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> * A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO"* Not really. The difference is that selective breeding takes a lo

> * A banana modified in a lab and one that is bred through selective breeding are both "GMO"* Not really. The difference is that selective breeding takes a lot of time and for the species that we eat today we've had hundreds to thousands of years to observe if it harms us or not. When new drugs or foods get approved for consumption, the tests being made are for how our body affect the eaten food, and the assessment being made is for how safe acute short term exposure is. But we are not doing long term studies on safety, because those are super expensive. We basically don't know what happens with chronic exposure over decades. And plants in particular have toxins, as a natural defense against pests, and most of those toxins are harmless to humans, or removed via cooking (like what happens with legumes), however some toxins can have an effect on mammals and we won't notice it until we've had decades to consume that plant and maybe come up with cooking methods to deal with it. Personally I'm not interested in being a lab rat. > The lack of science education. I think this goes on in both camps ;-)

tomc1985 7y ago
I get that, but it's not like the body isn't accustomed to a wide range of food inputs. We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible; assuming GMO variants are not totally different from the original we can rely on heuristics to determine their toxicity, can't we? It seems a little silly to outright dismiss GMO foods as long as they do not deviate too far from their parents
- gingabriska 7y ago
  >We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible No we don't, we only really start looking at new kinds of toxins when they start affecting us. GMO have one or many gene flipped, as a result many things are affected at once but genetic engineers/companies will look at optimising what interests them and ignoring the rest of the effect for the sake of cost cutting/simplification/shorter time to market. (These things have affected civil engineering companies too, which make your bridges dangerous but bridges are much simpler to reason compared to a multicellular organism like plants and bridges don't reproduce or evolve on their own. The seeds will not be picked by intercontinental birds and dropped somewhere where they start displacing local varieties or evolve into something dangerous (toxic?) for humans. While bridges have small life, genetic modification can survive for a very long time. Some changes induced by GMO process will take long time test. By that time it would have spread to billions of humans, thanks to modern industrial process and globalization. Heck, we can't reliably alter genes in humans which makes them taller then how can you be sure of GMO crops? Genetic engineers look at correlations in genes then they try to flip some of them randomly and if they observe positive change in the feature they are optimizing, they call it success if it doesn't produce immediate negative effects. GMO variety also isn't sterile, so it might evolve into something dangerous. Why it shouldn't? The genetic history of the plant which stopped it from being toxic to humans, encoded in its genes has now been edited out by genetic engineers. GMO come from flawed understanding of how genes work. Most GMO supporters claim that the nutations we are inducing through GMO process are also capable of happening in nature on its own. Sure, but genes not just carry info of function but genetic history too that's how we remember how to fight viruses/backterias. A person who has been burned by keep their hand on flame will not try the same second time, same way a planet which has mutated in past in favour of something which made it resistant and survive in nature will select against the feature which made it survive. GMO people think mutations happen at random, without any peeking at past mutations (genetic history) which is incorrect assumption.
  - gattilorenz 7y ago
    > selective breeding takes a lot of time and for the species that we eat today we've had hundreds to thousands of years to observe if it harms us or not Pardon my ignorance, but how is this different from GMO? Sure, it took a while to get to that particular cultivar with selective breeding, but at some point we got there and started to scale up the production. Where's the guarantee that the last few mutations before scaling up were not harmful on the very long term? It's not that they ran long experimental trials before marketing the tangelo...
- krageon 7y ago
  You are making a case that is worth making and valuable, however: > We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible Implying that nutrition is by and large a solved problem instead of a hugely moving target that is upended every ten years for knowledge of a completely different direction is very incorrect and harms the rest of that you are saying by proximity. Nutrition is not solved. We know what things will kill you for sure (and generally how fast), but things that kill you very slowly or that might very subtly be good for you are hard to measure and therefore not well documented.
mlyle 7y ago
It seems like your argument works in reverse. Selective breeding-- who knows what changes you're making to the underlying food. When I taste a "cotton candy grape", there's likely a whole lot of chemical difference from a normal grape, in mostly-unknown-ways. Whereas with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of.
- bad_user 7y ago
  It doesn't work that way. Literally every fruit, legume and vegetable you're eating, that you're not hand picking from a forest, is the result of selective breeding and this has been going on since agriculture happened, from around year 10,000 BC at least. It's not perfect, since the selective breeding we've been doing has been for diluting the proteins and increasing the energy per acre. And there are still plenty of concerns with various seeds we've been eating, like wheat, corn or soy, but interestingly these are also the playground for GMO research and that research hasn't been about making them safer for humans, but rather for increasing the yield, protecting patents and for reduced pesticide use ... which should raise further concerns about their safety ;-) When I'll see GMOs meant for making consumption by humans safer, those are the GMOs I'm ready to buy into, but not until then. --- > with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of I don't believe that we can readily assess their safety, because I've been interested in and studying nutrition and I know how science in this field works. But if you know more on this subject, please provide details.
  - mlyle 7y ago
    I'm just making a very simple argument: when David Cain cross-pollinated hundreds of thousands of grape plants to make a new flavor, there's a terrific amount of diversity and "newness" and some degree of opportunity for something slightly hazardous to be introduced. Compare to someone making a CRISPR edit to alter a Cavendish protein to the form in other bananas that people have already been consuming in quantity for hundreds of years. Why do you assess the former probability of harm to be so much lower than the latter?

tomc1985 7y ago

I get that, but it's not like the body isn't accustomed to a wide range of food inputs. We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible; assuming GMO variants are not totally different from the original we can rely on heuristics to determine their toxicity, can't we? It seems a little silly to outright dismiss GMO foods as long as they do not deviate too far from their parents

gingabriska 7y ago
>We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible No we don't, we only really start looking at new kinds of toxins when they start affecting us. GMO have one or many gene flipped, as a result many things are affected at once but genetic engineers/companies will look at optimising what interests them and ignoring the rest of the effect for the sake of cost cutting/simplification/shorter time to market. (These things have affected civil engineering companies too, which make your bridges dangerous but bridges are much simpler to reason compared to a multicellular organism like plants and bridges don't reproduce or evolve on their own. The seeds will not be picked by intercontinental birds and dropped somewhere where they start displacing local varieties or evolve into something dangerous (toxic?) for humans. While bridges have small life, genetic modification can survive for a very long time. Some changes induced by GMO process will take long time test. By that time it would have spread to billions of humans, thanks to modern industrial process and globalization. Heck, we can't reliably alter genes in humans which makes them taller then how can you be sure of GMO crops? Genetic engineers look at correlations in genes then they try to flip some of them randomly and if they observe positive change in the feature they are optimizing, they call it success if it doesn't produce immediate negative effects. GMO variety also isn't sterile, so it might evolve into something dangerous. Why it shouldn't? The genetic history of the plant which stopped it from being toxic to humans, encoded in its genes has now been edited out by genetic engineers. GMO come from flawed understanding of how genes work. Most GMO supporters claim that the nutations we are inducing through GMO process are also capable of happening in nature on its own. Sure, but genes not just carry info of function but genetic history too that's how we remember how to fight viruses/backterias. A person who has been burned by keep their hand on flame will not try the same second time, same way a planet which has mutated in past in favour of something which made it resistant and survive in nature will select against the feature which made it survive. GMO people think mutations happen at random, without any peeking at past mutations (genetic history) which is incorrect assumption.
- gattilorenz 7y ago
  > selective breeding takes a lot of time and for the species that we eat today we've had hundreds to thousands of years to observe if it harms us or not Pardon my ignorance, but how is this different from GMO? Sure, it took a while to get to that particular cultivar with selective breeding, but at some point we got there and started to scale up the production. Where's the guarantee that the last few mutations before scaling up were not harmful on the very long term? It's not that they ran long experimental trials before marketing the tangelo...
krageon 7y ago
You are making a case that is worth making and valuable, however: > We know what chemical structures are deeply harmful to the body and what are digestible Implying that nutrition is by and large a solved problem instead of a hugely moving target that is upended every ten years for knowledge of a completely different direction is very incorrect and harms the rest of that you are saying by proximity. Nutrition is not solved. We know what things will kill you for sure (and generally how fast), but things that kill you very slowly or that might very subtly be good for you are hard to measure and therefore not well documented.

mlyle 7y ago

It seems like your argument works in reverse. Selective breeding-- who knows what changes you're making to the underlying food. When I taste a "cotton candy grape", there's likely a whole lot of chemical difference from a normal grape, in mostly-unknown-ways. Whereas with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of.

bad_user 7y ago
It doesn't work that way. Literally every fruit, legume and vegetable you're eating, that you're not hand picking from a forest, is the result of selective breeding and this has been going on since agriculture happened, from around year 10,000 BC at least. It's not perfect, since the selective breeding we've been doing has been for diluting the proteins and increasing the energy per acre. And there are still plenty of concerns with various seeds we've been eating, like wheat, corn or soy, but interestingly these are also the playground for GMO research and that research hasn't been about making them safer for humans, but rather for increasing the yield, protecting patents and for reduced pesticide use ... which should raise further concerns about their safety ;-) When I'll see GMOs meant for making consumption by humans safer, those are the GMOs I'm ready to buy into, but not until then. --- > with GMO we can be assured it's a very small set of edits that we can more readily assess the safety of I don't believe that we can readily assess their safety, because I've been interested in and studying nutrition and I know how science in this field works. But if you know more on this subject, please provide details.
- mlyle 7y ago
  I'm just making a very simple argument: when David Cain cross-pollinated hundreds of thousands of grape plants to make a new flavor, there's a terrific amount of diversity and "newness" and some degree of opportunity for something slightly hazardous to be introduced. Compare to someone making a CRISPR edit to alter a Cavendish protein to the form in other bananas that people have already been consuming in quantity for hundreds of years. Why do you assess the former probability of harm to be so much lower than the latter?