Are GMOs bad for you?

nvmomketo wrote: »

johnslater461 wrote: »

nvmomketo wrote: »

debrakgoogins wrote: »

sydney_bosque wrote: »

Considering it requires you to study biology, chemistry, genetics, and the actual GMO processes, I would say I have a more educated view on them than most who have replied here. My certification in commercial/agricultural pesticide application also helps me understand it better.

I have a degree in Horticulture. I also have a degree in Operations and Project Management. I am 11 courses away from my masters degree in Sustainability and Environmental Compliance. I might have a more educated view that you. Everything I have studied has reinforced that GMOs are not the enemy they are made out to be. Mind you, I AM an environmentalist. If I found non-biased (not sponsored by non-GMO proponents) research that GMOs were harmful in the long term, I wouldn't eat GMO products. I eat them. I feel based on personal and educational research that I and my family are safer eating GMOs than food laden with chemical pesticides.

Aren't some GMOs designed to withstand those chemical pesticides? Like round up ready crops?

Why are you afraid of roundup?



The RfD is determined by using what’s called the “toxicological end point” or the “NOEL” (No Observable Effect Limit) for the most sensitive mammalian toxicological study. The EPA uses an uncertainly factor of 100 in deriving it (which is pretty high in order to be conservative) so as to ensure the sufficiency of the RfD, and based on the assumption that certain segments of the human population could be as much as 100 times more sensitive than the species represented by the toxicology tests. In rat studies on glyphosate, doses of up to 31 mg/kg/day were administered with no observable adverse effects at all, and dog studies have gone as high as 500 mg/kg/day with no negative effects.

The EPA’s assumption about how much people would eat was very conservative. In order to insure you don’t get over 2 mg per kg per day they use a “worst case” dietary risk model of an individual eating a lifetime of food derived entirely from glyphosate-sprayed fields with residues at their maximum levels.

...

You weigh 70 kg or 154 lbs.

To get 2 mg per kg you would need to get 140 mg of glyphosate residue.

So you would need to eat 200 * 140, or 28,000 grams of this 5 ppm produce to get to the 2 mg per kg per day level.

There are 28 grams in an ounce, so that’s 1,000 ounces.

There are 16 oz in a pound, so you would need to eat 62 lbs of produce.

We’re talking about EACH DAY here, and even if you managed that, that would only get you to a level that is 100 times less then the NOEL level in the most sensitive species tested.





http://www.crediblehulk.org/index.php/2015/06/02/glyphosate-toxicity-looking-past-the-hyperbole-and-sorting-through-the-facts-by-credible-hulk/

I'm not so much afraid as cautious. It's something I think can't hurt to avoid. I think it is probably dose dependent and more is not better.

My uncle, who lived on a roundup ready farm died of brain cancer. So has all of his siblings except two: one died of pancreatic cancer and one is still cancer free. I admit that I wonder about the effect that living on that farm had on them. I don't blame roundup (sprayed from planes) but I wonder if it played a role.

nvmomketo wrote: »

johnslater461 wrote: »

nvmomketo wrote: »

debrakgoogins wrote: »

sydney_bosque wrote: »

Considering it requires you to study biology, chemistry, genetics, and the actual GMO processes, I would say I have a more educated view on them than most who have replied here. My certification in commercial/agricultural pesticide application also helps me understand it better.

I have a degree in Horticulture. I also have a degree in Operations and Project Management. I am 11 courses away from my masters degree in Sustainability and Environmental Compliance. I might have a more educated view that you. Everything I have studied has reinforced that GMOs are not the enemy they are made out to be. Mind you, I AM an environmentalist. If I found non-biased (not sponsored by non-GMO proponents) research that GMOs were harmful in the long term, I wouldn't eat GMO products. I eat them. I feel based on personal and educational research that I and my family are safer eating GMOs than food laden with chemical pesticides.

Aren't some GMOs designed to withstand those chemical pesticides? Like round up ready crops?

Why are you afraid of roundup?



The RfD is determined by using what’s called the “toxicological end point” or the “NOEL” (No Observable Effect Limit) for the most sensitive mammalian toxicological study. The EPA uses an uncertainly factor of 100 in deriving it (which is pretty high in order to be conservative) so as to ensure the sufficiency of the RfD, and based on the assumption that certain segments of the human population could be as much as 100 times more sensitive than the species represented by the toxicology tests. In rat studies on glyphosate, doses of up to 31 mg/kg/day were administered with no observable adverse effects at all, and dog studies have gone as high as 500 mg/kg/day with no negative effects.

The EPA’s assumption about how much people would eat was very conservative. In order to insure you don’t get over 2 mg per kg per day they use a “worst case” dietary risk model of an individual eating a lifetime of food derived entirely from glyphosate-sprayed fields with residues at their maximum levels.

...

You weigh 70 kg or 154 lbs.

To get 2 mg per kg you would need to get 140 mg of glyphosate residue.

So you would need to eat 200 * 140, or 28,000 grams of this 5 ppm produce to get to the 2 mg per kg per day level.

There are 28 grams in an ounce, so that’s 1,000 ounces.

There are 16 oz in a pound, so you would need to eat 62 lbs of produce.

We’re talking about EACH DAY here, and even if you managed that, that would only get you to a level that is 100 times less then the NOEL level in the most sensitive species tested.





http://www.crediblehulk.org/index.php/2015/06/02/glyphosate-toxicity-looking-past-the-hyperbole-and-sorting-through-the-facts-by-credible-hulk/

I'm not so much afraid as cautious. It's something I think can't hurt to avoid. I think it is probably dose dependent and more is not better.

My uncle, who lived on a roundup ready farm died of brain cancer. So has all of his siblings except two: one died of pancreatic cancer and one is still cancer free. I admit that I wonder about the effect that living on that farm had on them. I don't blame roundup (sprayed from planes) but I wonder if it played a role.

And yet you throw caution to the wind when it concerns red meat consumption, which has an ACTUAL link to cancer.

nvmomketo wrote: »

johnslater461 wrote: »

nvmomketo wrote: »

debrakgoogins wrote: »

sydney_bosque wrote: »

Considering it requires you to study biology, chemistry, genetics, and the actual GMO processes, I would say I have a more educated view on them than most who have replied here. My certification in commercial/agricultural pesticide application also helps me understand it better.

I have a degree in Horticulture. I also have a degree in Operations and Project Management. I am 11 courses away from my masters degree in Sustainability and Environmental Compliance. I might have a more educated view that you. Everything I have studied has reinforced that GMOs are not the enemy they are made out to be. Mind you, I AM an environmentalist. If I found non-biased (not sponsored by non-GMO proponents) research that GMOs were harmful in the long term, I wouldn't eat GMO products. I eat them. I feel based on personal and educational research that I and my family are safer eating GMOs than food laden with chemical pesticides.

Aren't some GMOs designed to withstand those chemical pesticides? Like round up ready crops?

Why are you afraid of roundup?



The RfD is determined by using what’s called the “toxicological end point” or the “NOEL” (No Observable Effect Limit) for the most sensitive mammalian toxicological study. The EPA uses an uncertainly factor of 100 in deriving it (which is pretty high in order to be conservative) so as to ensure the sufficiency of the RfD, and based on the assumption that certain segments of the human population could be as much as 100 times more sensitive than the species represented by the toxicology tests. In rat studies on glyphosate, doses of up to 31 mg/kg/day were administered with no observable adverse effects at all, and dog studies have gone as high as 500 mg/kg/day with no negative effects.

The EPA’s assumption about how much people would eat was very conservative. In order to insure you don’t get over 2 mg per kg per day they use a “worst case” dietary risk model of an individual eating a lifetime of food derived entirely from glyphosate-sprayed fields with residues at their maximum levels.

...

You weigh 70 kg or 154 lbs.

To get 2 mg per kg you would need to get 140 mg of glyphosate residue.

So you would need to eat 200 * 140, or 28,000 grams of this 5 ppm produce to get to the 2 mg per kg per day level.

There are 28 grams in an ounce, so that’s 1,000 ounces.

There are 16 oz in a pound, so you would need to eat 62 lbs of produce.

We’re talking about EACH DAY here, and even if you managed that, that would only get you to a level that is 100 times less then the NOEL level in the most sensitive species tested.





http://www.crediblehulk.org/index.php/2015/06/02/glyphosate-toxicity-looking-past-the-hyperbole-and-sorting-through-the-facts-by-credible-hulk/

I'm not so much afraid as cautious. It's something I think can't hurt to avoid. I think it is probably dose dependent and more is not better.

My uncle, who lived on a roundup ready farm died of brain cancer. So has all of his siblings except two: one died of pancreatic cancer and one is still cancer free. I admit that I wonder about the effect that living on that farm had on them. I don't blame roundup (sprayed from planes) but I wonder if it played a role.

Your family situation, however sad, sounds more like a hereditary issue than a farming one, but that's not the issue for debate here.

I'm not trolling, but I'm going to be blunt: if you want to avoid glyphosate due to toxicity, then you might as well not eat any fruits or vegetables ever, organic or conventional (whether the foods themselves be GE or not). Don't drink coffee either; it's more toxic than the pesticide levels you get from your fruit and veg over the year.

If you're on an organic farm that does aerial spraying, higher numbers sprays of a higher number of pesticides/herbicides/fungicides are required to keep a viable crop. The potential side effects of some of these approved chemicals which are used in higher concentrations and are more toxic than glyphosate don't exactly give me the warm fuzzies.

I'd like to give a toxicity scale for glyphosate versus approved organic pesticides as well as a couple of other chemicals, using LD50 For comparison (the individual dose required to kill 50% of a population of whatever species it was tested on). In this case, the lower the number, the more toxic it is.

Glyphosate: 5600mg/kg (WHO lowest level of toxicity rather than LD50: 2000mg/kg)
Methyl Bromide: 214mg/kg (also has negative effects on the ozone layer)
Neem oil/Azadirachtin: 3450mg/kg (also kills bees. LOTS of bees)
Nicotine sulphate: 60mg/kg (organic neurotoxin)
Pyrethrin: 200mg/kg - 2600mg/kg (there are different formulations. It's also another neurotoxin)
Organic Copper Sulphate: 300mg/kg (there is a synthetic version that is not approved for organic use that comes in at 4500mg/kg. It's also highly toxic to fish)

Non-pesticides for reference:
Acetaminophen/paracetamol: 1944mg/kg
Baking soda: 4220mg/kg

In addition: the long half-lives of some of these products cause much longer environmental damage then glyphosate will.

I'm not saying don't avoid it if it gives you the ability to feel good about what you eat. I'm not saying that glyphosate is an angel in the agricultural industry either, because it isn't. Just don't avoid it and eat organic for the wrong reasons.

Both organic and conventional crops need to meet the same standards on pesticide residues to ensure the health of the populations. I'm pretty sure I said this in an earlier post in the thread: the farmers growing your food do not want to kill you. Even if the reason is so they don't go out of business, they don't want to kill you.

The glyphosate issue, however fun and heated to debate, isn't the be all and end all of the "Is GE safe" question.

If a GE food (not just crop) meant that nary a pesticide was sprayed, less water is used to grow it, and provided markedly greater nutrition than their organic/traditionally grown counterparts, would you still be against eating it? I mean, we now have decades of safety data showing that GE food is safe and nutritious to eat.

What grinds my gears the most about the GE/organic debate is that people who have the choice over what they eat are slowing down access to more food and more viable crops for people in developing nations who don't get that choice. GE foods and organic farming should theoretically be a match made in heaven, not be mutually exclusive.

jgnatca wrote: »

Thank you for laying that out, @mangrothian . My "training" in pesticides comes from running a file room for our department of the Environment. My background has turned me in to a jack of all trades, of sorts. It is a pleasure to see a master at work.

Heh, you’re saying that to a person who now works in quality and compliance in the pharmaceutical industry. I’m nowhere near a lab anymore as haven’t been for over a decade.

Funnily enough, the reason I’m so passionate about educating people about GE foods is not just because I support the industry. It’s about the lies, scam marketing and scare tactics perpetuated by the organic food industry.

I won’t lie; I fell for the organic filled, juice cleanse, raw, holistic woo crap that they put into a well marketed package. I still have a Jason Vale juice master and a ‘food matters’ cookbook in my collection so I never forget.

Me, the person who in the early-mid 2000’s was pipette deep in genetically engineering some null mutant plants for some hormone transport binding proteins (and to this day still think I inhaled some of the seeds when I sneezed and felt like I was choking for a bit. I was never worried about it then...) fell for this idea that is not even close to being scientifically sound. And I’m sure I wasn’t the only scientist who did.

I can’t remember what I was reading at the time, but one of the woo articles made a scientific sounding statement that clicked in my brain as very wrong, and made me go fact check what I was reading. Man I was glad I did.

After I realised what I was doing, I became angry and frustrated at the whole insidious organic and alternative health industry.

When you’re able to say almost whatever you want to make your product sound sexy and discredit the competition with blatant lies, your job is easy. The scientific community by its very nature needs to sell truth and facts only to keep its reputation; and because of this it’s not sexy, and very hard to sell to the consumer.

sydney_bosque wrote: »

Considering it requires you to study biology, chemistry, genetics, and the actual GMO processes, I would say I have a more educated view on them than most who have replied here. My certification in commercial/agricultural pesticide application also helps me understand it better.

But, what do I know? I only have a degree in this stuff.

If credentials are important to you then I have a Ph.D. in molecular biology, I have genetically engineered products myself which have gone into human clinical trials. I am familiar with the tecniques and have at least read up on the ones that the public happens to hate on (ie Monsanto ones such as the introduction of a bacterial shikimate pathway shunt to crops (ie round-up ready) and the one that induced production of an delta-endotoxin in crop plants (BT) neither of which are actually dangerous to humans although one might argue from an enviornmentalist or coroporate power perspective I suppose.

The important point here though is that genetic engineering is just a tool, you cannot evaluate the safety profile of a product solely based on what tools were used in its production. It would be like deciding that you were really concerned about the safety of a specific product that was built using a hammer and therefore cautioned everyone about the potential dangers of hammer-made products. There is nothing inherently dangerous about genetic engineering or products that are made in part utilizing genetically engineering...I think that is the most salient point. The anti-GMO movement is classic fear mongering relying on the old trope of "well we can't know for sure if it is safe" which is a empty statement given it could be said about literally anything and still arguably be true.

Now if we can stop waving our degree-dicks around and just back up what we are saying with information or statements that the general readership can understand I think that'd be appreciated by everyone else. Pardon my language but it is just gross to just throw up your education and point to it like that is your argument and then act all smug about it.

"GMOs" in the common parlance is basically any product be it alive or not that was made in part using the modern molecular biological techniques of genetic engineering. The product is still considered "GMO" even if the product itself is not engineered at all but rather just came from a source that was engineered (ie fructose from a round-up ready corn crop).

So those who are concerned by GMOs are presumably concerned about the use of genetic engineering as a tool. To those who consider "GMOs" to just be dangerous in general lets do a hypothetical because I'm curious as to what you would think about this.

Lets say there was a human disease out there that was caused by the lack of production of a particular protein that circulates in the blood. Humans that didn't produce this protein had to do severe dietary restrictions or face debilitating conditions or even death. Even with the dietary restrictions life was likely to be shortened and come with some debilitating issues.

Clearly if we could just provide these people with the protein they were missing as an injectable they could just inject it regularly and lead a fairly normal life. But how do you get enough of the protein to do that...you can't exactly practically harvest it from humans themselves? Perhaps a closely related species like a farm animal like pigs you could harvest a related protein from their blood and try that. It might work but in a lot of cases it might cause an antibody response as it is a foreign protein and even if it works it would require a lot of animal product which would be quite expensive to produce.

What if, instead, we could take the genetic code for the human protein and put it into bacteria so that the bacteria produced the protein. We could then grow the bacteria very cheaply in huge vats and then harvest and purify the human protein from that. Then we could produce the actual human protein rather than an animal surrogate and we could mass produce it cheaply to be able to supply everyone who suffered from the disease. Of course there would be high standards for purity of the purified protein product and formulation of the injectable and of course there would be the standard clinical tests for safety and efficacy. Would that type of thing be worth trying? Would that sort of product be okay or would that also be too dangerous to even attempt?

What if I told you what I just described wasn't a hypothetical...I was describing the production of insulin for the treatment of diabetes.

So, if you are concerned about the potential safety or environmental issues associated with a specific product I can appreciate that and it make sense to talk about those specific concerns...but don't just create overly generalized terms like "GMO" and talk about how dangerous "GMOs" are when really what you mean is the one or two Monsanto products you've heard of.