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Comment by Brakenshire | Hacker News Reader

This is, I think, the same reason why we should be sceptical of genetically modified foods - not because the process is unnatural, or is inherently damaging - but for a more banal reason, because it is similar to eating foods with a lot of additives. In both cases you fundamentally lose control over the building blocks of your diet. If you can only choose between different highly processed foods, that means you need advanced domain knowledge to be able to make a reasonable judgment about the trans-fats, the MSG, or the highly processed sugar. But, at present, these additives are not mixed into the ingredients, you do at least have the option of opting out.

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The only way your body would know or care if it was consuming a genetically modified food was if that modification produced something toxic (poisonous). Barring than that, to your body, it's all proteins, carbohydrates, fats, etc... If you are concerned about genetically modified foods, you should probably also be concerned with domesticated foods, since those have been selected by their farmers for many generations to produce specific things - bigger fruits, better tasting meats. We've been doing genetic modification since we started farming. It's only been the past generation or so that we started hacking the DNA directly.

> you should probably also be concerned with domesticated foods, since those have been selected by their farmers for many generations to produce specific things - bigger fruits, better tasting meats

This is sort of true, but also not at all. Natural selection deals with incremental changes over the course of decades, or generations. The likelihood that, for instance, Omega 3 production will spontaneously arise in a tomato, is so small as to be negligible. GM represents a step-change in capability, closer to the possibilities of the use of industrial food additives, than it is to traditional breeding. Except, as I say, the additives are now an integral part of the ingredients.

In a way it's glaringly true. Most Americans will die from eating too much domesticated meat which is known to cause heart disease. If you're already overweight or have high cholesterol/etc then any undetected possible effect from additives/GM is irrelevant.

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