The Promise of GMOs: Nutrition

January 2, 2017 Josh Tasman 0

GUEST AUTHOR: Anastasia Bodnar

This is a part of the series The Promise of GMOs. Do GMOs live up to the promises of the biotech industry? So far it’s not looking very good. While all of the nutrition-related claims about biotechnology are certainly possible, there are no crops with these types of traits available on the market yet.

“I don’t want to eat food that makes insects stomachs explode! / I don’t want to eat food that’s been bred to withstand being drenched in toxic herbicides”

December 14, 2016 Marc Brazeau 1

How often have you heard some version of:

“I don’t want to eat food that makes insects stomachs explode! / I don’t want to eat food that’s been bred to withstand being drenched in toxic herbicides”

This may be the most common misconception out there. Let’s try to reconnect it with reality a little bit.

“I don’t want to eat a tomato that has fish DNA. Breeding in a laboratory is not the same as breeding that happens in nature over hundreds of years.”

December 12, 2016 Marc Brazeau 0

One of the most common objections to biotech crops that comes up on the internet is some variation on this theme:
“I don’t want to eat a tomato that has fish DNA. Breeding in a laboratory is not the same as breeding that happens in nature over hundreds of years.”

There’s a lot of misunderstanding packed into those two sentences

Answering the 3 Most Common Internet Objections to GMOs

November 21, 2016 Marc Brazeau 5

Any discussion of GMOs on the internet brings a swarm of commenters. No matter the topic, an inevitable pattern of comment is “Yes, but what the author ignores is (insert common anti-GMO myth)”.

Here are three of the most common tropes that litter those discussions.

The 10 Minor Realizations That Flipped My Thinking About GMOs

November 7, 2016 Marc Brazeau 1

I wasn’t ideologically opposed to genetic engineering, I just figured that given our current understanding of nutrition and ecology, the technology wasn’t really ready for prime time. I figured if we couldn’t figure out margarine, then we weren’t ready to start tinkering with plants at a genetic level. Common sense, right?

It took a while to realize that was an incorrect model for thinking about GE breeding. There are a number of realizations that I went through before leaving that behind. Here are ten of them:

About Those Industry Funded GMO Studies . . .

September 10, 2014 Marc Brazeau 16

Let’s talk about those GMO funded studies. You know the ones. The ones you always hear about from Anti-GMO folks when you read the comment section for any story about GMOs. According to those folks, the whole scientific consensus on GMOs is based on those studies. According to peanut gallery, the only studies that show that GMOs pose no different risks than conventionally bred crops were all bought and paid for by Monsanto. That would make the consensus suspicious right? It would if there weren’t also a ton of independently funded studies that show the same thing.