CC vs Not CC

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  • senecarr
    senecarr Posts: 5,377 Member
    Azuriaz wrote: »
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    queenliz99 wrote: »
    Azuriaz wrote: »
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    GaleHawkins wrote: »
    A practicing MD by the name of William Davis last year published Wheat Belly Total Health. It it the best book I have found in a medical sense that cuts through a lot of the conflicting diet info out there today.


    Wheat belly is just another fad diet thought up by one person.

    To sell books

    And one that seems to fail on some basic fact checking levels. My understanding is the book claims wheat was genetically modified in the 1970s (a technology that didn't exist back then) and that is when wheat started having gliadin (gliadin has always been in wheat).

    Not it was not genetically modified and he does say this. The wheat was bombarded with toxic mutagenic chemicals to create mutations, then they took the ones they wanted and bred them.

    Woo
    Actually not exactly. Use of radiation and mutagens on crops is common practice. Technically, we've been doing it since the dawn of time because the sun's UV rays and Earth's background radiation do this, but specifically we sped up the process in more recent times with induced radiation and use of terratogenic mutagenic chemicals. Interestingly, this process, which makes random mutations happen across uncountable numbers of base pairs is just FINE, and perfectly acceptable in ORGANIC farming, or any farming, really, with no safety testing. Meanwhile, transgenic technology takes known genes, splices 1-10 base pairs or so, and then requires $1 million plus and possibly ten years worth of safety testing before going onto the market, isn't allowed in organics, and scares people that don't understand what dihydrogen monoxide is but know for a fact that transgenics are scary.
    Regardless, I've seen people describe it as transgenics or genetic engineering. Mutagenesis isn't genetic engineering / genetic modification unless you want to also call selective breeding genetic modification as well. It also isn't what cause gliadin to be in wheat. Gliadin is a naturally occurring protein in the family of plants wheat belongs to. It isn't something that was introduced at some point in the 1900s.

    It's interesting to me how people who tell us not to worry our heads about GMOs call natural breeding by farmers genetic modification, but when it doesn't suit their argument nitpick about earlier forms of genetic modification by chemicals.

    Meanwhile, I'll eat cloned cow and mutant plants all day. As long as I have reasonable, non-biased, thoroughly researched scientific evidence that they are healthful.

    We aren't there yet.
    What organisms on this planet aren't mutants, exactly? Or do you refuse to eat only man-made mutants but not natural mutants?

    None. And many plants are acute and chronic toxins, I presume at least some mutated to be that way so we wouldn't eat them.

    Like I said, give me all the mutated, cloned food available. After the proper research has been done. It hasn't been.
    But if all food is mutated, what do you eat if not mutated food?

    Also, I don't know how much I'd want to characterize evolution in such a seemingly goal-oriented way... though I am glad that the capsaicin-bearing plants worked out the way that they did.

    But the whole wheat belly tangent is straying pretty far afield, at this point.

    I don't want to go any further off topic either, I will end with this: If my ancestors ate it and didn't die I am probably okay (although like anyone who gets a bellyache from dairy I'd be fool not to listen to my own body on the topic, too). As far as more modern manmade changes in food, we need a government and media that isn't influenced by private money or we will never have a sufficient body of unbiased research on anything that might affect profits. Because it isn't hard to buy studies to counter any undesired results, no matter how scrupulously those undesired results were obtained. So I'm leery of such things. That, and only that, molds my position on the matter. As a meat eater who hates the idea of slaughterhouses, when I know it's healthful and when I can afford it, I will be so happy to eat cloned meats!
    And that is lazy reasoning. You're avoiding what is hard for people to do following the scientific literature and process to see that it makes sense, regardless of motive, because it is hard, even though it is correct reasoning. Instead, you're falling back on what humans are adapt at doing: following the motives of other humans which is simple, but can easily produce wrong results because it is not logically sound. It is intellectual laziness. And if you're fine with following the profit motive, why aren't you concerned that Whole Foods has revenue on par with Monsanto's, that organic has a profit motive to for driving labeling of GMO's and persecuting them, and that in fact, organic, being a fashion label that doesn't actually guarantee a useful property of food, has the far greater motive to impugn their competitor to deal with the fact that they can't compete?
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