Is GMO Food Safe? Answers to Your Questions

[timeuser84]

Hi again, not sure where to post this but for about a year or 2 now I have been buying all non gmo food/drinks with the usda seal on it or with the butterfly symbol on the food products because for whatever reason, I had decided to invest in non gmo food for safety, because I might have thought that gmo food won't get me ripped when combined with exercising and that gmo food is a scam just to make money. SO is gmo food safe to eat and can get me ripped with proper exercise? and if yes then is non gmo food really just a sales gimic to make a extra buck rather then the gmo food?

 

[Bystander]

wont get me ripped

get me ripped

Off?

 

[phinds]

Actually, MOST of the food we now eat is genetically modified, it's just that most of that modification was done over a long period of time via selective breeding. Modern DNA modification methods generally just speed up the process and possibly make some mods that would be difficult / impossible w/ traditional methods. Yes, there is always the possibility that modern GM foods might have a long-term side effect that is not yet understood but that seems unlikely. Scare tactics against GM are generally just BS. I doubt that GM foods will "get you ripped" much differently than regular food. Exercise is that only thing that will do that.

 

[berkeman]

Off?

I believe he means "ripped" in the sense of low body fat and strong muscle tone from diet and exercise...

 

[Bystander]

 

[Drakkith]

SO is gmo food safe to eat and can get me ripped with proper exercise?

Yes, GMO's are safe to eat. Nearly all reputable studies have found no adverse health effects from eating GMO's and some of the few that have found an association between GMO's and a disease state that it's likely not because of the food itself, but the chemical pesticides used on them. Note that this association is not proof of anything. It's just an association. There's an association found between the drop in the number of pirates and the rise in global temperatures, but that doesn't mean that pirates prevent global warming.

Long story short, the benefits of GMO's, such as increased nutritional value and resistance to pests and pesticides, far outweighs any potential negatives at this time.

See this article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/23/well/eat/are-gmo-foods-safe.html

and if yes then is non gmo food really just a sales gimic to make a extra buck rather then the gmo food?

Note that the health food industry is an industry just like any other. They exist primarily to make money. While I'm sure there are plenty of people in the industry that actually believe that they are selling healthier products, the overwhelming majority don't care one bit. They just want to make a profit. As such, they are not against advertising just about anything to get you to buy their products, and the primary way to get people to do this is to prey on their fears.

P.S. Yes, you'll still get ripped when eating GMO's if you exercise properly.

 

[timeuser84]

ok thanks all and YES, I mean ripped as in low bodyfat with muscle

 

[jim mcnamara]

To get "ripped" requires an increase in the rate of protein synthesis. This is partly dietary, and very much related to exercise levels.

To add muscle tissue you generally require more complete protein than the minimum here:

The AMDR for protein provides a minimum RDA intake of 0.8 g/kg with a range up to at least 2.5 g/kg without any identifiable Upper Limit risk.

This is a little bit technical:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666737/
So for a 170 lb( 79.3837kg) human this works out to 65.5g of complete protein. Soy is the only easily available plant source if you want plants, and a complete protein, but many soy products are GMO. 65g of complete protein is approximately 9 medium eggs (US grade), for example.

This AMDR is for complete protein. A complete protein has a balanced level of each of the required amino acids. This is a great article please consider reading it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complete_protein

GMO has very little to do with any of this information. You can find non-GMO complete protein and GMO complete protein foods easily.

 

[Rive]

is gmo food safe to eat

Since one direction in GMO development is to reduce the usage of chemicals some GMO foods can even be safer than non-GMO foods (which might be produced with using more chemicals).
For the others it is more or less the same. It is not the GMO part what makes difference.

is non gmo food really just a sales gimic to make a extra buck rather then the gmo food?

Kind of a missed point. Since 'food' became an industry there is always some stuff what is ... weird. But that does not depends on GMO or non-GMO. So actually as advertising, it is really 'just a sales gimic'.

 

[Al_]

IMHO, the real danger of GMO foods is not from directly eating them, but the effect that GM might have on the world ecosystem if modifications escape the farm and thrive in the wild.
Think about how introduced species have damaged ecosystems across the world, almost every continent has it's troublesome invaders.
The power of GM to make massive, designed, radical changes to a plant's genes far exceeds what is likely to occur in nature by orders of magnitude.
As an example, what if photosynthesis is made more efficient. Currently plants manage about 3% energy conversion, I have read. If GM gives us plants that manage 30%, and they escape, do they have the potential to evolve into forms that take over the grasslands and forests of the world?

 

[russ_watters]

Hi again, not sure where to post this but for about a year or 2 now I have been buying all non gmo food/drinks with the usda seal on it or with the butterfly symbol on the food products because for whatever reason, I had decided to invest in non gmo food for safety, because I might have thought that gmo food won't get me ripped when combined with exercising and that gmo food is a scam just to make money. SO is gmo food safe to eat and can get me ripped with proper exercise? and if yes then is non gmo food really just a sales gimic to make a extra buck rather then the gmo food?

I think the others provided some of the detail, but to be succinct, you have the issue backwards: Non-GMO typically costs more than GMO food, so if it can't be demonstrated to be superior (and it can't), then you are getting ripped--off by buying non-GMO food.

...though that's basically one of the primary goals of advertising.

 

[Al_]

Although, if someone wanted to genetically engineer a poisonous strawberry, for example, that would be entirely possible, given the required skill and lab setup. At least with traditional foods (including old varieties produced by selective breeding) we have the assurance that comes from centuries of testing on live subjects.
Call me a "late adopter" if you like

 

[BWV]

If you are squeamish about GMOs, then stop eating cheese - 90%+ of cheese is made with genetically modified rennet. The natural organic way of making rennet is to kill a calf and harvest its stomach enzymes

Also insulin is 'GMO' but would not recommend stopping that if you need it
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/08/29/40-years-ago-gmo-insulin-was-controversial-also-11757

 

[Al_]

There are non-GM microbes that can do the job. Apparently used commonly in Europe and the US in industrial cheese making.

 

[Ygggdrasil]

Although, if someone wanted to genetically engineer a poisonous strawberry, for example, that would be entirely possible, given the required skill and lab setup. At least with traditional foods (including old varieties produced by selective breeding) we have the assurance that comes from centuries of testing on live subjects.
Call me a "late adopter" if you like

Conventional breeding also carries risks of creating poisonous or unsafe plants. For example, in the 1960s, farmers bred a new variety of potato that created the best potato chip that anyone had ever made. Unfortunately, while selectively breeding for the ability to produce better potato chips, the farmers had also inadvertently introduced genes from wild potato plants that increase the amounts of toxic compounds in the potato (remember, the potato is in the same family as nightshade).

"Often, people frame genetically modified plants as this huge open question — a giant uncertainty, of the sort we’ve never dealt with before. There’s this idea that GM plants are uniquely at risk of producing unexpected side effects, and that we have no way of knowing what those effects would be until average consumers start getting sick, Gould told me. But neither of those things is really true. Conventional breeding, the simple act of crossing one existing plant with another, can produce all sorts of unexpected and dangerous results. One of the reasons Lenape potatoes are so infamous, I later found out, is that they played a big role in shaping how the USDA treats and tests new varieties of conventionally bred food plants today.

In fact, from Gould’s perspective, there’s actually a lot more risk and uncertainty with conventional breeding, than there is with genetic modification. That’s because, with GM, you’re mucking about with a single gene. There are a lot more genes in play with conventional breeding, and a lot more ways that surprising genetic interactions could come back to haunt you. “You try breeding potatoes for pest resistance, but you’re bringing in a whole chromosome from a wild potato,” he said. “We’ve found interactions between the wild genomes and the cultivated genomes that actually led to potentially poisonous chemicals in the potato.”​

https://boingboing.net/2013/03/25/the-case-of-the-poison-potato.html

Of course, all varieties of GMO plants are extensively tested before they can be approved for human consumption in order to prevent situations like the Lenape potato from occurring, and long term studies of GMO crops, such as one put out by the US National Academy of Sciences, have concluded that they are safe.

IMHO, the real danger of GMO foods is not from directly eating them, but the effect that GM might have on the world ecosystem if modifications escape the farm and thrive in the wild.
Think about how introduced species have damaged ecosystems across the world, almost every continent has it's troublesome invaders.
The power of GM to make massive, designed, radical changes to a plant's genes far exceeds what is likely to occur in nature by orders of magnitude.
As an example, what if photosynthesis is made more efficient. Currently plants manage about 3% energy conversion, I have read. If GM gives us plants that manage 30%, and they escape, do they have the potential to evolve into forms that take over the grasslands and forests of the world?

Most domesticated food crops (the type being genetically engineered) would survive in the wild about as well as a domesticated house cat would survive in the African savanna (or else why would farmers have to put in so much effort to keep weeds [wild plants] for taking over their fields). Some applications would carry the risk of spreading engineered organisms into wild populations, but those applications rightly receive a lot of scrutiny.

 

[russ_watters]

Although, if someone wanted to genetically engineer a poisonous strawberry, for example, that would be entirely possible, given the required skill and lab setup.

While I guess that's true in principle, it would be tough to get that past the FDA.

 

[BWV]

There are non-GM microbes that can do the job. Apparently used commonly in Europe and the US in industrial cheese making.

Not that I can see, do you have a source?

 

[jim mcnamara]

@Al_ Please stop posting GMO nonsense. Thank you. You can think GMO is toxic if you want. But you cannot avoid it, you eat it every day. And have done so as long as you are alive.

As @Ygggdrasil and several others have said - the amount of human wrought genetic change in everything we eat today is enormous. And was enormous in 1900, long before anyone knew about GMO.

You would not recognize many of the ancestors of modern crops, for example teosinte -> corn.
Look at the picture - http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/selection/corn/
BTW this a great article for understanding why some genetic changes occur in the blink of an Archeologist's eye.

The point is we have already messed around with DNA over the past 3000 to 10000 years to a much further extent than any of the GMO so-called horrors have been altered. The undomesticated line of almonds produces almonds with cyanide in the kernel. You can guess how healthy that is.

Please stop the GMO versus non-GMO stuff. In reality nearly all food is GMO. Virtually everything that you find in the grocery store originates from long term or shorter term intentional changes in genetics.

The real "frankenfoods" are created by overzealous processed food scientists. 12% fructose/glucose human-synthesized drinks with caffeine and guarana and a dash of B vitamins straight from the lab bench, all brings this to mind:
https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/foods/...TAR, BLACKOUT ENERGY DRINK, UPC: 818094007436

 

[jedishrfu]

Perhaps it’s time to close the thread before it too becomes a GMO. :-)

Thank you all for contributing here.