GMO is harmful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food#Heal...
Bio/organic food is healthier than the regular food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Health_and_safety
Bio/organic food is healthier than the regular food: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_food#Health_and_safety
It's very easy to look at both at these data points and think "oh, so it's okay to just go and support GMO and ignore organic farmers". In reality though, the criticism against GMO is how its wide-scale adoption destroys genetic diversity, and how this lack of diversity is a huge potential source of systemic risks.
The problem is not with genetically modification, the problem is with the scale that is done.
And if we want to talk scale, do you see corn that looks like wheat being planted and harvested? At all? Of course not - it wouldn't provide enough yield to be useful.
Bananas is also an example of this process of “GMO-by-hand” stopping due to economic reasons, leading to monocultures susceptible to disease, twice as I understand it.
Early corn: https://tdaynard.com/2020/01/12/how-corn-began/
That's only one possible outcome, and I think it's not a very likely one long term. Genetic modification can create large numbers of variants, so could potentially increase genetic diversity significantly.
I think more of a criticism is the unknown consequences of modified genetic material escaping into other species by horizontal gene transfer.
- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2707887/
Grass-legume mixtures sustain strong yield advantage over monocultures under cool maritime growing conditions over a period of 5 years
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29790908/
Biodiversity loss in Latin American coffee landscapes: review of the evidence on ants, birds, and trees (2008)
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18759777/
Temporal changes in genetic diversity and forage yield of perennial ryegrass in monoculture and in combination with red clover in swards (2018)
That is (a) a bit hyperbolic, (b) more applicable to large-scale, "industrial" farming and (c) not exactly desirable, right?
> Competing GMO banana products would introduce more diversity than exists today.
A good example of "it's the dosage that makes the difference between the poison and the medicine".
That's not a belief, this is a stated preference, and you would be fully entitled to ignore it as "invalid criticism" due to the confusion between facts and opinions.
The belief that you are actually asking me to "back up with links" is that GMO reduces genetic diversity. Do you really need a link for that?
I don't know if this is what actually happened, but it's certainly not true that the existence of GMO crops will by definition significantly decrease overall biodiversity.
Even then, if every banana in the world was genetically identical what harmful effect would this have? I can probably speculate, but I'm genuinely curious what the science says.
On the basis of the article that you linked to, I think it would be more accurate to say that "currently available GMO food is not thought to be harmful to humans."
There is nothing inherent in genetic modification that prevents if from being used to create food that is harmful when consumed by people (or animals) - whether due to toxicity or negative dietary effects. There probably isn't much incentive to do the former (except maybe as a weapon of war or terrorism), but engineering unhealthy but addictive foods isn't hard to imagine.
Similarly, theres nothing in the technology that prevents it from being used to develop plants or animals that cause harm to their environment - for example by runaway reproduction, excessive use of resources like water, affecting species equilibria, etc.
I personally wouldn't be worried about eating a GMO foodstuff, but I'm extremely unhappy about the environmental impact of ideas like terminator seeds or engineered pesticide resistance that leads to over-use of pesticides, and I wouldn't call them "safe".
I would actually say instead that "there is no reason to think that genetic modification itself introduces any additional danger to the food". Of course you can create dangerous food using GMO. You can also just poison it, too.
This is misleading from the link you sent.
> There is little scientific evidence of benefit or harm to human health from a diet high in organic food, and conducting any sort of rigorous experiment on the subject is very difficult
It would be more correct to say "healthier than non-organic food". I read your message at first thinking you meant organics were unhealthy :)
> The emails further demonstrated that since 2005 Monsanto has attempted to destroy my team’s work and reputation, in particular by recruiting third-party, supposedly independent experts at the highest levels to voice ghost-written and biased arguments (Henry Miller or Wallace Hayes, for instance [10,11,12]), who did not, however, publicly disclose their links with Monsanto
I'm not saying that the author is wrong, or that their criticisms of the other study are meritless (I have 0 experience in this field), especially with the widespread ethics concerns they point out.
But this particular paper doesn't draw any conclusions.
I don't buy organic food because I think it's healthier either btw. I do it because of the environmental impacts - same reason I buy local as much as possible via CSAs for my meat and veggies - whether they are certified organic or not (you can usually find a local farm that has practices just as good or better than certified organic anyways). It's super ironic to me that people think they're being environmentally friendly or saving the earth with GMO non-organic food just because it isn't meat. For all the conspiracies around Bill Gates I think his ideas of using tech to save the environment are scarier because it's actually ignoring science.
What are you trying to get at with this statement?
The evidence that the Moderna vaccine lowers the risk of death due to COVID is conclusive in the sense that a controlled, double blind study was performed and we have determined with some degree of certainty (>99.9%) that the vaccine is effective. But it's relatively easy to design an experiment.
How would you even go about designing an experiment for organic food. Giving a vaccine is binary... it was given on two occasions or it wasn't. With organic food, if there are benefits to it, they are most likely over a much longer term. So you'd need to police a participant's eating habits for years or maybe even decades to test your hypothesis. It's not a practical experiment to perform. At best we can say "there's no scientific evidence that organic food is better for you than non-organic", but that's not the same as saying "we have concluded with 99.9% certainty that organic food is no better for you than non-organic food".
Certain things just can't be tested effectively, especially things as complicated as diet. This is why dietary recommendations change so frequently. Still, not everything requires conclusive science. There's never been a controlled experiment showing that parachutes save skydivers' lives. But sometimes common sense trumps the need for scientific inquiry.
EDIT: Please don't read this as anti-science. On the contrary, science is great for answering certain questions, but has limitations for other questions.
What if "conventional food" is bad and has been bred for things like appearance and shelf-stability over nutrition?
This should be obviously untrue.