Here to extinguish all those stuffs about GMO foods being "unnatural" and all that.
Enjoy.
Excerpt#1
Non-GMO Foods? Nonsense.
Steven Salzberg, Contributor
I was at a local organic food market recently buying lunch, and I noticed that my avocado-and-hummus sandwich proclaimed that it contained “non-GMO” ingredients (GMO = “genetically modified organism).
Now, I happen to like organic groceries. The ones near me tend to have better produce and fish, two of the main ingredients in my diet. But organic markets are a hotbed of bogus, even laughable health claims, and I often have to suppress my urge to complain to the store’s management. (I once wrote to Whole Foods, but they never responded.)
Here in the U.S., most of our food supply is filled with so-called GMO foods, but in Europe the situation is dramatically different. For some reasons, our otherwise well-educated European friends are terrified of GMO foods. They don’t seem to realize that we’ve been modifying the genes in our foods for centuries, and it’s generally been a good thing. The latest biotechnology merely allows us to modify plants (and animals too, though none are yet on the market) much more quickly, and more intelligently. Today we can alter just a few genes to produce a more-desirable plant, rather than doing it by trial-and-error over many generations.
In fact, the “GMO” foods of the past likely had hundreds of unknown gene modifications.Farmers selected plants for seed because they looked and tasted good, without having any idea of what was really different about them.
Let’s take a look at corn. The corn we eat today, organic or not, looks nothing like the “real” corn (or maize) from centuries ago. The earliest corn cobs discovered by archaeologists were tiny, with only a few kernels. This picture shows a primitive form of corn, called teosinte, compared to modern corn:
That hasn’t stopped opponents of GMO foods from sounding the alarm. Even the World Health Organization makes some errors on its website, where it discusses three main “issues of concern for human health”:
That hasn’t stopped opponents of GMO foods from sounding the alarm. Even the World Health Organization makes some errors on its website, where it discusses three main “issues of concern for human health”:
- Allergenicity. Not a problem. The WHO says “No allergic effects have been found relative to GM foods currently on the market.”
- Gene transfer. The WHO gets this one wrong. They write that “gene transfer from GM foods to cells of the body or to bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract would cause concern if the transferred genetic material adversely affects human health.” Gene transfer is a topic that I’ve studied in some detail, and published papers on. The WHO says that the likelihood of a gene transfer event is “low,” but in fact it is vanishingly small – so small, in fact, that not a single gene transfer event has ever happened. In the history of our species, and of all mammals, going back tens of millions of years, not a single gene from something we’ve eaten has been transferred into the human genome or, as far as we can tell, into bacteria within our guts.
- Outcrossing. This is “the movement of genes from GM plants into conventional crops,” and this really can happen – they’re the same species, so they can interbreed. But it’s only a concern if GM plants are harmful, which they’re not.
The bottom line is, you’re far more likely to be harmed by being hit on the head by a corn cob than by some kind of deviant GMO corn gene.
The WHO concludes that GM foods “are not likely to present risks for human health.” Of course, not all GMO foods are good. I’m not a fan of engineering crops to be more tolerant of pesticides, for example: this type of GMO food benefits big agricultural firms rather than the consumer.And it is theoretically possible to insert harmful genes into plants, but agricultural firms wouldn’t have any reason to do that.
So the next time you see the non-GMO claim in your grocery, ask yourself whether the ingredients could really be completely unmodified from their “natural” state. I doubt it.
My sandwich was really good, by the way.
Excerpt#2
Here's what fruits and vegetables looked like before we domesticated them
Next time you bite into a slice of watermelon or a cob of corn, consider this: These familiar fruits and veggies didn't always look and taste this way.
Genetically modified foods, or GMOs, inspire strong reactions nowadays, but humans have been tweaking the genetics of our favorite produce for millennia.
While GMOs may involve splicing genes from other organisms (such as bacteria) to give plants desired traits — like resistance to pests, selective breeding is a slower process whereby farmers select and grow crops with those traits over time.
From bananas to eggplant, here are some of the foods that looked totally different before humans first started growing them for food.
Shutterstock
Flickr/Rosana Prada
Wild watermelon
This 17th-century painting by Giovanni Stanchi depicts a watermelon that looks strikingly different from modern melons, as Vox points out. A cross-section of the one in the painting, which was made between 1645 and 1672, appears to have swirly shapes embedded in six triangular pie-shaped pieces.
Modern watermelon
Over time, humans have bred watermelons to have a red, fleshy interior — which is actually the placenta — like the ones seen here. Some people think the watermelon in Stanchi's painting may just beunripe or unwatered, but the black seeds in the painting suggest that it was, in fact, ripe.
Wild banana
The first bananas may have been cultivated at least 7,000 years ago — and possibly as early as 10,000 years ago — in what is now Papua New Guinea. They were also grown in Southeast Asia. Modern bananas came from two wild varieties, Musa acuminata andMusa balbisiana, which had large, hard seeds, like the ones in this photo.
Modern banana
The hybrid produced the delicious modern banana, with its handy, graspable shape and peelable covering. Compared to its ancestor, the fruit has much smaller seeds, tastes better, and is packed with nutrients.
Wild eggplant
Throughout their history, eggplants have come in a wide array of shapes and colors, such as white, azure, purple, and yellow — like those shown here. Some of the earliest eggplants were cultivated in China. Primitive versions used to have spines on the place where the plant's stem connects to the flowers.
Modern eggplant
But selective breeding has gotten rid of the spines and given us the larger, familiar, oblong purple vegetable you find in most grocery stores.
Wild carrot
The earliest known carrots were grown in the 10th century in Persia and Asia Minor. These were thought to originally be purple or white with a thin, forked root — like those shown here — but they lost their purple pigment and became a yellow color.
Modern carrot
Farmers domesticated these thin, white roots, which had a strong flavor and biennial flower, into these large, tasty orange roots that are an annual winter crop.
Wild corn
Perhaps the most iconic example of selective breeding is North American sweetcorn, which was bred from the barely edible teosinte plant. Natural corn, shown here, was first domesticated in 7,000 BC and was dry like a raw potato, according to this infographic by chemistry teacher James Kennedy.
Modern corn
Today, corn is 1,000 times larger than it was 9,000 years ago and much easier to peel and grow. Also, 6.6% of it is made up of sugar, compared with just 1.9% in natural corn, according to Kennedy. About half of these changes occurred since the 15th century, when European settlers started cultivating the crop.
Wild peach
Peaches used to be small, cherry-like fruits with little flesh. They were first domesticated around 4,000 B.C. by the ancient Chinese and tasted earthy and slightly salty, "like a lentil," according to Kennedy.
Modern peach
But after thousands of years of farmers selectively breeding them, peaches are now 64 times larger, 27% juicier, and 4% sweeter.
So next time someone tells you we shouldn't be eating food that's been genetically modified, you can tell them we already are.
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