The problem with this statement is it is assuming that there are no health concerns.
The reason it's rational is this: were GMOs to be found to be unhealthy, it would be a continuation of a well-established pattern. Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy.
- Trans-fats (hydrogenated oils) are basically artery plaque in the form of fake butter or shortening.
- Nearly all additives such as MSG and artificial sweeteners are either unhealthy or suspect.
- Bleaching and other treatments to improve shelf life denude food of its nutrients. Re-enrichment only replaces macronutrients, leaving micronutrients and minerals unaccounted for.
- Preservatives enhance shelf life and reduce the likelihood of food-borne illness, but many are themselves suspect and many have been taken off the market.
- Nitrites are possible carcinogen.
- Google: brominated oil, arsenic poultry.
... and so on. The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients, namely iodine and vitamins C and D. But we're talking two successes out of dozens of failed experiments.
In every case, the "experts" told people it was safe or even good for you before the experts proceeded to change their minds. Margarine in particular is illustrative. It was recommended as a health food.
As a result, people have become rightly ultra-conservative about food, viewing any modification to food as guilty until proven innocent. "GMO is safe" means "we haven't figured out how GMO kills you, yet."
- Preservatives -- it's hard to know what you're referring to without you being more specific. Something being "suspect" is basically a comment about human paranoia, not actual health effects.
- Nitrites -- again, weak evidence that they may be carcinogens in some circumstances. Nothing epidemiological as far as I can tell. The alternative (botulism or other contamination) is far worse.
Herein lies the problem. Science is a method, not a dogma or a series of religious pronouncements. Trans-fat and even cigarettes were once considered healthy according to the science of the day.
As far as suspicion of new food items goes, there's a scientific argument to be made there too. Human beings are the outcome of hundreds of millions of years of mammalian evolution that has optimized us to metabolize certain nutrients in certain ratios. In a healthy individual, this diet is likely to be optimal since evolution has been optimizing for it in a feedback loop for thousands of generations. Any deviation from this diet is likely to be neutral to suboptimal, and anything not present in this diet likewise.
Don't get me wrong... far worse than anything I mentioned in my original post above is the way we eat: tons of simple carbs and sugars. Drinking soda and eating empty calories is likely a lot worse for you than GMOs would ever be likely to be.
I do know a bit about genetics too, and I personally think that GMOs are probably safe in most cases. The only legitimate health issue I'm aware of is the possibility of allergies. I was talking more about the social context of opposition to them, and pointing out that it's based on reasonable extrapolations of a trend.
All the hype about how GMO will end hunger and nutritional deficiencies and such is part of the problem. I'd say at this point breathless hype is seen as a contrarian indicator.
I believe he suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect and his completely unsourced post should create a huge red flag in any readers mind.
I'm not going to go point by point as the average HNer should be able to research for themselves, but I will respond to this gem that generated the largest facepalm:
> Nearly all food "innovations" of the last 100 years are unhealthy ... The only beneficial modification to the food system from a nutritional perspective has been fortification with certain key nutrients,
This is such a shockingly misguided statement that it hurts to read it. This is why I believe he suffers from illusory superiority, because I think his utter inexperience with agrology is leading him to think that he actually understands this field and can speak with expertise on it.
For a counter-point that "all innovation has been bad", one should only have to look at Norman Borlaug, known colloquially as "the man who saved a billion lives" and "the father of the green revolution". Norman Borlaug was Nobel laureate and agrologist whose research changed agriculture around the world and is credited with preventing billions from starvation.
The innovations of the past century directly allowed nations to increase wheat and rice yields by 2-10X, saving more than one nation from mass famine. I certainly would not label that "unbeneficial" or "unhealthy".
And this is just the elephant in the room in terms of examples, believe me when I say you could write books on the subject of the benefits of agricultural development of the past century. Entire schools are devoted to this study.
I personally am not particularly afraid of GMO foods. I was pointing out the sociological and political reasons for opposition to them. Look into the history of health advice and you'll find the same pattern: something is said to be healthy and people are told to do it. Later it is found to be unhealthy, often dramatically so. Cigarettes and margarine / trans-fat are probably the clearest examples, but there are many others and many outside the realm of food.
Every time you say something is good then reverse yourself, you lose credibility. At some point people actually start taking your pronouncements as a contrarian indicator. "Oh, the experts say GMO foods are great... they must be on Monsanto's payroll and they're probably worse for you than cigarettes."
Bad cherry picking used only to promote your own point. What about the enormous amount of good advice that has changed our lifestyles over the past century? Do you even know how people lived 100 years ago, how they ate?
What you should say is "some health experts have a habit of not always promoting scientifically sound advice, and many times promoting ideas that fly contrary to evidence. Fortunately as more evidence is gathered, those 'experts' are discredited and a better understanding of nutrition is the result".
When you don't cherry pick, you can find sources like:
The Harvard School of Public Health's Nutrition source. By any metric, "health experts promoting ideas". http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/
Can you take issue with these health experts providing advice? Anything they recommend that you think is grossly wrong? Because this is scientifically validated nutrition advice from health experts, the very thing you're trying to discredit by screaming "trans fats and cigarettes" as if those complex cases invalidate an entire scientific field of study.
Honestly, you're trying to smear the name of "experts" in general, without separating "health experts" (medical doctors, nutritionists, idiot laypeople who label themselves naturopaths, etc) from scientists. I feel like you're trying to find a way to ignore the entire science of nutrition because you got burned listening to a fad or because big tobacco ran roughshod over science six decades ago.
Absolutely. That's exactly what I'm doing. High-profile failures affect the perception of expertise, even across disciplines. The Harvard that credentialed the economists who said there was no housing bubble is the same Harvard that credentials the scientists who say GMO food is safe. The medical science that big tobacco ran roughshod over six decades ago hasn't changed substantially either-- the institutions and how those institutions are financed and run is largely the same.
People are simply not going to nod their heads to experts anymore. It's over, not just because of high-profile failures but because of the Internet. On the net anyone can appear as an expert. Anyone can look like they know what they're talking about.
How is science going to adapt to that? What I'd like to see is a solution to both problems: a more transparent, open, and engaging scientific process that both reduces the likelihood of major errors and frauds and more deeply engages the public.
You know... I have an apology I'd like to make. I'd like to apologize to all those marketing and sales people I slandered over my years as an engineer.
They were so irrational, said such ridiculous and inane things, made absurd and hyperbolic claims and chastised me for pointing out how unreasonable they were, insisted on framing things through awkward metaphors that bore little resemblance to underlying realities...
What they were trying to do was bang me over the head and get me to understand how actual human beings make decisions. They were trying to get me to pull my head out of technical realities (cough my ass cough) for a second and look instead at how things are perceived by people who are not experts.
Cause that's what I'm doing here. I am intentionally being hyperbolic and playing devils' advocate just a little because I want people to grasp why science and industry are mistrusted by so many in the general public. Most importantly, I want people to grasp that the people reaching these conclusions are not idiots. They're relying on methods of inductive reasoning that function on average very well in limited-knowledge scenarios. Evolution invented these methods of reasoning to keep us alive in situations where we have incomplete knowledge and are required to make important decisions.
I might draw different conclusions, but that's because I have a BS in biology and have created transgenic organisms in the lab before. That puts me in a tiny minority, probably less than a tiny fraction of 1% of the population.
I can either look at the rest 99.99% of humanity and the fact that the majority of them are suspicious of GMO food and say -- as most scientifically-minded skeptics do -- "man, those people are idiots." Now I've insulted them, which makes them even less likely to listen to me. Or I can say "hmm... why would so many otherwise intelligent people be afraid of something that is not likely to really be harmful to them?"
People have also cherry picked this or that. I'll concede MSG. That's not the point. So far nobody's cherry picked margarine because there is now very strong evidence for the unhealthiness of trans fats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans_fat#Health_risks
For a generation doctors told people to replace butter with margarine. Got to avoid those unhealthy saturated fats!
Butter, it turns out, may actually be good for you: http://quantifiedself.com/2011/01/results-of-the-buttermind-...
What inductive inference are people supposed to draw from this pattern? Or are they just supposed to mindlessly trust in people with credentials next to their names?
It's a problem that goes way beyond medical science, too. Every time the president of the United States stands up and lies the country into war, every time a well-respected economist claims housing prices will always go up or a market pundit calls out that "this bubble is different," every time it is said that "no modern reactor can have an accident like Chernobyl" (this was the refrain prior to Fukushima), people lose a bit of their respect for the social mechanisms our society uses to identify and credential expertise.
This is the cause for the increasing mistrust of expertise. The quacks and fanatics and pseudoscientists are simply exploiting it. They didn't cause it. The claimants of expertise in our culture destroy their own credibility quite well, and when that happens people inductively extend that loss of credibility to entire categories of expertise and even to the concept of expertise itself.
You first need to demonstrate that food changes have been overall bad before we can even accept your core point, let alone respond to it.
I've tried to point out the perception-of-expertise problem before in threads like this, and skeptics always get angry and defensive and dismissive.
MSG is fine. GMOs are fine. There is no housing bubble. That's what the experts say.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10...
How many people do you know whose financial well-being was destroyed by the housing bubble?
Bernanke graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University, among other accolades. You don't get more credentialed expertise than that. What conclusion are people supposed to draw here?
I'm simply pointing out the obvious one, and the one that many people do in fact draw: expertise is bullshit. I don't personally believe that -- I think the reality is far more nuanced -- but I can see how someone could draw that conclusion and I am not convinced that doing so makes them an idiot.
For me I just want choice (at the super-market). Choice to not choose GMO, until there is more than enough evidence and discussion around the topic. Maybe you feel there is enough evidence, but I want more. I do not want said firm to 'force' me into eating their product just yet. This is my due diligence on the one life I live.
The subject is conservatism. A conservative is not someone who rejects all of a thing, but someone who is skeptical and suspicious of new things.
As a result of many past issues with novel food products, people have become increasingly conservative about food. That doesn't mean that they reject all industrial or scientific agriculture, but they're likely to be suspicious of things that haven't been around for more than one or two generations. They're quick to reject novel changes in the food supply and very slow to accept them.
Along with having been burned in the past, I can think of another reason why this might be rational. The cost function is weighted heavily on the conservative side. It feels like something that could be modeled well with game theory.
The cost of food conservatism is likely a small increase in the amount of money paid for food. This is a very small cost for most first-worlders, where food is so available that obesity is a health crisis. The benefit is that the risks, if any, are well-known and are known to be tiny.
The cost of food liberalism, by contrast, is an unknown chance of getting cancer, heart disease, diabetes, allergic reactions and inflammatory disorders, etc. The unknown chance is probably very small, but many of those health effects have astronomically high costs that possibly include death or permanent disability. But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies on unlikely events such as floods or tornadoes. Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance -- otherwise how would it be that the insurance company could make money? But you'd rather trade the risk of losing everything you own and having no recourse for a small amount of money that you're not going to miss.
This is a very basic math error. If you multiply two unknown quantities, you can not assume anything about the result, even if one of them is very big. So basically what you're saying is "we have no idea if it's dangerous or not, and there's absolutely no evidence on any danger present, but if it were, you could DIE!!! so PANIC!!!" This would be an extremely irrational and stupid behavior.
>>> But the benefits are small to nonexistent, especially for your typical first-worlder who as I mentioned is drowning in food.
The problem is that it is very fragile. If the anti-science idiots ever prevail, the whole food abundance we have now could very well collapse pretty quickly - without science, malthusian scenarios are very real, and the people who predicted massive hunger by 2000s could very well be right if science did not intervene. If the idiots ever succeed in their war on science, first world would be in no way insulated from the disastrous effects of their victory. The whole abundance is the direct effect of what you call "food liberalism" and it is the only thing maintaining it.
>>> The same calculus underlies decisions to take out insurance policies
Not at all. Insurance companies have very accurate actuarial and statistical data, which they use in very accurate and specific ways to issue insurance. They never base their decisions on "multiply two unknown numbers, make assumptions on the result, panic". Your decision on buying the insurance may very well be irrational, but the insurance market itself is very rational.
>>> Statistically you'll probably be better off not buying insurance
It is not true, since you can not be better "statistically" - the fact that it didn't happen to 100000 people would not improve your situation if it happens to you. The whole function of insurance is to make statistics work for you, without it statistics would be just a useless trivia - just as the fact that if Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average income of the bar visitors jumps - is useless for anybody in the bar, because they get no money from it. Insurance is the way to get you some money from statistics.
If there is an alternative organic I buy it.
This is good enough for me and I also buy a lot from my local organic farmer.
I don't have to go to the extremes you mention, at all.
When I walk into a super market I just want choice.
Do I choose 100% non gmo? Most likely not, but I will if I had a choice.
Again, you might want to not associate that extremism with simple rational choice.
I suppose I can understand Europe's arch-conservatism regarding food products after the thalidomide disaster, but I would certainly prefer to see actual evidence of harm from genetically-modified food, or even a plausible explanation of why a given GM food could cause injury and not just FUD FUD FUD.
But that doesn't matter. The reason we're careful about GMO technology is that there is a reasonable mechanism whereby harm may be the result.
We thus require careful testing and good quality science before allowing these technologies.
Unfortunately, politicians are often in the chain of "people granting permission", and many of them are stupid and ignorant and not interested in science.
You ask for a plausible mechanism for harm, but you also mention thalidomide. Thalidomide is a great example of unknown unknowns - we didn't know that chirality was important, and it was only after many birth defects that we found out.
So maybe there's something we don't know with GMOs, and we don't know that we don't know it so we can't reassure ourselves about it. We can do as much as we can to rule out those unknowns, and to reassure ourselves about the knowns.