Why is genetically engineered food important

Genetic modification has also made plants with improved resistance to certain diseases. Some of the crops altered in this way include bananas, corn and papayas. Increased production. Many crops have been genetically modified to produce higher yields under specific environmental conditions. More recently, genetically altered crops with potential benefits to the consumer have been developed, having the following desired traits: Improved taste or appearance. Genetic engineering is used to make new crops that taste better, look better, ripen slower and stay fresh longer.

Examples include citrus fruits with less bitterness, apples that do not brown when sliced, potatoes that do not get bruises during transportation, tomatoes with more flavor that also stay fresh longer after ripening, and other fruits and vegetables with improved shelf-life.

Enhanced nutritional value and health. A number of different plants have been genetically improved or are being developed to include extra nutrients or fewer harmful substances.

Some of the examples include rice with added beta-carotene, vitamin E, iron and lysine; potatoes that produce fewer cancer-causing chemicals when fried; allergen-free nuts; reduced-allergen soybean; beans that cause less flatulence; cooking oils canola, soybean, corn with reduced amounts of saturated fats and increased essential amino acids. Improved adaptability to environmental conditions. Genetic engineering has allowed farmers to grow crops such as rice, corn, wheat and other cereals in harsh conditions e.

Pharmaceutical benefits. To Potrykus, the notion of home gardens for everyone— Let them eat carrot cake —reeked of Western ignorance. Potrykus and Conway wanted to try everything to alleviate vitamin A deficiency: diversification, fortification, supplementation, and Golden Rice. But the anti-GMO groups refused. They doubled down on their double standards. They portrayed Golden Rice as a financial scheme , but then—after Potrykus made clear that it would be given to poor farmers for free —objected that free distribution would lead to genetic contamination of local crops.

Some anti-GMO groups said the rice should be abandoned because it was tied up in 70 patents. While critics tried to block the project, Potrykus and his colleagues worked to improve the rice. By they had developed plants with eight times as much beta carotene as the original version. In they unveiled a line that had 20 times as much beta carotene as the original.

GMO critics could no longer dismiss Golden Rice as inadequate. So they reversed course. Now that the rice produced plenty of beta carotene, anti-GMO activists claimed that beta carotene and vitamin A were dangerous. To support the new alarmism, David Schubert, an anti-GMO activist and neurobiologist at the Salk Institute, drafted a paper on the ostensible perils of boosting vitamin A. In he got it published in the Journal of Medicinal Food. In the article he noted that beta carotene and dozens of related compounds, known as carotenoids, could produce other compounds, called retinoids, which included vitamin A.

Schubert systematically distorted the evidence. To suggest that Golden Rice might be toxic, he cited a study that had been reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in He also failed to quote the rest of the paper, which emphasized that in general, beta carotene was actually associated with a lower risk of lung cancer.

Schubert gave opponents of Golden Rice what they needed: the illusion of scientific support. Every anti-GMO lobby cited his paper. But the new position, like the old one, relied on double standards. To begin with, every green plant produces carotenoids.

For years, anti-GMO groups had argued that instead of eating Golden Rice, people should grow other plants rich in beta carotene. They had also encouraged the use of selective breeding to increase carotenoid levels. They also advocated the mass administration of vitamin A through high-dose capsules and chemical manipulation of the food supply.

By their own alarmist standards—which, fortunately, were unwarranted—this would have been reckless. The human body derives from beta carotene sources, such as Golden Rice, only as much vitamin A as it needs.

In the context of GMOs, Greenpeace claimed to stand for freedom. In the Philippines, where Greenpeace was fighting to block field trials of Golden Rice, its hypocrisy was egregious. The government administered capsules to preschoolers twice a year, and to some pregnant women for 28 consecutive days. If Greenpeace seriously believed that retinoids caused birth defects and should be a matter of personal choice, it would never have endorsed these programs.

Despite this, the anti-GMO lobby went ballistic when scientists fed Golden Rice to 24 children during clinical trials in China. The trials, conducted in , were designed to measure how much vitamin A the rice could generate in people who suffered from vitamin A deficiency. One group of kids was given Golden Rice, a second group was given beta carotene capsules, and a third was given spinach. In a separate study, they found that an adult-sized serving could do the same for adults.

Golden Rice was as good as capsules, and better than spinach, at delivering vitamin A. When Greenpeace found out about the trials, it enlisted the Chinese government to stop them. For all the scare talk about beta carotene, Schubert and his colleagues never mentioned the kids who were given beta carotene capsules in the studies.

Nor did Greenpeace. Their sole concern was the rice. Supporters of Golden Rice were baffled. Greenpeace was outraged. Should we allow ourselves to be subjects in a human experiment? Eventually, Tufts commissioned three reviews of the clinical trials. Two were internal; the third was external. So they ignored it. Their enmity is unappeasable; their alarmism is unfalsifiable. Take the question of allergies.

In , scientists found no allergens among the proteins in Golden Rice. The critics refused to accept this finding. They demanded additional tests. The critics openly advocate unattainable standards. And these standards apply only to GMOs.

Three years ago Greenpeace recommended marker-assisted selection —essentially, breeding guided by genetic analysis—as a better way to increase levels of beta carotene and other nutrients. Shortly afterward, a study found that Greenpeace had it backward: In rice, marker-assisted selection caused more genetic and functional disruption than genetic engineering did. They want studies to assess how much beta carotene the rice loses when stored at various temperatures. Two years ago anti-GMO activists destroyed a field trial of the rice in the Philippines.

Last year they filed a petition to block all field tests and feeding studies. The stories of papaya, Bt, and Golden Rice demonstrate, in several ways, that these concerns are unfounded. Hundreds of studies have been done, and tons of GE food have been eaten. No amount of evidence will convince the doomsayers that GMOs are safe. Let it go. In fact, if you look at illness or direct fatalities —or at correlations between food sales and disease trends , which anti-GMO activists like to do—you can make a better case against organic food than against GMOs.

Keeping you scared is the key to their political and business strategy. And companies like Chipotle, with their non-GMO marketing campaigns, are playing along. There are other criticisms, and one of them is worth your attention. Three-quarters of the corn and cotton grown in this country is engineered to resist insects.

These crops have the bacterial Bt gene, which makes them lethal to bugs that eat them. Slightly more than that, about 80 percent to 85 percent of corn and cotton , is engineered to withstand weed-killing chemicals, especially glyphosate, which is sold as Roundup.

The two traits are usually packaged together. The percentages are similar for soy. Worldwide, insect-resistant crops are grown on about 50 percent of the land allotted to GMOs, while herbicide-tolerant crops are grown on more than 80 percent. Both applications are considered pesticidal, because weeds, like bugs, are pests. And this is crucial to understanding the debate over whether GMOs, as a whole, have raised or lowered the level of pesticide use. An international analysis of multiple studies, published last year, calculates that GMOs decreased pesticide use by 37 percent.

But the two assessments agree on a fundamental distinction: While bug-resistant GMOs have led to lower use of insecticides , herbicide-tolerant GMOs have led to higher use of weedkillers. Two factors seem to account for the herbicide increase. One is direct: If your crops are engineered to withstand Roundup, you can spray it profusely without killing them.

The other factor is indirect: When every farmer sprays Roundup, weeds adapt to a Roundup-saturated world. They evolve to survive. To kill these herbicide-resistant strains, farmers spray more weedkillers. Benbrook has called it one of the safest herbicides on the market. But the arms race could change that. As weeds evolve to withstand Roundup, farmers are deploying other, more worrisome herbicides. And companies are engineering crops to withstand these herbicides so that farmers can spray them freely.

But this is misleading in two ways. First, by pooling the data, Chipotle has hidden half of what Benbrook found: that Bt crops reduced insecticide use and thereby, in terms of their contribution to the bottom line, reduced the combined use of pest-killing chemicals.

To confound evolution, you have to make evolutionary pressures less predictable. That means switching herbicides so weeds that develop resistance to one herbicide will be killed by another.

It also means alternating crops, so weeds have to compete with different plants and grow under different tilling, watering, and harvest conditions. Industry and regulators, belatedly, are beginning to address this problem. As part of its product approval and renewal process, the EPA, backed by the USDA , is requiring producers of herbicides and herbicide-tolerant crops to monitor and report use of their chemicals, work with farmers to control excessive use, and promote non-herbicidal weed control methods.

GMOs are part of the problem. Herbicide-tolerant crops let farmers spray weedkillers more often and more thoroughly without harming their crops.

Farmers have been cultivating homogeneity for millennia. Roundup has been used for more than 40 years. Chipotle illustrates the folly of renouncing GMOs in the name of herbicide control. But shifting to sunflower oil is demonstrably counterproductive. They were bred to tolerate a class of herbicides called ALS inhibitors. And since farmers start[ed] relying on those herbicides, many weeds have evolved resistance to them.

In fact, many more weeds have become resistant to ALS inhibitors than to glyphosate. None of that is on the label. Herbicide-tolerant crops even mitigate climate change by reducing the need to till fields , which erodes soil and releases greenhouse gases. The more you learn about herbicide resistance, the more you come to understand how complicated the truth about GMOs is. Then you realize that nothing is perfectly innocent.

Pesticide vs. The best you can do is measure each practice against the alternatives. The least you can do is look past a three-letter label. Greenpeace and Chipotle think the logical response to this travesty is to purge GMOs. The relentless efforts of Luddites to block testing, regulatory approval, and commercial development of GMOs are major reasons why more advanced GE products, such as Golden Rice, are still unavailable. The list includes drought-tolerant corn, virus-resistant plums, non-browning apples, potatoes with fewer natural toxins, and soybeans that produce less saturated fat.

Genetically modified organisms GMOs are living organisms whose genetic material has been artificially manipulated in a laboratory through genetic engineering. This creates combinations of plant, animal, bacteria, and virus genes that do not occur in nature or through traditional crossbreeding methods.

However, new technologies are now being used to artificially develop other traits in plants, such as a resistance to browning in apples, and to create new organisms using synthetic biology. Despite biotech industry promises, there is no evidence that any of the GMOs currently on the market offer increased yield, drought tolerance, enhanced nutrition, or any other consumer benefit. Visit the What is GMO page for more information and a list of high-risk crops.

Are GMOs safe? In the absence of credible independent long-term feeding studies, the safety of GMOs is unknown. Increasingly, citizens are taking matters into their own hands and choosing to opt out of the GMO experiment. Are GMOs labeled? Sixty-four countries around the world, including Australia, Japan, and all of the countries in the European Union, require genetically modified foods to be labeled.