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Originally Posted by bmw325i
Ok well rather than taking the innocent until proven guilty or the guilty until proven innocent approach on GMO's, why hasn't anyone done any actual testing on the safety of them? Namely the FDA and Monsanto.
How are we supposed to know what health problems are caused by GMO's if 99% of people are eating them. Who is the control group in this experiment we are forced to be part of?
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Even if you were right, how is that different from what we've done with any other crop for all of human history? New genes are introduced to those all the time, often genes that are completely novel, vs. GMO genes which are generally borrowed from somewhere else. GMO crops are tested though. They start with the assumption that the ancestral crop was safe enough, and then measure what's different about it. If the difference, even if it's making BT proteins, is considered to be within acceptable toxicity tolerences, it's considered safe.
This typically is not done with crops developed from selective breeding, either traditionally or accelerated with mutagens and radiation.
There can be health benefits, too. For example, corn damaged by insects often contains high levels of fumonisins, carcinogenic toxins made by fungi that are carried on the backs of insects and that grow in the wounds of the damaged corn. Studies show that most Bt corn has lower levels of fumonisins than conventional corn damaged by insects.
Not that there's such a thing as a "natural" crop, but people are totally snowed that "natural" = "healthy". Arsenic and snake venom are natural and pretty much as toxic as anything devised in a lab. It's just a knee-jerk fear of change and the unknown.