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Comment by DVassallo | Hacker News Reader

The potential downside of GM food is human extinction.

In the 80s and 90s the beef industry meddled with nature and started feeding animal meat to cows. The result was a disease that could have killed us all if we had eaten contaminated beef in the previous 10 years. If the genetic conditions that make people susceptible to vCJD were more common or universal, we might not be here today [1].

Grass-fed beef can be assumed safe because it has been eaten by humans for 200,000 years. Animal-fed beef turned out to be very dangerous very quickly. People who think GM food is as safe as food we’ve been eating for hundreds of thousands of years are highly delusional.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variant_Creutzfeldt–Jakob_dise...

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How this relates to GM?

You really don’t see the relationship?

The potential consequence of eating unnatural food that did not pass the test of time is catastrophic. Do this on a global scale, and the consequences could be global.

Trans fats are another example.

Why do you think natural things are prima facie good ?

With “natural” I mean natural for humans to eat them. Those foods can be assumed safe because, by definition, they have been eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years. Can you say the same thing for GM food?

> Those foods can be assumed safe because, by definition, they have been eaten by humans for hundreds of thousands of years

Even prior to GM foods, humans have been engineering food to change it's traits for longer than civilization, and essentially everything humans eat today is a product of such engineering. GM foods differ systematically from other forms fo engineering only on the degree of precision and control possible (which is far from perfect, but much greater than any other known technique.)

Basically nothing humans eat today has been eaten for hundreds of thousands of years.

They did it in local tribes. If the experiment proved harmful, the impact was local. In this case, the impact could be global. Big difference.

I have made some research and problem with risks of feeding animals to other animals is a much different problem than prion diseases. Eating other animals is the key factor for transmission of prions, not producing them. Misfolded prion can be formed anywhere. Just not feeding animals to animals won't prevent it, it will reduce impact. But that was true for millions of years, whats different here?

You can’t even say the same thing about broccoli.

Broccoli have been eaten for over 2000 years. If they killed us, we would have known.

Oh, that’s the cutoff? What about Brussels sprouts?

You think that the risk of consequential harm (say, death within 10 years) is the same for Brussels sprouts and GM foods? Haven’t we learned anything from mad cow and trans fats?

Edit: The risk is reduced significantly after we’ve eaten something for a few generations. The problem is if we test something new on the global population before a local tribe tries it on themselves for a few generations.

What does mad cow have to do with GM? Ironically: the process that begat mad cow: also "natural".

Eating meat-fed cows is not natural. Eating trans fats is not natural. Eating GM foods is not natural. The first two proved to have catastrophic harm. Why are we confident GM foods are safe?

We’re treating no evidence of harm as evidence of no harm. And we’re doing it on a global scale.

It sounds like "natural" just means "stuff you don't approve of". Some of your list overlaps mine, others don't. That's fine, but it's kind of a boring argument.

“Natural selection” is the process that makes something “natural”. If it hasn’t passed the test of time, it’s not natural. Which part of my list doesn’t overlap with yours? You consider Impossible Foods natural?

The only "natural" thing to eat then would be wild berries, tubers and tramplings by unruly ungulates.

Can you name one item at an organic grocery store that was eaten by modern humans even 50000 years ago?

Yes: meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts... Quite a lot.

It doesn’t have to be 50000 years. For example: I trust that drinking cow milk won’t kill me even though it hasn’t been common for long. Can’t say the same for GM food.

> Yes: meat, fruit, vegetables, nuts...

Yes, but if you zoom out to categories that broad, GM food still fits within them. GM foods are not any less like foods eaten tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago than anything else we eat.

The same was said for meat-fed cows and trans fats. Turned out their consumption had fatal consequences.

> The same was said for meat-fed cows and trans fats.

Meat fed cows and trans fats were products of the same relatively (compared to both the inherent nature and existing regulatory framework requiring proof of safety of novel food element of and faced by GMOs on the former case, and the latter of those in the latter case) uncontrolled evolution of food supply that characterizes the long history of “safe” food against which GMOs are contrasted.

I’m not sure what you mean, but there is no proof of safety for GMOs. No evidence of harm is not evidence of no harm. The only adequate test is the test of time, and testing on the global population is highly irresponsible.

Grass fed cows are about as close as it gets

Over the thousands of years we were eating foods before the inventions of GMOs, we had plenty of other ways to breed crops and livestock to be more desirable. We also tended to die a lot of malnutrition.

> We also tended to die a lot of malnutrition.

Only because populations tended to run closer to their own carrying capacity so that any shock (from variation in the natural environment or human conflict or ...) would put them over and cause malnutrition, not because normal supply was inadequate.

It's only fairly recently that humans other than in the most ideal environments could produce more than a small surplus of food even in good years (of course, that capacity was acheived in part by millenia of engineering for food for yield traits, with a lot of incidental changes induced along the way.)

Most tribal people died of natural causes or traumatic injuries, malnutrition was not widespread.

Read Nutrition and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price for more background on this.

Why do you assume unnatural foods are inherently safe for human consumption?

The potential downside of not worshiping Roko's Basilisk: Superintelligent Godess is similarly human extinction. She kills all pagans, you see. That's her thing. Kill the non-believers. Which is everyone, currently. Come to think of it...there are a literal infinitude of things which may result in our extinction. Zombies. Aliens. Rogue trapezists. Who knows!

But we don't sweat the zombie thing. There's not sufficient evidence that Roko's Basilisk will destroy us. Or aliens. And so on. And until significant evidence shows that GMOs will destroy us, they're in the same boat. As the old saw goes: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Doubly so for extinction claims.

The burden of the proof is on the GMOs. We have plenty of evidence that eating food that we’re not used to eat can cause catastrophic harm. If this was a local tribe experimenting with GMOs, then it’s fine. But if we expose virtually every person to that downside, the risks are considerable.

GMO foods have been eaten for well over 3 decades. I think if there were adverse health effects, we would've seen 'em.

The only reason to dislike GMO is if they increased herbicide usage (e.g., roudup). But from what i hear, using GMO to reduce herbicide usage is more likely, and therefore, is better than a non-GMO version of the crop.

Every GM product is different.

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