3 ms·

A lot of people see opposition to GMOs as irrational, but I don't think it is. It's perfectly rational, especially if you don't really understand genetics (whic

by api 13y ago

A lot of people see opposition to GMOs as irrational, but I don't think it is. It's perfectly rational, especially if you don't really understand genetics (which most people don't... it's an esoteric subject). The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy. - Trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) are basically artery plaque in the form of fake butter or shortening. - Nearly all additives such as MSG and artificial sweeteners are either unhealthy or suspect. - Bleaching and other treatments to improve shelf life denude food of its nutrients. Re-enrichment only replaces macronutrients, leaving micronutrients and minerals unaccounted for. - Preservatives enhance shelf life and reduce the likelihood of food-borne illness, but many are themselves suspect and many have been taken off the market. - Nitrites are possible carcinogen. - Google: brominated oil, arsenic poultry. ... and so on. The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, namely iodine and vitamins C and D. But we're talking two successes out of dozens of failed experiments. In every case, the "experts" told people it was safe or even good for you before the experts proceeded to change their minds. Margarine in particular is illustrative. It was recommended as a health food. As a result, people have become rightly ultra-conservative about food, viewing any modification to food as guilty until proven innocent. "GMO is safe" means "we haven't figured out how GMO kills you, yet."

jamesaguilar 13y ago
- MSG is fine. Denying this is basically anti-scientific. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety) - Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects. - Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.
- api 13y ago
  "Anti-scientific" Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day. As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise. Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be. I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    Right, and you are denying the outcome of applying that method.
genwin 13y ago
Absolutely. Cigarettes were good for health too. Pretty much anything that makes an industry is good for you, until it's not. I highly doubt that GMO is different.
- api 13y ago
  GMO might be different, but people are going to err on the side of caution. All the hype about how GMO will end hunger and nutritional deficiencies and such is part of the problem. I'd say at this point breathless hype is seen as a contrarian indicator.
criley 13y ago
Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage. I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind. I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm: > Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it. For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation. The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy". And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution
- api 13y ago
  I should also have been more precise. By food "innovations" I meant synthetic alterations in the composition of food itself such as the introduction of chemically altered oils, flavoring additives, preservatives, and similar. Borlaug changed the way food is grown, not its composition. I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food. Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."
mikeash 13y ago
MSG? Really? What's next, the evils of vaccines?
- api 13y ago
  So far nobody's responded to my core point, which is about human social behavior and inductive inference in the absence of deep subject matter understanding. People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks For a generation doctors told people to replace butter with margarine. Got to avoid those unhealthy saturated fats! Butter, it turns out, may actually be good for you: http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-experiment/ http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-... What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names? It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise. This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    It's difficult to respond to your core point when you just list off a bunch of kookiness and try to use that as a basis for saying that nearly every recent change in food has been bad. You first need to demonstrate that food changes have been overall bad before we can even accept your core point, let alone respond to it.

by api 13y ago

jamesaguilar 13y ago

- MSG is fine. Denying this is basically anti-scientific. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety) - Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects. - Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.

api 13y ago
"Anti-scientific" Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day. As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise. Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be. I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  Right, and you are denying the outcome of applying that method.

genwin 13y ago

Absolutely. Cigarettes were good for health too. Pretty much anything that makes an industry is good for you, until it's not. I highly doubt that GMO is different.

api 13y ago
GMO might be different, but people are going to err on the side of caution. All the hype about how GMO will end hunger and nutritional deficiencies and such is part of the problem. I'd say at this point breathless hype is seen as a contrarian indicator.

criley 13y ago

Hey, just jumping in, I have a BS in Biology and api's post here is full of non-scientific and pseudoscientific garbage. I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind. I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm: > Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it. For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation. The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy". And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Borlaug http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_revolution

api 13y ago
I should also have been more precise. By food "innovations" I meant synthetic alterations in the composition of food itself such as the introduction of chemically altered oils, flavoring additives, preservatives, and similar. Borlaug changed the way food is grown, not its composition. I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food. Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."

mikeash 13y ago

MSG? Really? What's next, the evils of vaccines?

api 13y ago
So far nobody's responded to my core point, which is about human social behavior and inductive inference in the absence of deep subject matter understanding. People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks For a generation doctors told people to replace butter with margarine. Got to avoid those unhealthy saturated fats! Butter, it turns out, may actually be good for you: http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-experiment/ http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-... What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names? It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise. This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.
- mikeash 13y ago
  It's difficult to respond to your core point when you just list off a bunch of kookiness and try to use that as a basis for saying that nearly every recent change in food has been bad. You first need to demonstrate that food changes have been overall bad before we can even accept your core point, let alone respond to it.