reach the market. It is a fact that no GM product has ever caused a food allergy (Goodman and others 2008). Ironically, about 10 common foods cause over 95 percent of all food allergies (Bannon and Lehrer 2005). No premarket testing is required for non-GM foods and they are not taken off the market when they cause allergies.
The premarket safety system protects the consumer and the producer. Companies do not benefit from selling defective products that make consumers sick, and consumers don’t want tainted products. The premarket safety evaluation that is applied to GM crops, but not conventional crops or organic products, has little difficulty detecting known food allergens."*
Non-GM soybeans (and many other “naturally hybridized” foods) can cause allergies - but nobody tests these crops for potential allergic responses.
This suggests that testing of GM crops is evenly split between those showing health hazards and those that don’t - which is a grotesque misstatement of the actual situation (in which potential problems like the possibly allergenic soybean are rare, and found long before the food makes it to market).
For someone who claims to be neutral on the issue of GM foods, you once again have demonstrated eagerness to embrace anti-GMO memes.
Ok, lets look at something concrete, how do you respond to this:
Consider the new allergens and cross-reactions discovered in the last 10 years - how would it have been possible to test for them prior to discovery?
I already mentioned one such test in this thread that is currently being done and has resulted in at least one GM food being banned. StarLink corn was deemed potentially unsafe because, in an artificial stomach, one particular protein took slightly too long to digest, which was enough to flag it as a potential allergen.
This wide-eyed, “Golly, maybe we should be doing some tests here” act is wearing thin and is getting more and more disingenuous.
Read Jackmanii’s link. It describes a bit about testing for possible allergens.
If you mean “how can we test for things we don’t know exist”, then we can’t. How is that different from testing anything else?
Regards,
Shodan
Really? Is “mixed signals” a “This might cause a rash and might not. Tests are inconclusive” or “we get a lot of false positives we have to test for because the allergen tests we currently use are hyper sensitive”?
Key words: didn’t go to market.
Except that you refuse to acknowledge that the “natural” foods we’ve consumed for thousands of years have the same drawbacks and potential deleterious effects as the “GMO” foods we’ve consumed. Yet we consider those “natural” foods “safe”.
Thus, GMO foods are “safe”. If you have evidence to the contrary, I’d be happy to retract my statement.
Additionally, applying your “blanket statement warning” means that nothing is safe. Your front door isn’t safe. Your car isn’t safe. Your bed isn’t safe. Your stove, floor, ceiling, walls, pets, personal body, and everything else isn’t safe. Thus, your definition of “safe” is far more stringent than any common man’s interpretation. Indeed, you go farther than even the most stringent regulation by any government agency.
As such, I reject your “blanket statement warning” wholesale. GMOs are safe.
I respond to it thusly: They are researching a brand new frontier that may have repercussions on our entire food supply. If and when they find these repercussions we should (And probably will) respond with their findings against the entire food supply and not just GMOs.
As a matter of fact, yes they did predict the brazil nut allergy in that soybean, at least they predicted that an allergy was a possibility and needed to be screened.
They were going to take that protein gene from brazil nuts and insert it into soybeans. But some people are allergic to brazil nuts, and they weren’t sure which protein caused it. So it was completely logical to then test the soybeans with the brazil nut protein, and sure enough, that protein carried over allergenicity.
Compare and contrast to older techniques where they would induce changes by irradiating the seeds or exposing them to chemicals that would cause DNA damage. With those, they didn’t know what the random changes may be.
Doesn’t the gene-splicing form of modification sound a lot more precise, a lot more reassuring that problems will be forseen? It does to me. Thanks for bring up this example.
Consider the new form of slow-onset cancer that will be discovered in about 3 years caused by 4G networks - how would it have been possible to test for them prior to discovery? Ban cell phones!
I agree, it does sound more precise and better.
It is entirely possible that the previous methods were worse, but that doesn’t close the current knowledge gaps, it just means previous methods might have been worse.