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GM and Other Food Production Techniques
RandomEngy
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Registered User regular
Warning, contains retardation that assumes GM or irradiated food is evil.
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... but it is.
:P
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
But radiation is bad! I want my government to protect me from evil radiation in my food. Now, if only they'd help protect me from the radiation constantly streaming into my eyes!
Yes. There you go. Now, you no longer have to worry.
Seriously. At this point, what do we eat that hasn't been genetically modified for decades if not centuries? Either in a lab or through basic biology. Corn, tomatoes, those button mushrooms. They are not supposed to look like that, those things are freaks.
Unless you go out to the wilderness and pick your own berries and hunt your own meat, absolutely everything you eat has been genetically modified for centuries through selective breeding. The only difference between that primitive form of genetic engineering and what we can do now is efficiency.
Basic biology, crossbreeding, things like that don't bother me. Genetic Manipulation worries me a bit, simply because I really think we need more research on genomes and mucking with them before eating the results (caution, not opposition), but mostly what bothers me is the hormone injections in livestock and the pesticides we spray on plants.
Not only that, but I'd like to see the actual fears, the actual ill effects that GM foods pose clearly delineated. All I hear is token disgust and mistrust wrapped up in the naturalistic fallacy.
"Nature is better."
To that I say, "Malaria, that's pretty natural. So is salmonella." Fact is, we have come to designer engineer EVERYTHING we eat. Look up Wild Bananas. The cavendish we eat, the most popular fruit is a freakish eunuch of a creature.
The process which we get there is irrelevant. If there are issues that arise due to the processes of Manipulation, you be damned sure they are ironed out before market.
Bring on the talking cows, I say
I'm with you on this. Hormone injections and pesticides aren't really something that I'm fond of. The former moreso than the latter.
Yep. And it's the successor to another similar banana which was completely eradicated because, like the cavendish, in our effort to breed them seedless, we essentially ended up with such a homogenous crop that a single type of blight wiped out the entire breed. (That's where the whole "slippery banana peel thing came from, by the by - cavendish doesn't have as slippery a peel). Cavendish faces a similar blight, which has not yet made it to the Americas, but has wiped it out everywhere else - if it does make it to the Americas, cavendish goes bye bye. Another consequence of our breeding things bigger, etc is that every single turkey has to be artificially inseminated - they're too big to permit the actions necessary for breeding to occur naturally. They're realities that we have to face.
that being said, I don't see what the harm is in making sure that people can find out whether they're treated a certain way is.
So, the things that almost no one cares about anymore? I agree that hormone injections and pesticides are a legitimate concern, which is also the most fucked up part about the whole thing. There's a huge uproar because we're using a more efficient means of doing the same thing we've been doing for centuries, but there's very little uproar about pesticides and hormone injections, a relatively recent phenomenon, that has some suggestive evidence that it is negatively impacting us in some ways.
There's a California cheese commercial joke, and a Douglas Adams joke that can be made here. I don't know which to choose.
So you think the current tests and certification for GM food is inadequate? Perhaps then you can point me to one instance where eating a certified GM product caused illness?
Requiring a label for GM food would be like requiring a label saying "Warning! This food has been transported by TRUCKS!" for some retards who think that the truck fumes are getting into their food. It gives a legitimacy to the whole paranoid movement that they simply do not deserve.
Illness would be less a concern rather than unforseen long term consequences in particular products. Same with replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup. Consuming that doesn't make me ill, but it sure as hell isn't a health benefit in comparison and was pretty needless at the onset anyway.
I was going for Adams, so I suppose you can do the cheese.
Plus, from a biological perspective, our bodies are very streamlined and developed to eat a certain type of food. Genetically modified foods may have different proteins or structures that our bodies literally cannot incorporate, or may incorporate poorly. If your body utilizes genetically modified foods that biologically are not up to the body's standards for workable materials, you could be looking at a whole host of problems.
Good point, we should wait 50 years before allowing any GM crop, even those that scientifically are inert to human digestion. What's that, thousands of people will die of starvation because these advances were delayed? It's all right, everyone who matters is still getting food.
Also, HFCS is not a GM food.
Side note:
Did you know, by the way, that up until very recently Thomas English muffins were made with HFCS?
I was looking at the package a couple of days ago and boggled at the label proudly proclaiming 'no longer made with HFCS'. Just sugar now, baby.
First, I had no idea sugar was involved, but whatever. Second: In bread? Really? This has indeed gone too far.
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Bread is basically fluffy sugar.
Acutally, yeah. We've only been doing it for what, a decade? Where are the long-term, 25+ year exposure tests? People are only just now starting to get evidence of the harm caused by pesticides, hormones, and HFCS.
I can't point you to any examples of "anyone getting sick" because there aren't any. Yet. There may never be. But I'd prefer we test these things far, far longer than we do. *shrug*
Oh, wait, that's the stuff at the Chinese bakery.
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What type of food is that?
I'm with you on the first two. As far as HFCS goes...
I think the major problem with HFCS is not its existence, but its ubiquity. If you aren't careful--and many, many people are not careful, or simply haven't been told--you consume an absolute pantload of it over the course of your life. Perhaps two pantloads, if you catch my drift. Taking so much sugar in on a constant basis is never going to be healthy for you, and of course it's going to lead to more health problems--but it's not because it's HFCS, it's because it's sugar.
We really should get off of this though.
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The sugar is used mostly as food for the yeast, causing it to activate and release the gasses that make bread fluffy. The main body of bread is water and flour, mixed until the proteins in the flour become long and stringy.
Depending on the bread, you can add more sugar for flavor, but at it's core, bread is fluffy gluten. :P
(Though commercial loaves of bread do use way more sugar/HFCS than you'd expect. Hence, I make my own bread.)
Yeah its horribly off topic and not even related to anything the campaigns have said. Especially in the wake of McCain saying something incredibly bad and the media now attempting to cover up for him.
pleasepaypreacher.net
Yes, this is exactly what I was suggesting.
Actually, it does and it can. The body prefers to process sucrose, table sugar, or even better, whole grains and other carbohydrates which the body can break down into sucrose & glucose for the proper metabolic pathways. When the body takes high fructose corn syrup, which is a combination of glucose and fructose, half of the mixture goes right into cellular metabolism without the need for processing, providing a quick sugar high, but inadvertently taxing the cells necessary for insulin production. Additionally, when you put that much glucose into the body, without giving the body a need for the additional sugar (i.e. exercise or metabolism) it goes straight into energy storage, a.k.a. fat. Fructose is primarily processed by the liver, which is not a normal site for carbohydrate metabolism. Normally, the liver is a super organ, capable of dealing with practically everything we send at it. Alcoholics usually need years of heavy drinking in order to damage the liver beyond repair. Diets high in fructose have yielded fatty, damaged livers in test animals, suggesting that high fructose consumption, which we partake in in most foods, does potentially damage the liver. Also, fructose, unlike sucrose and other sugars, primarily is stored as fat in the human body.
Yeah, it's crazy how much bread has high fructose corn syrup in it. It's literally everywhere.
My last comment on this, and then yeah, let's split it or forget it.
The theoretical problem with HFCS, courtesy Wikipedia:
Now, how about that Obama guy? Seems such a nice young man...
*edit* Not only did Archgarth beat'd me, but wrote it up instead of quoting wikipedia. Man, I fail.
(This is me trying on populism.)
Whatever boosts your polling numbers better, Senator!
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The body is a very, very complicated machine. It takes building blocks from food, such as proteins, sugars, fats, etc and uses them to build and maintain itself. Very specific metabolic pathways are used to process these items. Enzymes are used in the body to catalyze reactions, and these enzymes are a specific shape and have a specific function. Lactose intolerance is a simple condition, where the human body lacks the ability to make sufficient amounts of lactase, the enzyme responsible for breaking down lactose (milk sugar). When the body lacks lactase, reactions occur, possibly allergic, because the body cannot handle the materials being introduced, so the body views such things as junk molecules, or intruders. Now, if the lactose molecule was tampered with in any way, no form of the lactase enzyme could break it down, because it is a very specific enzyme. I am talking a very small change in the lactose sugar, something as simple as the orientation of an oxygen atom attached to one of the carbons.
GMO foods run the problem because the proteins and sugars present in them could very well not be suited to biological pathways. That is the first problem, our bodies may not be able to process them. The second problem is what if they are similar enough that our bodies incorporate them anyways? A good example is trans fats. They are similar enough to the normal fats our bodies are used to, and so it stores them like normal. The problem is when the body goes to its fat stores and encounters trans fats, it is severely hindered in breaking them down due to their different structure. So the process is slowed considerably. The enzymes responsible for fat breakdown are capable of dealing with them, but they are not specialized for the trans fat structure, thus causing the increase in time.
Hope that helps.
*edit: Sorry, I was typing this up before talk of split came up. I'm done.
Well done Jeffe. If I see you at Pax, I'll give you a cookie. Homemade, no HFCS.
It's a good thing they never trial these GM food products on animals or human before releasing them to the general market!
Seriously, I see where you're coming from but using this argument we'd never see a new drug being produced. Plus all current GM are really rather picky about the genes they transplant, you won't be getting Daffodil lyrorine genes in Gold Rice for example.
Well, sometimes they don't. A few years ago, Taco Bell released taco shells to supermarkets that had genetically modified corn that had been untested for human consumption.
Also, interesting how you bring up the drug angle, because it illustrates just how little we know about the human body. A lot of drugs today, if you look at the drug information/monograph states how "the drug's mechanism of action is unknown, but believed to be..." So we are already at that point, we are putting out drugs for which we don't know how they work in the body.
In regards to Celebrex, a drug for arthritis, it is astonishingly effective, but also falls prey to the "we don't know what it will do in the body" syndrome. It is a Cox-2 inhibitor. Cox-2 enzymes are used by the body as pain signals, and Celebrex acts upon these molecules, inhibiting their efficacy. Unfortunately, what we didn't know at the time, is that Cox-2 enzymes are also used for other important functions in the body, namely proper heart function. We didn't know this until people started to have heart attacks at a greater percentage when they were taking Celebrex in comparison to people who were not.
For GMO foods, while they are tested for human consumption, we don't always "know" what the end result will be on the human body. Call me crazy, but I prefer non GMO foods if I can, simply because who am I to question millions of years of evolution regarding my metabolic pathways.
Also, I think there is a difference between drugs and GMO foods. If the outright benefit of the drug outweighs the possible negatives, then that's a decision a person can and should make. But with GMO foods, there seems to be, a majority of the time, little added benefit other than money.