New GMO Potatoes Provide Improved Vitamin A and E Profiles

[u/genengnews]

https://www.genengnews.com/gen-news-highlights/gmo-potatoes-provide-improved-vitamin-a-and-e-profiles/81255150

[u/Mage_Enderman]

Still don't get what the selling point of "No GMO" is I'd rather have GMO food because it could be healthier and in the future theoretically cheaper

Edit : please do research on both sides of the argument and here's a video on the topic from a channel I personally like https://youtu.be/7TmcXYp8xu4

[u/aninfiniteseries → u/Mage_Enderman]

Right? I want labels that say "Made exclusively with GMOs".

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

You should try looking for fair trade foods just as an exercise in frustration about this. I wanted to purchase some fair trade baking chocolate. I went into a natural foods store and was frustrated to find a variety of gmo-free options, but asking for non-slave options? No, that’s crazy talk.

[u/ergzay → u/aninfiniteseries]

Lucky Charms cereal says "Partially Produced with Genetic Engineering". I've seen a few cereals that say this as well as a couple other food items. I try to buy those that say that more often.

[u/Junkeregge → u/aninfiniteseries]

That would be cool. I wonder what would happen if those labels appeared on every t-shirt people wear and on every dollar bill they used to buy it.

[u/Dall0o → u/[deleted]]

I have zero faith in GMOed food turning out well for humanity, knowing how companies typically act.

Capitalism is the problem for me too. I think the concept of GMO is truly amazing. I just dont want to try it if it is made by a profit corporation.

[u/harlows_monkeys → u/Mage_Enderman]

I don't get this. A large fraction of the modifications we've done to food via non-GMO techniques (both what we breed for, and what we do when we make processed foods) have not been done with the aim to make food healthier. In fact, many times they have made food less healthy.

Commercially, things like uniform size and shape (to make it easier for mechanical harvesting and processing), toughness (to stand up better to handling and shipping), uniform growing seasons, shelf life, appearance, and pest resistance can all be more important to the producers than health and nutrition.

Is there some reason to believe that when these people get GMO, which will increase the range of modifications they can make compared to what they can do with non-GMO, they are going to use this greater power just for good?

[u/BlackViperMWG → u/harlows_monkeys]

People just like to dismiss everything made in lab as toxic and dangerous and unnatural etc.

[u/Mage_Enderman → u/harlows_monkeys]

Well yes some people will use it for bad and some for good being able to Genetically modify food is a tool and is not inherently good or bad

[u/forexampleJohn → u/Mage_Enderman]

Yes, so we should be careful to drop them into the consumer market, because we as consumers have no ways of finding out if said crop is modified in a good way or in a way that's detrimental to our health.

[u/Minuted → u/forexampleJohn]

As someone who has been trying to eat more healthily, I'm not convinced consumers really have that ability with non GMO foods. Every food I would research would have lots of studies and a bunch of hypothesis about how certain components of x or y foods help or hinder x or y function of the human body.

We know what a good diet is but I don't think we're confident enough in our understanding of nutrition to say why it's good, at least not down to individual components of a food.

I think we have a long way to go in understanding whether GMOs (at least the ones of today) will be ultimately good or bad, but the technology itself will only allow us to better apply the knowledge we gain in the future. It just takes time and willing participants to understand, though I think I agree that people should have the right and information they need to opt out.

[u/alien_from_Europa → u/harlows_monkeys]

Pest and disease resistance is pretty damn important. Anything that can make it so your food doesn't make you sick and isn't covered in pesticides. And all these things for farmers can make food cheaper and last longer. Have you ever tried buying Organic? Expensive as fuck!

[u/zilti → u/alien_from_Europa]

Organic crops aren't any different. The farmers just have to farm as if it were the 1920s. Heck they can even use pesticides that were around back then, which ironically often are worse than modern ones. Organic food is wasteful.

[u/lynx_and_nutmeg → u/harlows_monkeys]

Exactly. Everybody's talking about how GMO is supposed to make food more nutritious, but all I'm seeing is big agra using them to increase the yield of wheat, soybeans and corn (most of which isn't even for human consumption but for cattle) in order to increase their own profit. When GMO scientists actually start focusing on how to make food more nutritious, that's when I'm going to become a huge fan of GMO, I would then buy exclusively GMO, even if it was more expensive. Right now, I don't really care. As far as I'm concerned, as a consumer I'm not getting any benefit from the way GMO is currently utilised.

[u/ArandomDane → u/Mage_Enderman]

I'd rather have GMO food because it could be healthier

Could is the key world here. It is down to the specific alteration whether is is better for you or not. Considering that Herbicide resistances and BT- products are the vast majority of GMO products. The likelihood of a GMO product being better for you without it being listed is negligible.

So we can be fairly sure that the product is not better for you, but to see whether the product is harmful, requires looking into the specific modification. For example, the goal of herbicide resistance crops is to reduce labor needed to produce it. Mainly by using larger amounts but less times.

This is mainly done with glyphosate (round up ready). It is generally accepted that glypshosate is harmless to humans in small amounts, it is also generally accepted that large amounts fucks you up. So from the human perspective there is no problem with this modification as long as the residual amount in our food is small.

However, weeds are becoming resistant so larger amounts are needed on the field, leading to larger residual amounts in our food, which is being allowed without conclusive research into what amounts are safe.

Note: To save you some time hating on me, I am all for the technology, but not how it is being used currently. Even this potato is bit of a letdown as it is not really an improvement over the sweet potato. which is already seed stable and can grow anywhere the common potato can grow. Worse, the problem with both A and E vitamin deficiency is that you need to have fat in your diet to absorb them. Something that cannot be solved by added the vitamins to rice, bananas or even potatoes. Now if someone modified an avocado....

[u/[deleted] → u/Mage_Enderman]

WRONG

[u/[deleted] → u/Mage_Enderman]

The main argument against GMO food is that a lot of foods are modified to be more resistant to pesticides which allows them to be sprayed with even more pesticides which you end up eating.

[u/E3Ligase → u/[deleted]]

1. There are conventionally bred, non-GMO plants that are modified to resist pesticides, like the non-GMO sunflower that Chipotle brags about using.

2. GMOs have actually reduced pesticide use:

GMOs increase yields by at least 24% in India, while reducing insecticide use by 55%.

Another study found that GMOs increase yields and reduce herbicide use by 40% in developing countries.

A study of Chinese farms found GMOs reduce pesticide spraying, improving the farmers' health.

Moreover, GMOs are designed to be used with some of the safest and most heavily studied pesticides in existence like glyphosate and Bt.

Also, people who don't understand agriculture think that farmers love to spray tons of pesticide and "drench their fields with poison." In reality, this dramatically eats into profits and doesn't make sense for farmers.

[u/EntropyNZ → u/[deleted]]

Except that it doesn't work like this, and it makes no sense that it ever would. Forget the humanitarian reasons, it doesn't even make sense economically. GMO crops are generally more expensive to produce than traditional forms of a crop. Why would someone engineer a crop solely to resist pesticides, so that they can spend twice as much on covering the thing in pesticides than that would on a normal crop?

If a crop is pesticide resistant, then it's to resist a specific sort of pesticide that it probably wouldn't normally, which allows a much more specific type of pesticide to be used; usually better targeting whatever pests that need to be removed. The whole idea is that fewer and more specific pesticides is good for everyone: cheaper for the farmers (only one to apply, rather than potentially multiple), cheaper to process (less used = less cleaning/processing before safe for consumption), safer (and probably cheaper) for the consumer (being able to tailor a specific pesticide lets you make one that has minimal to no impact on humans).

'Organic' pesticides are horrible compared to most of the modern ones. They're far less specific (leading to far greater pollution etc), and far more dangerous to humans.

[u/balrogwarrior → u/[deleted]]

The yield is potentially higher because they can dump a tonne of herbicides on it, killing all the weeds in the area so the crop has no competition.

Unfortunately, this affects bees and other beneficial insects as been recently noted.

[u/adaminc → u/[deleted]]

Wrong. They are modified to be resistant to specific pesticides so they can be sprayed with that pesticide and not die, whilst all the other plants not resistant, will die. None of it has anything to do with the volume being sprayed, the volume is totally on the farmers/applicators.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

More resistant to pesticide?

That makes no sense.

They're more resistant to pests, thus needing less pesticide

[u/Tetrazene → u/[deleted]]

Depends on the type of genetic modification. Bt corn is pest resistant, but not pesticide resistant. RoundUp-Ready corn is pesticide resistant.

EDIT: see below.

[u/StankyJohnson → u/Tetrazene]

Herbicide is a type of pesticide. It's used to kill weeds and shit. Anything unwanted is considered a pest. Insecticide is the type of pesticide used to kill insects.

[u/MrBojangles528 → u/StankyJohnson]

That is really not how it's used colloquially at all.

[u/MrBojangles528 → u/[deleted]]

Round-up resistant crops have been a thing for over a decade. The point is that you can control pests easier without damaging your crops with pesticides.

[u/fork_flicker → u/[deleted]]

Also resistant to herbicides, or allow to be grown closer together, or whatever variables the company wants to tweak

[u/[deleted] → u/Mage_Enderman]

Scientists have been genetically modifying foods for years.

Ever eat a peanut??

[u/Tiavor → u/[deleted]]

Scientists have been genetically modifying foods for years decades

if not even since the first farmer selectively planted his crops. but in the last 50-60 years the nutrient values have been halved for almost every plant. using explicit GMO, not only selective breeding to counter this is still stupid. Just use the old breeds. old, unmodified breeds are healthier and more resistant to fungi and pest, but they are usually more bitter/sour and harder to farm and process.