From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat May 10 2003 - 14:29:54 MDT
Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>On Fri, 9 May 2003, Greg Jordan wrote:
>...
>
>
>Organic food certification is simply a way to allow small-farm and/or
>government subsidized farms (in Europe) farmers to compete against large
>farms that have mass production advantages. Its health benefits
>are marginal if any.
>
>For example -- go find some statistics that state that "organic" peanuts
>have less aflatoxin than "non-organic" peanuts. Aflatoxin is a known
>carcinogen produced by fungi that grow on peanuts -- it is known to cause
>mutations in the p53 gene that lead to cancer. The amount one ingests
>is regulated by food safety regulations -- but clearly less would be better.
>The amount one ingests has little or nothing to do with how the peanuts
>are grown and a lot to do with how they are stored.
>
>That isn't a GM/organic debate -- its a food processing (cost) debate.
>
>Robert
>
But more to the point, it's incorrectly framed. There is nothing
intrinsically wrong with GM foods just because they are GM, but any
particular modification is a new variant, and may either remove
desireable characteristics or add undesireable characteristics, as well
as the converse. And sometimes simultaneously. And this relates to all
food processing, not just to GM. To take a well documented case:
Brown rice doesn't store as well as rice that has been polished to
remove the bran. So to improve storage characteristics orientals began
polishing it. Currently this has become so common, that this is the
only kind of rice that they eat. About a century ago, however, it was
discovered that doing so removes the B vitamins that had been
traditionally present. (Nothing would eat it because it was nearly pure
starch, and dry. So anything that tried, starved to death.) So people
who were living on it started to get beriberi. It took a long time to
trace this back to the rice polishing, and until this was done the
problem couldn't be corrected. (The correction was to add back some of
what was removed...people had gotten used to only eating polished rice.)
Note that people still usually eat polished rice. But now the polished
rice has been fortified with B vitamins. There wasn't anything
intrinsically wrong with polishing the rice. But when people first
started doing it, they couldn't predict all of the side effects, so a
large number of people ended up dead and disabled. And even more were
sick and unhappy for a long time.
GM is being handled the same way. Soybeans are being modified to alter
their phytochemical balance. Good? Bad? It's a *different* food
afterwards, and it should be considered fraud to sell it as the same
thing. You can't count on the same protein balance, You can't count on
the same mineral balance. You can't count on the same taste. Etc. If
you make tofu out of it, the tofu may have *different* nutritional
characteristics. Better? Worse? I can't tell, and it may depend on
your genome/lifestyle. But you can't tell the difference by looking, so
it had *better* have a different name.
The laws are irrational wrt GM products. If peanuts were modified to
remove the allergenic propertied, you still wouldn't be able to use them
in products without the warning label "Caution: This product may
contain peanuts...", but the new plant would be a fundamentally
different plant, with different characteristics. And if soybeans are
modified to contain a less complete protein (which makes it cheaper to
grow, and gives longer storage life, perhaps) they will be a
fundamentally different plant. If you call it the same thing, some
people will end up with a protein diffency despite their best efforts.
It's irrational to ban GM foods, but it's also even more irrational to
ban the labeling of foods as GM, or even to not require it. With GM
foods, you can't depend on the standard nutritional refferences.
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