Obama signs Monsanto Protection Act

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Actually, some foods are engineered to be better for you... and higher crop yields benefit us all.

"Half a cup" is not a standard measurement, so I don't doubt that if your cup is sufficiently large. However, you don't drink Glyphosate.

Glyphosphate does not bioaccumulate, and [url=http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273230099913715[/url]two[/url] separate reviews found no risk to humans from consumption of food.

Regardless, Glyphosate is not equivalent to GM. Even if glyphosate accumulated to dangerous levels, that is a reason to ban Glyphosate, not GE.


Monsanto's unquestionably terrible business ethics are irrelevant to whether their product is safe. I don't like Apple's business ethics, but I don't go around calling for phones and MP3 players to be banned as a result of that. Play the man.

In any case, I would like to reassure you that your worst fears are not grounded in science. Firstly, Monsanto does not actually use the terminator gene - and it holding a patent stops an even worse company from being able to use it. There is no way the terminator gene could ever get into wild populations, that's in its very nature. The plants cannot produce offspring, so they cannot spread the gene. Additionally, there is no way a gene can spread from a crop plant to a mammal, because plants and mammals do not cross breed due to irreconcilable differences in their reproductive systems. Even if an unethical biotech company such as Monsanto one day decided to use the terminator gene in their seeds, there would be absolutely no chance of it spreading to humans.


If what you were saying is true, then there would be grounds for panic. However, it is not true. Firstly, Glyphosate is not a neurotoxin. Plants do not have brains, so that would be an extremely inefficient way for a herbcide to act. It acts by inhibiting amino acid synthesis. Obviously that is a potential human health concern, but it manifests as problems with the kidneys, lungs, or occasionally heart, not the brain.

As I explained to Dantac, Glyphosate is safely excreted from the body in urine at the concentrations it will exist on your food. It does not bio-accumulate.

Think about it - the vast majority of Americans (and Canadians) eat a diet that is extremely high in crops that have been treated with Roundup. If Glyphosate was extremely deadly in extremely low concentrations, wouldn't we have noticed?



Tobacco and alcohol are actually unsafe. There is a wealth of evidence of that. Genetically modified foods are an undoubted good thing. Again, if we are going to label things like that, why not introduce a million other irrelevant labels?

Out of interest, seeing as you are very quick to point out how ignorant everyone else is on this matter, to what extent have you studied genetic modification?

I am having a certain sense of deja-vu... I wonder why...

Oh, silly me. This is what I wrote more than a year ago discussing the very same subjects (GMO and Monsanto):
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postp5278748 ... t=#5278748

(Updated link, as the previous one died)

The painstaking lengths that people go to to dilute themselves is amazing isnt it? You are insane. Consumers have decided that they want to label foods with GMOs, all the other "million other irrelevant" things are already required to be placed on ingredient lists for foods and yes there is a reason why. I have a right to know whats in my food.

People who use tobacco and alcohol already know they are risky and there are already labels on them. If I want to know what foods and food products have GMOs in them then I aught to be able to and to hell with anyone who thinks I shouldnt. The rates of cancer and other disease in the U.S. has sky rocketed lately for apparently no reason. There is cause for concern and airing on the side on risk rather than caution is very stupid for a multiple of reasons. Not using your brain is fine for you obviously, but trying to force that on the rest of us is not.

"Initial testing shows Monsanto and Global regulatory bodies are wrong regarding bio-accumulation of glyphosate, leading to serious public health concerns"
http://sustainablepulse.com/2014/04/06/ ... 45hHyiB6kN

As it turns out, there hasnt really been enough studies to actually support anything you have said about its bioaccumulation in the body but the more recent studies show you to be wrong.

Every hybrid plant you have ever consumed is a GMO

In fact all of the veggies in the supermarket are hybrid varieties developed from original wild stock. You favorite corn is a hybrid. Most wheat is a hybrid variety. Has anyone gotten sick from those?

ruveyn

There is a difference between hybrids and GMOs.I can cross pollinate plants in my garden and they won't have salmon genes in them.
http://www.organicconsumers.org/article ... _27096.cfm

People have been altering genetic traits of crops and animals from the beginning of time. The only difference is that initially it was via selective breeding. GMO's created by gene splicing and the like are essentially the same thing, except that doesn't take as long.

It is an answer, and any better would be accepted. The last wave, the population spike after WWII grew faster than the food supply. The Green Revolution focused chemicals, insecicides, and tractors at the problem, food production went up, more people went to bed with a full belly. There they started more children.

Fallow and reserves became forgotten words. All land was farmed every year, all crops eaten, and the results of forty years is a third of farmland is beyound production, and the rest is severly distressed. We have passed Peak Soil, there is nothing left to bring into production.

Where one unit of energy used to produce one unit of food, more energy was added, it now takes eight units of energy to produce one of food, and more does nothing.

The problem is, we lived off of the natural soil fertility, copied it, and in effect, killed it. Laying a modern field fallow will not revive it. The complex life cycle of soil has been disrupted.

This has had a major effect on the climate, and the water cycle. Even better soils are less likely to produce.

Men with crew cuts wearing gray suits and black rimmed glasses gave it their best shot in the fifties and sixties, to apply Business and Science to food production. It would have worked if they included Birth Control by genetic modification.

Everyone exploited cheap food, doubled the population, and farmed the soil to sand.

Like antibiotics, insecticides only work for a while, and resistant strains evolve. They are also harmful to farm workers, nearby towns, and food should be scrubed with a brush in hot water with soap.

There is a Dead Zone along the Louisiana coast. It is caused by farm runoff. It is growing, and other dead zones are forming at the mouth of other rivers worldwide. Many rivers no longer reach the sea.

Food choices have changed to meet available supplies. Everything is loaded with Corn Sugars. Use of corn sugar and obesity rose together.

Nothing will get more production from the soil. Insects are less easy to control, hybred grains have reached max production. The Boll Weavel destroyed Cotton, Nothing worked. Corn and Wheat face the same problems. That is most of the planet food supply. The Cotton problem produced Polyesters, nothing will replace food.

We used to cultivate fields for weeds, the weeds got smarter. Those that could flower and go to seed between cultivations, fit in and became a sub crop. Too much cultivation is bad for the soil. Roundup works for now, with crops that have some built in defense, but even GMOs lose pest resistance, unless half the ground is planted with untreated plants, so a breeding population of non resistant pests is maintained.

This is a last ditch effort to continue vast fields of monoculture, and we are losing. The result will be famine.

I have a garden. I grow Celulose eating bacteria, worms that eat both, weed by hand, and control pests by sissors, cutting off their heads. Killed ten horn catipillers this week. I prune out leaves with bugs and put them in a bucket, then the garbage. It feeds me, but could not be done field scale. For labor, materials added, I have some expensive soil. Rich, deep, lots of worm castings, the cost per acre would exceed any cash crop.

With a little luck, I am producing food at less than store prices. At least I know what I am eating.

The world wants food. They will take what they can get. I want more dirt, acres I can cover in 40,000 cubic foot of manure and wheat straw, replace micro nutirients, depleated in most soils, and grow cover crops to plow in Rye, Clover, Peas, for a few years. It gets the weeds down, does not supply constant food for pests, and can produce food crops for a year or so. Farming half your dirt will keep production coming.

This year, due to the California drought, produce prices are going up by a third. Food is getting expensive, and soon harder to find.

I would cross my corn with a shark, if it could be self feeding by eating bugs.

Corn with the DNA of bacteria that creates its own poison is not the same as a hybrid plant.

But... but playing God is BAD. Corporations are EVIL. Any good that any corporation does, if they make even a single penny of profit, is completely negated.

Ingredients lists and nutritional values are relevant because they tell you something about the food that could be relevant as to whether it is safe.

We're generally quite aware of the reasons why cancer rates have increased. It's generally because cancer is a disease of affluence, it's what will kill you if you don't die of anything else and we're getting better at curing everything else. In any case, the rates in the US and Canada are not unusual.

What you have posted is not a study. It is an examination of 10 women, and 3 of them apparently had glyphosate at detectable levels in their breast milk. It has not been repeated, it has not been peer reviewed, and it has not even been submitted to a journal for publication. I would suggest that it is reasonably likely that the lab made a mistake with their testing.

This review article found no danger to human health: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10854122
This article found that feeding foods exposed with roundup to farm animals is safe: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18328408

And, of course, there is that one which Viper posted.

Before you accuse others of not using their brains, or being insane, I suggest you learn a little about science. This blog (and his books) is a really good start.

Yes,but only in the same family of vegetables.I can cross pollinate squash varieties,and create a new squash,but I can't cross a tomato with a squash.There is no way to cross pollinate an eggplant with a salmon,does not happen in nature.

So?

The protein doesn't know that it comes from salmon. It doesn't know that it isn't in salmon. Your body also doesn't care.

The point I was making is that GMOs are not hybrids.
Maybe I don't want to eat vegtables with salmon genes,other people don't want to either.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... -1.1357031

The "Monsanto Protection Act" didn't protect Monsanto from ANYTHING. It only allowed farmers to keep using biotech seeds when the safety of those seeds was challenged in court, and it expired this past December.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/mpa.asp

@ Misslizard: There are no animal genes in genetically engineered crops. How can anyone be so goddamn intellectually dishonest as to spread lies about GE plants?

Scientific consensus always trumps paranoia, ignorance, knee-jerk alarmism, hysteria, fear-mongering, and self-retardation.

American Association for the Advancement of Science: "Foods containing ingredients from genetically modified (GM) crops pose no greater risk than the same foods made from crops modified by conventional plant breeding techniques, the AAAS Board of Directors has concluded. Legally mandating labels on GM foods could therefore ?mislead and falsely alarm consumers...?
http://www.aaas.org/sites/default/files ... tement.pdf

U.S. National Academy of Sciences: "To date more than 98 million acres of genetically modified crops have been grown worldwide. No evidence of any human health problems associated with the ingestion of these crops or resulting food products have been identified."
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=10977

Food and Agriculture Organization: "Scientists generally agree that genetic engineering can offer direct and indirect health benefits to consumers (ICSU). Direct benefits can come from improving the nutritional quality of foods (e.g. Golden Rice), reducing the presence of toxic compounds (e.g. cassava with less cyanide) and by reducing allergens in certain foods (e.g. groundnuts and wheat)."
http://www.fao.org/docrep/006/Y5160E/y5 ... P3_1651The

American Medical Association: ?There is no scientific justification for special labeling of genetically modified foods. Bioengineered foods have been consumed for close to 20 years, and during that time, no overt consequences on human health have been reported and/or substantiated in the peer-reviewed literature.?
http://www.ama-assn.org/resources/doc/c ... dfoods.pdf

World Health Organization: ?No effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of GM foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved.?
http://www.who.int/foodsafety/publicati ... stions/en/

Royal Society of Medicine: ?Foods derived from GM crops have been consumed by hundreds of millions of people across the world for more than 15 years, with no reported ill effects (or legal cases related to human health), despite many of the consumers coming from that most litigious of countries, the USA.?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2408621/

European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation: ?The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research, and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are no more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies.?
http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety ... search.pdf

Union of the German Academies of Science and Humanities: "Our collective experience to date shows the strict allergenicity tests of GM products to have been very successful: not one allergenic GM product has been introduced onto the market. In conventional breeding, in which genes are altered at random by experimentally caused mutations or unexpected gene combinations generated by crossings, such tests are not legally required. For this reason the risk of GM plants causing allergies can be regarded as substantially lower than that of products from conventional breeding. Furthermore, intensive gene technology research is already under way with a view to removing allergens from peanuts, wheat and rice."
http://www.akademienunion.de_files/memo ... logyII.pdf

"Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture" - Prepared by the Royal Society of London, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Indian National Science Academy, the Mexican Academy of Sciences, and the Third World Academy of Sciences: ?Foods can be produced through the use of GM technology that are more nutritious, stable in storage, and in principle health promoting ? bringing benefits to consumers in both industrialized and developing nations.?
http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=9889&page=1

Society for In-Vitro Biology: ?The SIVB supports the current science-based approach for the evaluation and regulation of genetically engineered crops. The SIVB supports the need for easy public access to available information on the safety of genetically modified crop products. In addition, the SIVB feels that foods from genetically modified crops, which are determined to be substantially equivalent to those made from crops, do not require mandatory labeling.? http://www.sivb.org/publicPolicy_CropEngineering.asp

Society of Toxicology: ?Scientific analysis indicates that the process of GM food production is unlikely to lead to hazards of a different nature than those already familiar to toxicologists. The level of safety of current GM foods to consumers appears to be equivalent to that of traditional foods."
http://www.toxicology.org/ai/gm/gm_food.asp

American Society of Microbiology: "Bt sprays and transgenic crops have not had any known significant harmful effects on vertebrates, including mammals and human beings. There have been only a few reports of Bt bacteria being isolated from humans with wounds or infections, and in these rare cases there is no evidence that Bt was the cause of any lasting injury. It also has been shown that farm workers do not develop respiratory, cutaneous, or eye diseases from exposure to large amounts of Bt in sprays."
http://academy.asm.org/images/stories/d ... tcolor.pdf

International Council for Science: "Currently available genetically modified foods are safe to eat. Food safety assessments by national regulatory agencies in several countries have deemed currently available GM foods to be as safe to eat as their conventional counterparts and suitable for human consumption. This view is shared by several intergovernmental agencies, including the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission on food safety, which has 162 member countries, the European Commission (EC), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Further, there is no evidence of any ill effects from the consumption of foods containing genetically modified ingredients. Since GM crops were first cultivated commercially in 1995, many millions of meals have been made with GM ingredients and consumed by people in several countries, with no demonstrated adverse effects."
http://www.icsu.org/publications/report ... emas-2003/

American Council on Science and Health: ?[W]ith the continuing accumulation of evidence of safety and efficiency, and the complete absence of any evidence of harm to the public or the environment, more and more consumers are becoming as comfortable with agricultural biotechnology as they are with medical biotechnology.?
http://bit.ly/12hvoyg

American Dietetic Association: ?It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that agricultural and food biotechnology techniques can enhance the quality, safety, nutritional value, and variety of food available for human consumption and increase the efficiency of food production, food processing, food distribution, and environmental and waste management.?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16442880

American Phytopathological Society: ?The American Phytopathological Society (APS), which represents approximately 5,000 scientists who work with plant pathogens, the diseases they cause, and ways of controlling them, supports biotechnology as a means for improving plant health, food safety, and sustainable growth in plant productivity.?
http://www.apsnet.org/members/outreach/ ... ology.aspx

American Society for Cell Biology: ?Far from presenting a threat to the public health, GM crops in many cases improve it. The ASCB vigorously supports research and development in the area of genetically engineered organisms, including the development of genetically modified (GM) crop plants.?
http://www.ascb.org/index.php?option=co ... &Itemid=31

Consensus document on GMOs Safety (14 Italian scientific societies): ?GMOs on the market today, having successfully passed all the tests and procedures necessary to authorization, are to be considered, on the basis of current knowledge, safe to use for human and animal consumption.?
http://bit.ly/166WHYZ

American Society of Plant Biologists: ?The risks of unintended consequences of this type of gene transfer are comparable to the random mixing of genes that occurs during classical breeding? The ASPB believes strongly that, with continued responsible regulation and oversight, GE will bring many significant health and environmental benefits to the world and its people.?
http://bit.ly/13bLJiR

International Seed Federation: ?The development of GM crops has benefited farmers, consumers and the environment? Today, data shows that GM crops and foods are as safe as their conventional counterparts: millions of hectares worldwide have been cultivated with GM crops and billions of people have eaten GM foods without any documented harmful effect on human health or the environment.? http://bit.ly/138rZLW

Council for Agricultural Science and Technology: ?Over the last decade, 8.5 million farmers have grown transgenic varieties of crops on more than 1 billion acres of farmland in 17 countries. These crops have been consumed by humans and animals in most countries. Transgenic crops on the market today are as safe to eat as their conventional counterparts, and likely more so given the greater regulatory scrutiny to which they are exposed.?
http://bit.ly/11cTKq9

Crop Science Society of America: ?The Crop Science Society of America supports education and research in all aspects of crop production, including the judicious application of biotechnology.?
http://bit.ly/138sQMB

International Society of African Scientists: ?Africa and the Caribbean cannot afford to be left further behind in acquiring the uses and benefits of this new agricultural revolution.?
http://bit.ly/14Fp1oK

Federation of Animal Science Societies: ?Meat, milk and eggs from livestock and poultry consuming biotech feeds are safe for human consumption.?
http://bit.ly/133F79K

French Academy of Science: ?All criticisms against GMOs can be largely rejected on strictly scientific criteria.?
http://bit.ly/15Hm3wO

The consensus around "GMOs" is as strong as the consensus around man-made climate change, and the consensus is that, after more than 25 years of testing and consumption, GE crops are fine. They're safe to eat.

http://www.sierraclub.org/biotech/report.aspx
http://www.rense.com/general44/cell.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation ... pean_Union

So your sources are:

1) A blatant scare page (note how it raises the terminator gene without pointing out that is has and probably will never be used) that nonetheless disagrees with you:



2) A page discussing scientific trials that have not been used commercially, including one that was biopharming rather than a GE crop

3) A Wikipedia article that points out that all appeals to ban crops had been overturned on scientific grounds