Why GMO is good for you

Why GMO is good for you

November 2019

I saw a commercial on TV last night for dog food.  Our dog food is GMO free.  I’m sure it is.  That just means it doesn’t have canola oil or corn in it.   It probably never would have.  The company is just jumping on the GMO free trend.  The company thinking must be people are scared of GMO.  Our dog food has no GMO ingredients, because our recipe never included them, let’s jump on this trend. 

Greetings

There is a lot of media and general population fear and push back against GMO.  However it is not really scary science.  It is not really so new or different than what has been happening for generations.  It is improving things in our food supply chain.

In order to think about if GMO products are damaging the world we need to understand a few main ideas

What does GMO mean

Genetic modification has been going on for centuries

GMO products can have environmentally healthy results

GMO products are carefully monitored

GMO means Genetically modified organism. 

·         "does not occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination". 

·         is an organism that has had its DNA altered or modified in some way through genetic engineering.

People have been genetically selecting organisms as long as there have been agricultural societies.  (People themselves have been genetically changed over generations.

Have you ever been on the Nonsuch at the Manitoba Museum?  Did you wonder how people slept on those tiny berths?  People have been getting larger over the centuries. In the last 150 years people have become about 10 cm taller.  Increased nutrition accounts for some of this change but so does genetic selection.  People for generations have chosen mates that are “hale and hearty”.  Tall has been considered attractive in males.  By this process new generations of humans have more and more, taller and larger genes.)

In agriculture saving and using the good seeds has been going on for generations.

My grandmother may have been of the last generation that regularly saved the seeds from one year to plant the next year’s garden.  One had to wait until the produce was very ripe and then carefully dry the seeds.  My grandmother picked 4 beautiful tomatoes and set them aside to get over ripe so we could dry the seeds later. I asked why we didn’t put aside some of the smaller, misshapen tomatoes and eat the good ones.  My grandmother asked, “Well do we want beautiful big tomatoes next year or do we want small misshapen tomatoes next year?”

Farmers saved and cleaned the good wheat seeds for the next year, resulting in crops that tolerated prairie conditions well. 

Dog breeds, plant species, are the result of genetic mixtures often chosen by people to get a desired result.  I love my mini golden doodle, it is the result of centuries of genetic selection.

GMO is different from this selection of genes to create specific characteristics in the next generation in only 2 ways.  One is that it is done in a lab at the molecular level and 2 that occasionally genes that would never naturally enter the DNA of an organism are added.

Corn borers are those ugly little worm things you find in your corn on the cob when you husk it.  When preparing a meal for your family they are an annoyance.  When growing and harvesting enough corn to feed the world they are a real problem.  Not only do they decrease yields they are a problem in storage, where everything needs to be dry and in turning the corn into flour or other food.  Enter GMO, scientist carefully develop and insert a naturally occurring soil bacterium into the corn DNA.  Now when a cob is growing and a corn borers tries to live in it a protein invades its stomach and it dies.  This protein does not affect people. It doesn’t even kill other insects such as beetles, flies, bees and wasps. Now there is no need for the farmer to use much more invasive and potentially more risky chemicals to spray the corn.  Misuse of pesticides and damage from spray drift are environmental concerns.

Round-Up ready canola.  Canola is a seed used to make cooking oil, parts not used in cooking oil are used for animal feed.  Round-up is an effective chemical for killing most vegetation.  It specifically kills broadleaf plants.  Grass is a narrow leaf plant.   Clover is a broad leaf plant.  Now canola is a broad leaf plant.  The weeds that love to grow in canola are broad leaf weeds.  Weeds complete with plants for the moisture and nutrition in the soil and therefor lower yields.  Round-up ready canola has been modified at the genetic level so Round up doesn’t kill it even though it normally would. Now the farmer is able to use a specific chemical after the canola has reached a specific stage of growth to aid his crop.  A specific well tested chemical is used rather than multiple sprayings of less effective chemicals.

Rice is the staple food for 1/3 of the world’s population.  It will sustain a body but it provides only carbohydrates.  Researches are working on GMO rice that would provide some protein and vitamins, making it a much healthier staple food. 

There are only 5 GMO crops and foods grown in Canada

1.   Canola  2.  Corn3.  Soy 4.  Sugar beet (white sugar beet for sugar processing only) 5.  Alfalfa (for animal feed

Health Canada has established a clear and stringent process for evaluating the safety of foods derived through genetic modification. The specific criteria for the safety assessment of such foods are outlined in the Health Canada publication "Guidelines for the Safety Assessment of Novel Foods." Health Canada conducts a thorough safety assessment of all biotechnology-derived foods to demonstrate that a novel food is as safe and nutritious as foods already on the Canadian marketplace.

When considering the use of GMO please consider:

Choosing parent plants or animals to get specific traits in offspring has been common practice for many years.

Modifying the genes at the DNA level offers different possibilities.

GMO products like all food products in Canada are carefully monitored.

GMO agriculture in Canada has environmental benefits as well as production benefits.

There is no scientific reason to believe that GMO products are harmful to people although core borers have a reason to dislike them.