A challenge to all GMO supporters.

[jeff47]

74. Because they think they have a "gotcha!", and are desperate to use it.

In lay person terms, there's a theory some scientists are pushing that food consumption affects how our genes work. It's a very popular attack on GMOs at the moment, because people can claim the genetic modifications in the GMO would be affecting us instead of being harmlessly digested.

There's a few large problems with this theory.

First, they haven't quite proven the fundamental claim - that diet alters how our genes work. Sure, diet affects feedback loops - you make more insulin if you eat more glucose. But their claims go well beyond that to food fundamentally altering gene expression. That eating some food would "turn off" or "turn on" that feedback loop.

This claim has been made in a few pay-to-publish journals. It hasn't been demonstrated by any simple experiments. Like finding plant genes in an animal cell after the animal eats the plant.

Second, they haven't quite explained how this is only relevant for GMOs, and not every other food on the planet. Such as crops and animals we created using traditional breeding and grafting techniques. Those would be just as dangerous as GMOs, because we very heavily modified everything we eat over the millennia.

That last bit gets to the third problem: If this is such a danger, how come it wasn't causing harm long ago? Wheat from 1900 looked nothing like the ancient grass we started with, yet people in 1900 were much healthier than their ancient counterparts.

(That last one is usually met with the claim that you can only go "so far" with selective breeding. That you can't just put in some other creature's genes. At which point they have to be reminded of retroviruses, and how they actually can put some other creature's genes in an organism. It's "swine flu" because it has bits of pig in the virus.)