GMO, Monsanto, organic dreadlocked nonsense?

Most of what Monsanto gets blamed for is directly related to terrible patenting laws regarding gene research, and things it did at the behest of the US government, like production of DDT and its role in developing Agent Orange for the US government in the Vietnam/Cold War era.

GMOs are fine, though the FDA could do more in the realm of regulatory control merely for the sake of assuring the public that GMOs are safe, but they've been consumed for decades around the world with no statistically significant linkages to negative health effects.

Pretty much every study that the anti GMO crowd throws around trying to prove GMOs are dangerous have been refuted outright by later research, or were so flawed as to be unworthy of publication in most cases.

A recent example is the assertion that GMO fed rats developed tumors. This was promoted by Natural News.com and other sources as proof positive GMOs are causing cancer around the globe. But when the scientific community began to review the research, they found numerous flaws, and eventually the article was pulled from the journal it was originally published in. Here's a couple of decent links to a run down on what happened in regards to that case.

http://www.nature.com/news/hyped-gm-...rutiny-1.11566

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/lo.../#.UU8IZRzvtPY

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cr.../#.UU8IrBzvtPY

Anyway, if a hippy is telling you that Monsanto is trying to poison them with GMOs, and you know for a fact they smoke cigarettes regularly (pretty common occurrance with my hippy friends who do the same exact shit you're describing) just laugh at how dumb and contradictory they are, and carry on with your daily life.

Tuco_sl said:

I feel completely uneducated on what the FDA regulation of 'organic' means and what promises are made when something is labeled organic.

Are there a bunch of beaurocrats who make a bunch of dumb laws that food producers skirt around to provide a legal but not-much-better organic food?
Is the penalty for labeling food organic so weak and unenforced that it's impossible to trust that something labeled organic actually meets the requirements?

Click to expand...

Just consider organic to be a marketing gimmick, that's really all it is.

Here's the FDA's pdf on organic versus natural

http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/doc...itute-vol1.pdf

And another FDA link on the subject, seems to have a lot of information there.

http://www.usda.gov/wps/portal/usda/...C_CERTIFICATIO

Organic is, as far as I'm concerned, basically just as you describe, a bureaucratically defined justification for charging more for a product which spoils days earlier.

If you want to eat "natural" and "healthy" you just need to be buying locally, basically. Like instead of purchasing meat at the grocery like beef, we bought half a cow from a local grower and filled a freezer with it. If you're buying it from a store, you're almost certainly just paying more for the labeling.

Organic is like putting the Apple sign on a piece of food. Suddenly you can charge extra just because of the label.

Stanford study finds the health benefits of "organic" overblown, basically a marketing gimmick

http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/september/organic.html

There's a link inside this article to the New York Times article on the stanford study as well, but I'm hitting the paywall when I try to access it so whatever. You might be able to access it if you haven't exceeded 10 articles this month

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/op...able.html?_r=0

And a counter argument from Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-jon...b_1866043.html

that doesn't mean anything that just means people are complacent and like the taste of high fructose corn syrup, even while it gives you diabetes.

and let's not pretend like selective breeding and gene insertion are the same thing, I have a hard time believing selective breeding would eventually make a goat make spider silk.

When you make claims about gene insertion being different (read: more dangerous or unnatural) as opposed to random mutation, the argument you are making is essentially that random mutation is safer than specifically selected mutation. Its not. Its just a much longer process, which isn't a good thing. The reason the goat can make spider silk is because the genetic code of the planet functions as interchangably as it does. The same gene that makes you grow arms and legs, with only minor modification, codes for virtually all limbs in all creatures, for instance. There's nothing "unnatural" or dangerous about it, this type of genetic modification is carried out in laboratories to gain a better understanding of the science, not for mainstream production and these animals are typically sterile. The compatability of the genetic code is so amazing because you can take a gene from one species, put it in another, it will code for a protein or amino acid that is readable by that organism's body. Its fantastic, and not something to fear.

But check this out, this is the plant that eventually became cornhttp://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/variation/corn/Pretty radical changes in the morphology and the genetic code of that species to become maize and then to become the modern day corn. The only thing is it took 10,000 years to get there, which is way too slow, especially to meet the demands of modern human society.

Selective breeding and gene insertion are for all intents and purposes the same thing, except one of them gets to be very highly controlled, and therefore, in many ways, it is far safer.

And corn syrup doesn't give you diabetes. Having excessively high levels of any sugar in your blood consistently over years gives you diabetes because it leads to your isles of langerhans malfunctioning. If you drink too much apple juice you can develop diabetes. Too much ice cream? Diabetes. Too much sugar of any type combined with obesity will lead to diabetes. There is nothing unique about HFCS in this regards. HFCS simply packs a lot of molecular energy into a small space, which contributes to obesity, because its a lot easier to drink the calories than it is to eat them. If you're burning the calories as they come in through exercise, HFCS is no more good or bad for you than plain old regular sugar in your coffee.