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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

> Magnesium deficiency can be attributed to common dietary practices, medications, and farming techniques, along with estimates that the mineral content of vegetables has declined by as much as 80–90% in the last 100 years.

This is why, when people defend GMOs with the argument that we've been genetically modifying plants and animals for hundreds of years by selective breeding, that I don't think that argument leads to the conclusions they're looking for which is that its all perfectly harmless.

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I make that argument, but I would never say "It's all perfectly harmless." The point is that the technique used to produce an organism isn't its self harmful. The question is whether the organism is harmful. Resistance to disease is good. Lower nutrient density is bad. It really doesn't matter whether we got here by selective breeding or modifying genes directly.

We didn't set out to lower nutrient density, though, that was a side effect of ignoring it and focusing on other things which we thought were good.

Yup, that's true. And the things we were focussing on are good. They're just not everything.

That's what they said back when butter would kill you and margarine was the solution.

I don't get it. You're saying we shouldn't bother to improve things because they still won't be perfect?

I'm saying we don't necessarily know good from bad and have fantastic amount of ignorance still about food and nutrition.

I got that part. So?

But it does help focus the discussion on whether the changes are harmful, away from “it's a change, and change is bad”.

Change in complex system is risky. Some people are risk averse.

Is lack of change in complex systems safe? I'd guess it's more that complex systems are inherently risky.

In such arguments, it is assumed that the current sate of things is already acceptable. That's exactly why people don't want to change them.

The current state of things isn't very stable though, especially when there's already a bunch of other parts of it we're intentionally or unintentionally modifying.

No, its deployed as a club to argue that all change is good.

Most anti-GMO sentiments I encountered are appealing to nature. In which case pointing out that it’s more of the same is a valid response.

There might be other arguments against GMOs, like the one you put forth, that require different responses.

GMO's are not perfectly harmless, but nor are they as different from other forms of human manipulation as we have been lead to believe.

I've long taken the stance that the bigger issues are agricultural monoculture and proprietary genetics. We should require all to have copyleft genomes and use our large agricultural subsidies to promote genetic diversity in our food supply.

What does this have to do with GMOs though?

The idea being that maybe our selective breeding has already had a negative affect in terms of nutrient content.

So if we’ve messed things up with selective breeding we could be similarly messing things up with genetic modification.

The drop in magnesium levels is related primarily to depletion in over-worked farmland.

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