Would you eat a plant that makes its own toxic pesticides, contains DNA from viruses and bacteria, sports genes that emerged from random strings of DNA code and whose DNA human beings have mercilessly chopped and manipulated, producing who knows what toxins and allergens?
Before you get out that pitchfork and march against Monsanto, you might like to know which crop varieties are “scary” like that. I’ll tell you. All of them — organic included. That scary-sounding stuff is just ordinary crop biology. Conventional breeding methods — like cross-breeding (millennia old) and X-ray bombardment (nearly a century old) — randomly smash up DNA with a sledgehammer. By comparison, genetic engineering is carefully managed minor tweaking.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Academies of Science, the American Medical Association, The Royal Society and the World Health Organization have all stated GMOs are just as safe for health and the environment as non-GMO crops. They looked at all the masses of evidence, not just the handful of flawed studies waiting to pounce on the ordinary Googler from anti-GMO websites.
Anti-GMO advocates sometimes dismiss this scientific consensus as “corporate-sponsored,” as in two recent letters to the editor in KTW. Besides being deeply insulting to scientists, this conspiracy theory has zero plausibility.
Big Oil couldn’t “buy” these organizations on climate change; how could comparatively tiny Monsanto do so on GMOs? It couldn’t.
Read the full, original article: Rational Thoughts: What is so scary about GMOs?
