Why People Oppose GMOs Even Though Science Says they're Safe

Everything, even organic produce has been genetically modified. The original avocado tasted bitter and barely had any of the delicious fleshy fatty consistency people pay a buck extra for in their burger and sandwiches nowadays. Similarly for a banana. The tasty fruit in it's original state barely had any fruit and tasted extremely bitter with it's easily peelable layer in a rougher exterior bark state. You can go down a list for every single fruit and vegetable and base it on selective breeding.

Here's what I've never quite understood when it comes to people that oppose genetic modification/selective breeding or don't believe in evolution. Look at your very own domesticated dog.

Even those cute little tea cup dogs that could briefly catch flight from a good gust of wind are descendants of wolves. You have to differentiate why a cute bug eyed pug with a short pig snout is related somehow to an Alaskan Malamute as they're different subsections of the same descendant. Selective breeding. Human's thousands of years ago saw the value in domesticating wolves. Feral animals can't be domesticated but you can breed the aggressive unpredictable feral nature out of a wolf if you find the two tamest personality wolves and breed them, pick the tamest personality wolves from the 1st generation litter and pair them with another 1st generation litter, then repeat the process over and over again.

After many generations of breeding the most passive wolves, we now have domesticated dogs. But it doesn't stop there. Dog breeders then realized you could give a dog a specific working class purpose that it excels at. So you have your herding dogs, who have a high prey drive but have had the killing instinct bred out of them. So you got a dog that stalks sheep just like a wolf but instead of killing it, it's been bred to nip hard at a sheep's hooves and control a herd. Then you got your smaller breed of working class dogs like a Mini Schnauzer who was bred to kill mice and vermin around the farmhouse that a German Shepherd Dog wouldn't excel at.

Then you got your dogs whose sole breeding purpose was to be cute and social. Dogs like the Bichon, Pug and other toy breeds fall in line with this. All that's human made evolution over the course of thousands of years with documented evidence of success. I guess my point is we **** with nature all the time, be it in our diet, our preferred type of animal social companion and in many other ways we don't even think about already.

 

Agree on both. That's exactly why I said earlier I'm for GMO and later, I said that's the type of GMO to push for.

 

Gene mutation, modification, whatever you want to call it, is "normal" and also naturally occur. The differences is one occur in nature and one is human created. Nature is nature - you live within it and accept what it does. The one we control, we should keep a careful eye on it, especially when it's profit driven. We know that these changes will have consequences to the environment and other life forms, sometime quickly detected, while other takes a longer time-frame to see.

The current US regulations is very lax and favorable to GMO. It's more of trust and check for safety using standard protocols, but not much of any specific for GMO. Bio-diversity and safety, for example, is not a requirement at all. So far, so good, until one of these days...

 

Hang on, those avocados, bananas, melons, all the fruit that we recognise today, they didn't come via nature. We breed them, over hundreds of years, to become that state. There was nothing natural about it, we just kept growing and growing them, throwing away the ones we don't want and keep the ones we do, until the perfect one (which has the right genetic mutations) is done.

 

I have yet have anyone give me a solid scientific explanation why GMO is bad, but I have heard plenty of noise behind the anti-GMO movement.

All I have heard is that we don't truly know if they are bad for our health, but it just MIGHT be bad in a couple of decades??

the only logical thing is the bio-diversity issue, but that covers a very broad topic that relates to modern agriculture in general not just GMO in particular.

weird issue, I remember there was this medium sized demonstration against GMO's around where I live, and no one could really give me a convincing reason of what they are demonstrating about. It seems like everyone there was just spouting off random stuff they heard from another guy and then going around screaming "say no to GMO"

 

You are correct about the bio-diversity issue.

Another issue that science literate folks have with GMOs is the transgenic movements of certain designer genes present in GMOs (like resistance to weed killers). There is evidence, although limited so far, to indicate that not only might the gene for resistance be transferring to weeds, but the plants themselves are requiring more of the chemicals like glyphosate (a weed killer also known as "roundup") to protect themselves. The accumulation of these chemicals in our food sources would be the real consequence (almost all our corn and soy products are "roundup ready".

So in essence, its the way the corporations like Monsanto are growing GMO crops and distributing them without any disclosure to the public that indeed they've had to increase glyphosate application by more than 10x over the past five years that is a concern to some people, not necessarily the GMOs themselves. Unfortunately, the incredible, possibly life altering invention of GMOs has fell under the umbrella of corporations looking to do nothing more than to cash in while their chips are hot.

-V-

 

It's the idea that natural is healthy. I have heard a ton of people say eating vegetarian is healthier than eating meat. It's all in what you eat. I can adhere to a strict vegetarian diet, eating Taco Bell, candy bars, and trix cereal but that doesn't mean I'm eating healthy. People have false assumptions about GMOs and don't look into the science of it. It's sad when 85% of scientists have a consensus on GMOs but only 35% of the population believes it. Heck, even Global Warming has better numbers than that... I think even the theory of evolution has better numbers than that.

 

Yea, but that is still quite natural and work in a standard generation time frame. We didn't insert anything into the gene. We selectively breed and let nature takes it course. GMO is we altering the gene directly.

 

No it's not. Natural is healthy wouldn't be nature of this world. Nature is cruel and forgiven. We can't do anything about nature. But when we are not careful and insert ourselves in nature course, accelerating it, we can do much damages on a very fast time-frame.

The idea is, we know what is dangerous or not in nature because we have experience with it. We know every little what is dangerous or not in relatively new "unnatural" product until we have experience with it. The conservative and safe way, then is to lend toward what is known.

Also, your idea of eating at those places aren't much vegetarian or "natural is healthy" at all. People that are truly concern about "natural" probably have their own garden and rarely eat out, especially at fast food places.

 

Farms are not "natural". Ranches are not "natural". Selective breeding is not "natural". These are human constructions.

 

With GMOs you are altering one gene. That's it. With selective breeding, you don't know what genes are affected. What sounds scarier, a targeted approach or a shotgun one?

 

Most complaints and or worries seem to be more about the chemicals they use... I haven't heard much fuss about selective breeding with food.

 

I'm still trying to understand what people are afraid of when they think about eating a GMO. Your own DNA will not change. Any pesticides used have dissipated by the time it reaches the shelves. What's the potential threat to human consumption?

 

Fear of the "unknown"...

 

By the way, if anyone wants to truly understand how much work goes into producing GMO's, you need to understand the relationship between modern science/healthcare and recombinant DNA.

To put it simply, this stuff forms the backbone of a tremendous amount of medical research and is widely accepted to be harmless when used in the correct context.

 

Check out RNAi. It essentially silences the RNA transcripts by terminating the mRNA produced. Potatoes are being incorporating an RNAi factor that mitigates their production of acrylamide. Acrylamide when fried can create carcinogens, so potatoes with this RNAi will be healthier to eat. Because RNAi is a targeted approach, it only affects production of a certain mRNA, and that's it. RNAi does not code for anything, so it can't create anything malicious. RNAi is also considered a GMO.