A reader doesn’t trust analyses of GMOs so far:
Experts have been frequently, horribly wrong through out history. Now, I do not think for one moment that the ignorant masses’ opinions on scientific facts are as valid as educated scientists. But with GMOs, the story is quite a bit muddier and different. First, there’s not been any valid test of their safety — and by that, I mean at a minimum it has to be a long term test, because effects are likely subtle. And because any error will adversely affect billions of people, unlike say drugs which were withdrawn from the market when it was discovered they were injuring and killing people. Secondly, because large industrial agriculture is built on GMOs and other such marketable “technologies”, there are a bunch of very large, very wealthy companies doing their best to skew the science and common belief about GMOs. So when I read “many scientists believe them to be safe”, I’m skeptical that that’s a valid sample or a valid statement. Monsanto, Bayer, ConAgra, Syngenta, Dupont, Dow Chemical, BASF and Cargill make billions of dollars on the system using GMOs. They are not going to stand by idly while consumers ask for information and safety, if it’s going to slow their profits.
I note a subtle confusion of scientists with their (potential) employers. Do scientists spout the company line? As people devoted to finding the truth, you’d hope not – but no doubt some do, through fear or epistemological confusion.
And absent the direct effects of GMOs on human digestion and health, there’s systemic effects: most GMO drops are GMO precisely to give them herbicide and pesticide resistance or characteristics. And those things have their own harmful effects. For instance, Monsanto’s huge line of “Roundup-ready” GMO crops: corn, beans, etc. Roundup is claimed to be “safe” because one main ingredient, glyphosate, does not interfere with human metabolism. However, it kills plants, which have a different metabolic pathway quite well. And it also kills bacteria, which have that same metabolic pathway as well. Bacteria, like the necessary and helpful bacteria in your gut. You’d die without them. Injuring them cannot be good for your health, but since science is only just beginning to scratch the surface on gut bacteria, we don’t really know what the heck we’re doing to ourselves, with so many chemicals added to our diet, intentionally and accidentally.
So even if GMO corn itself will not harm me — and again, that has not been proven via a multi-decade study — all of that corn has been saturated repeatedly with glyphosate. Any trace amounts remaining are bad for my health.
Just out of curiosity, I decided to see how much of the corn supply goes directly to humans. From Jonathan Foley, the director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, comes this via Scientific American and Ensia.com:
Although U.S. corn is a highly productive crop, with typical yields between 140 and 160 bushels per acre, the resulting delivery of food by the corn system is far lower. Today’s corn crop is mainly used for biofuels (roughly 40 percent of U.S. corn is used for ethanol) and as animal feed (roughly 36 percent of U.S. corn, plus distillers grains left over from ethanol production, is fed to cattle, pigs and chickens). Much of the rest is exported. Only a tiny fraction of the national corn crop is directly used for food for Americans, much of that for high-fructose corn syrup.
Yes, the corn fed to animals does produce valuable food to people, mainly in the form of dairy and meat products, but only after suffering major losses of calories and protein along the way. For corn-fed animals, the efficiency of converting grain to meat and dairy calories ranges from roughly 3 percent to 40 percent, depending on the animal production system in question. What this all means is that little of the corn crop actually ends up feeding American people. It’s just math. The average Iowa cornfield has the potential to deliver more than 15 million calories per acre each year (enough to sustain 14 people per acre, with a 3,000 calorie-per-day diet, if we ate all of the corn ourselves), but with the current allocation of corn to ethanol and animal production, we end up with an estimated 3 million calories of food per acre per year, mainly as dairy and meat products, enough to sustain only three people per acre. That is lower than the average delivery of food calories from farms in Bangladesh, Egypt and Vietnam.
Incidentally, the article is entitled, “It’s Time to Rethink America’s Corn System.” I must finish reading it later today, it’s interesting. Due to a wrist injury, I must curtain my response (not that I had much of one, although the reader raised a host of interesting points). I also wonder if corn is as nutritious as other crops…
