Genetically Modified Food is Really, Really Bad for Rats - and Maybe YOU!!!

Wait, if genetic modification and pesticides aren't producing higher yields or better crops, then wouldn't farmers just use conventional farming techniques? I doubt they would use more complicated/costly farming techniques if they offered no benefit over the original methods.

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Originally Posted by juroara

no, not good enough

I need you to explain why Im wrong. Systemic pesticides is an actual technical term in horticulture. Farmers make a choice whether to use a pesticide that stays in the plants system or a pesticide that only sits on top of the leaves and washes with rain. (both equally bad) Viruses have been used to inject-infect plant cells with foreign dna. How does any of that go against biology? Viruses already do that....

edit: Here is an example of a gm method that has people alarmed

"Not only can genes be transferred from one plant to another, but genes from non-plant organisms also can be used. The best known example of this is the use of B.t. genes in corn and other crops. B.t., or Bacillus thuringiensis, is a naturally occurring bacterium that produces crystal proteins that are lethal to insect larvae. B.t. crystal protein genes have been transferred into corn, enabling the corn to produce its own pesticides against insects such as the European corn borer. "

People are alarmed by this mixture of dna, as far as I understand, never before seen in nature or in the human diet in this manner. Why does eating something we've never eaten before sound so scary to people? Because eating things that was never a part of our evolutionary diet causes diet related diseases. Even if its just a simple allergy.

Whats the result of eating plants mixed with non-plant dna? Dont pompously lie to me and pretend you know exactly what this means, no one really knows what it means. In the US, the FDA allows companies to test on the populace. And the poppulace has no right to know. GM companies have also proven they had no real understanding of how it would affect the wilderness. The after effects of gm are UNKNOWN.

Im NOT saying that eating plants modified in this way is bad for you. What I am saying is people have legitimate reasons to be skeptical of eating something thats a complete bastardization of a natural process



Take the bees for example.

Farmers decided it was smart to control the insemination process. They take the queen bee, stradle her and rape her with needle as she squirms and squirms trying to break free. Intuition tells us this is obviously wrong. It takes a while for the left brain to figure out why it doesnt sit well with the right.

Whats the real scientific verdict of controlling who the queen bee mates with?

The scientific verdict is - its going horribly wrong.

Its not like queen bees were having trouble having sex! They were mating with up to 20 on a single flight. This created a genetic diversity keeping the bee population healthy.

But after years of controlling the bee genes, we've bred weak, sickly bees. Entire colonies die to something they should have had immunity for. In otherwords, we were pretty absurd and stupid in thinking we should control bee sex.



Yes, there is a real genuis behind the science of genetic modification. But like bees, theres complete absurdity in why we were modifying genes to begin with. Farmers wanted their plants to be free from all pests. But the problem wasnt in the plants genes, the problem was monoculture was a paradise for pests. Farmers wanted bigger and better crops. But the problem wasn't in the plants genes, the problem was the soil sucked.

Statistics show that organic farming DOES NOT produce more crops than conventional farming. This has ironically been used to argue that organic is not any better than conventional, with all its pesticides and expensive (very expensive for the farmers) gms. But its the other way around!

Organic came first. This means that conventional farming with all of its super gm seeds, are NOT producing higher yields or better crops.

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Now this is a lot more interesting, I really can't disagree with much of what you are saying. Once again, I will simply repeat what has been said a few times. What you are describing is evidence of evil business practices, and also a government that is so desperate for cheaper food, that it's willing to put the health of its citizens on the line. In Europe none of this happens, and if it does, it's clearly said on the packaging of the food.

What I don't like about your posts is the very emotional descriptions you weave in, such as

"They take the queen bee, stradle her and rape her with needle as she squirms and squirms trying to break free."

and

"a complete bastardization of a natural process"

These kind of remarks do not in any way make us, the people you are arguing against, have more sympathy for the cause you fight, we simply take it as evidence that you really don't know what you are talking about, and instead try to appeal to our emotions.

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Originally Posted by juroara

lol, what are you trying to say?

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lol you don't know anything about food.

All of the things I listed were created by man via artificial selection. Wheat, milk for human consumption, pigs, cows; none of these things existed, let alone were eaten, before the agricultural revolution some 15,000 years ago. Wheat for instance was brought into existence by genes from various different grasses mixing in a single plant. This would have been useless and the plant would have quickly disappeared had man not intervened.

The mixing of genes which you think you're so opposed to is actually responsible for civilisation itself, and you eat its products every day. I guess that makes you a willing slave to corporations. Or something.

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Originally Posted by sivason

True! Picture J could be an exact picture of my sweet little Darla, who developed a tumor exactly like that. She only ate normal foods, like oats and rice and pasta. She was not a lab rat. That picture looks completely normal for a rat. They get those tumors all the freaking time. It is just something that happens to rats. By the time she died it was a bit larger than that one pictured.

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You need to restrict your rats' diet.
The effects of patterned calorie-restricted d... [Carcinogenesis. 1993] - PubMed - NCBI

The rats used in this study ate too much. This breed of rat gets tumours when not given a restricted diet.

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a complete bastardization of a natural process

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"And now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go off and use my advanced modern technology that's completely unnatural"

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Originally Posted by Xei

lol you don't know anything about food.

All of the things I listed were created by man via artificial selection. Wheat, milk for human consumption, pigs, cows; none of these things existed, let alone were eaten, before the agricultural revolution some 15,000 years ago. Wheat for instance was brought into existence by genes from various different grasses mixing in a single plant. This would have been useless and the plant would have quickly disappeared had man not intervened.

The mixing of genes which you think you're so opposed to is actually responsible for civilisation itself, and you eat its products every day. I guess that makes you a willing slave to corporations. Or something.

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You're going way off here. I never said that breeding was bad, youre just making that assumption. But for the record, I think we should just let the animals have sex the old fashioned way.

What I said about gm has to do with mixing plants with non-plant dna. This has never happened before. This is brand new in the realm of science. Can you imagine what they can create in 100 years time?

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Originally Posted by Marvo

Now this is a lot more interesting, I really can't disagree with much of what you are saying. Once again, I will simply repeat what has been said a few times. What you are describing is evidence of evil business practices, and also a government that is so desperate for cheaper food, that it's willing to put the health of its citizens on the line. In Europe none of this happens, and if it does, it's clearly said on the packaging of the food.

What I don't like about your posts is the very emotional descriptions you weave in, such as

"They take the queen bee, stradle her and rape her with needle as she squirms and squirms trying to break free."

and

"a complete bastardization of a natural process"

These kind of remarks do not in any way make us, the people you are arguing against, have more sympathy for the cause you fight, we simply take it as evidence that you really don't know what you are talking about, and instead try to appeal to our emotions.

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Im glad to have emotions and sympathy and I dont know why you make the assumption that because someone does this means they dont know what theyre talking about. Scientific application removed from all emotion and sympathy leads to abuse. So yeah, we do need to bring that other human side of us when asking "Sure we can do this, but should we?"

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Originally Posted by juroara

What I said about gm has to do with mixing plants with non-plant dna. This has never happened before. This is brand new in the realm of science. Can you imagine what they can create in 100 years time?

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There's no difference between plant and non-plant DNA. They have exactly the same structure and do exactly the the same thing, which is make proteins. If the protein coded by the gene isn't harmful in the original organism, there's no reason to think it will be harmful in the organism it is transferred to. Do you have a single piece of evidence to the contrary? And your claim that it has never happened before is once again plain wrong, it's called 'horizontal gene transfer', and has occurred in nature from, for instance, bacteria to plants.

Excluding the bee sex, and dna part (cause I don't know anything about the bee sex stuff)...I agree with some of what Jurora said...the transgeneic processes and monoculture are the things I don't like....but what can a farmer do when billion dollar companies are buying one single type of product. This year we (the US) had some serious droughts in the Midwest, and mega farmers weren't able to make much money....same thing happened down south near my area. There was a lot of rain, and because of it, we generated more strawberries than most harvests. So they were complaining about how they wont be able to sell them because they have too much or they'll have to be super cheap. They both ended up getting bailouts from the government. (IMO they should have gotten it from the business but that's another story all together) Things like that get on my nerves, but the only way we'll see any real change is if all the consumers made different choices about what they bought. It would have to take a huge shift in everyone's consumptions. The organic market wouldn't be able to keep up with the demand, and eventually we'd have to go right back to getting whatever is available unless they caved in. Essentially it would be easier trying to remove all the whale piss from the ocean.

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Originally Posted by Xei

If the protein coded by the gene isn't harmful in the original organism, there's no reason to think it will be harmful in the organism it is transferred to. Do you have a single piece of evidence to the contrary?

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Also in before monarch butterfly/corn maize craziness.

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Originally Posted by Xei

There's no difference between plant and non-plant DNA. They have exactly the same structure and do exactly the the same thing, which is make proteins. If the protein coded by the gene isn't harmful in the original organism, there's no reason to think it will be harmful in the organism it is transferred to. Do you have a single piece of evidence to the contrary? And your claim that it has never happened before is once again plain wrong, it's called 'horizontal gene transfer', and has occurred in nature from, for instance, bacteria to plants.

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I disagree, it's not unreasonable to be wary of unintended side effects of gene modification. We don't understand the full complexity of DNA so changing it could bring about unwanted changes. Even if the gene functions as predicted, the proteins that are produced could be different, seeing how they're in a different environment.

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Originally Posted by juroara

Im glad to have emotions and sympathy and I dont know why you make the assumption that because someone does this means they dont know what theyre talking about. Scientific application removed from all emotion and sympathy leads to abuse. So yeah, we do need to bring that other human side of us when asking "Sure we can do this, but should we?"

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Haha oh wow.

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Originally Posted by khh

I disagree, it's not unreasonable to be wary of unintended side effects of gene modification. We don't understand the full complexity of DNA so changing it could bring about unwanted changes. Even if the gene functions as predicted, the proteins that are produced could be different, seeing how they're in a different environment.

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What you'd get is a bunch of proteins which failed to fold properly. Is there any evidence that they would be dangerous with anything but a vanishing probability? Is there any reason to think that misfoldings due to GM wouldn't be completely dwarfed by the background levels of misfolding in nature?

And in any case, isn't it easy for the GM scientists to tell whether the protein is folding correctly or not in the host organism?

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Originally Posted by Xei

What you'd get is a bunch of proteins which failed to fold properly. Is there any evidence that they would be dangerous with anything but a vanishing probability? Is there any reason to think that misfoldings due to GM wouldn't be completely dwarfed by the background levels of misfolding in nature?

And in any case, isn't it easy for the GM scientists to tell whether the protein is folding correctly or not in the host organism?

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Don't Prions come from misfolding of genes? Lets hope the scientists get it right.

Yes, and I was mindful of prions when I wrote that post. Over millions of years, with a test tube consisting of millions of organisms with millions of proteins, nature has only given us one example of a prion (they are all based on the same protein), so the probability of that event occurring is apparently vanishingly small; and if misfolding events occur all the time at a huge frequency in nature, why should we be worried about a couple of extra instances?

Well, I just have issue with one thing being discussed (because I don't want to get into the rest)...but any DNA we consume gets digested into nucleotides by pancreatic enzymes in the gut. If...and that's a really big IF...there is the rare instance that the DNA you consume somehow remains in your system and doesn't get broken down properly, it's not going to actually do anything, even if it remains in your leukocytes (white blood cells) and lymphatic system. Assuming that dietary DNA will somehow be incorporated into the human genome just seems misguided to me. I haven't done much research about this topic, as it's not of huge interest to me...I just wanted to comment because it struck me as odd that consuming dietary DNA was a point of contention. I can understand how someone might think it is scary to ingest foreign DNA, and that the DNA you ingest would be incorporated into the human genome and cause mutations etc. but that's just not the way it works.

The point of my post is not to say that I think GM is bad or good. Merely that we don't need to fear ingestion of DNA. Prions are a different story of course. I think that it is generally unsafe to encourage something like GM when it seems we don't fully understand the consequences, but we've been doing stupid stuff like that for centuries and it's not going to change anytime soon.

Also, Auron...we didn't talk about this in my biology or microbiology classes either. I took genetics as well, and it was barely touched on. Not that I'm complaining, as I said, not very interesting to me, but it is a little surprising that we didn't spend even a day talking about it in a genetics course.

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Originally Posted by tommo

You need to restrict your rats' diet.
The effects of patterned calorie-restricted d... [Carcinogenesis. 1993] - PubMed - NCBI

The rats used in this study ate too much. This breed of rat gets tumours when not given a restricted diet.

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Thanks for the link. My last rats had a never ending food bowl, but the new ones do not get as much.

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Originally Posted by Xei

I find it very unlikely that GM crops inherently cause cancer. They're just making proteins found in other plants.

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Is that really all they do? Because from what I understand the modifications make the plants resistant to super pesticides that kill just about everything. Some of them make it so the plants make their own pesticide.

I think whether they cause cancer or not needs to be further researched, as do the effects on humans generally. The way the FDA has handled the issue has been pathetic, probably because the people working for the FDA at the time were ex employees of the companies making money on GM foods.

However the way we are using this technology is having negative environmental impacts. I'm lazy and am not gonna look up sources but it is. The technology itself could probably be useful, but it seems obvious to me that we need to do more testing before we go planting things that could potentially fuck up entire ecosystems.

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Originally Posted by StonedApe

Is that really all they do? Because from what I understand the modifications make the plants resistant to super pesticides that kill just about everything. Some of them make it so the plants make their own pesticide.

I think whether they cause cancer or not needs to be further researched, as do the effects on humans generally. The way the FDA has handled the issue has been pathetic, probably because the people working for the FDA at the time were ex employees of the companies making money on GM foods.

However the way we are using this technology is having negative environmental impacts. I'm lazy and am not gonna look up sources but it is. The technology itself could probably be useful, but it seems obvious to me that we need to do more testing before we go planting things that could potentially fuck up entire ecosystems.

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If you read my posts, I've already covered this. Obviously if the protein does something harmful then there will be harmful effects. I'm just defending benign proteins in benign hosts.

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Originally Posted by Xei

If you read my posts, I've already covered this. Obviously if the protein does something harmful then there will be harmful effects. I'm just defending benign proteins in benign hosts.

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I didn't, I just skimmed the first page. I was just trying to wrap my head around what actually goes on. I didn't know that you could make a pesticide from proteins, but I guess it makes sense, has to be made from something.

That's what a gene does, it makes proteins (except a few which make RNA). Proteins basically control all chemical reactions in the body, so either the protein itself is a pesticide, or the protein catalyses reactions which produce a pesticide.

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Originally Posted by StonedApe

However the way we are using this technology is having negative environmental impacts. I'm lazy and am not gonna look up sources but it is. The technology itself could probably be useful, but it seems obvious to me that we need to do more testing before we go planting things that could potentially fuck up entire ecosystems.

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It doesn't help that the plants are grown outdoors and get cross pollinated with normal crops.
Pharmaceutical companies are testing modified sunflowers that produce drugs and they just plant them out in the open.
How much dumber than that can you possibly get?

Monsanto its a pesticide company.. They created agent orange and DDT, I don't exactly trust them to make my foods.
If GMO is as safe as they claim it to be you would think they would be proud to label it as such. Nope, quite they opposite, they have raised millions of dollars to fight prop 37 in California.. One of their reasons to oppose labeling its it would be too expensive. Rather ironic of you ask me, lol.
Also, GMO's are outlawed or have to be outlawed in over 100 other countries... Not to mention that once GMO's are grown on the land, that land is tainted and non GMO cannot be grown again.
I am sticking to real food.. If that's even possible anymore.

I meant to say outlawed or have to be labeled

Considering what they done in the past, Monsanto is not a company to be trusted.

They have ties with the federal government as well as the FDA.

I only read the first page and saw this mentioned a lot, but my girlfriend keeps rats for pets and every one of them has died from cancer. Some of them get tumors so large they can't walk. It's quite horrifying, but normal with rats. Cancer is pretty much the leading cause of death for rats, although I've seen a lot of respiratory infections too.