19 Years of Feeding Animals GMO Shows No Harm [View all]

[True Earthling]

Since 1996 90-95% of animal feed in the U.S. has been GMO. A new study to be published October 1 in the Journal of Animal Science looked at 19 yrs of data representing over 2,000 studies, 100 billion feed animals and trillions of meals consumed by feed animals..by common sense alone, if GMO feed were causing unusual problems among livestock, farmers would have noticed. Sick animals would be evident on farms around the world. Yet there are no anecdotal reports of mass health problems. The authors also found no evidence to suggest any health affect on humans who eat those animals. No study has revealed any differences in the nutritional profile of animal products derived from GMO-fed animals. Because DNA and protein are normal components of the diet that are digested, there are no detectable or reliably quantifiable traces of GE components in milk, meat, and eggs following consumption of GMO feed.

I suspect the science backing anti-GMO is as bogus as the science supporting anti-vax. If someone can show me a scientific paper published in a peer reviewed journal that shows health issues caused by GMO's in humans or animals, I would like to see it.

From the abstract...
http://www.journalofanimalscience.org/content/early/2014/08/27/jas.2014-8124

Data on livestock productivity and health were collated from publicly available sources from 1983, before the introduction of GE (Genetically Engineered) crops in 1996, and subsequently through 2011, a period with high levels of predominately GE animal feed. These field data sets representing over 100 billion animals following the introduction of GE crops did not reveal unfavorable or perturbed trends in livestock health and productivity. No study has revealed any differences in the nutritional profile of animal products derived from GE-fed animals. Because DNA and protein are normal components of the diet that are digested, there are no detectable or reliably quantifiable traces of GMO components in milk, meat, and eggs following consumption of GE feed.

From the Neurologica Blog...

19 Years of Feeding Animals GMO Shows No Harm
http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/19-years-of-feeding-animals-gmo-shows-no-harm/

Conclusion

We now have a large set of data, both experimental and observational, showing that genetically modified feed is safe and nutritionally equivalent to non-GMO feed. There does not appear to be any health risk to the animals, and it is even less likely that there could be any health effect on humans who eat those animals.

In order to maintain the position that GMOs are not adequately tested, or that they are harmful or risky, you have to either highly selectively cherry pick a few outliers of low scientific quality, or you have to simply deny the science.

Here is a comprehensive list of animal feeding studies. http://www.fass.org/page.asp?pageID=52&autotry=true&ULnotkn=true

Many of these studies are independent. The list included systematic reviews, all of which conclude that GMO feed is safe.

There is as strong a scientific consensus that GMOs do not present any novel health risk, that those in current use are safe, and that they pose no health risk to animals or humans, as there is a consensus for the safety and efficacy of vaccines or that humans are contributing significantly to global warming.

With 2000+ global studies affirming safety, GM foods among most analyzed subjects in science
http://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2013/10/08/with-2000-global-studies-confirming-safety-gm-foods-among-most-analyzed-subject-in-science/

A popular weapon used by those critical of agricultural biotechnology is to claim that there has been little to no evaluation of the safety of GM crops and there is no scientific consensus on this issue.

Those claims are simply not true. Every major international science body in the world has reviewed multiple independent studies—in some cases numbering in the hundreds—in coming to the consensus conclusion that GMO crops are as safe or safer than conventional or organic foods, but the magnitude of the research has never been evaluated or documented.

Still the claim that GMOs are ‘understudied’—the meme represented in the quotes highlighted at the beginning of this article—has become a staple of anti-GMO critics, especially activist journalists. In response to what they believed was an information gap, a team of Italian scientists cataloged and analyzed 1783 studies about the safety and environmental impacts of GMO foods—a staggering number.

The researchers couldn’t find a single credible example demonstrating that GM foods pose any harm to humans or animals. “The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of genetically engineered crops,” the scientists concluded.