Understanding the Science of Genetically Modified Foods (GMOs)

[KurtNYC]

32. Allergies are, relatively, poorly understood but there is some agreement on the relationship

between gut bacteria, early exposure to potential allergens and allergies.

The decrease in richness of gut bacteria in Westerners may have something to do with the rise in allergies in industrialized countries, said Dr. Paolo Lionetti of the department of pediatrics at Meyer Children Hospital at the University of Florence. Sanitation measures and vaccines in the West may have controlled infectious disease, but they decreased exposure to a variety of bacteria may have opened the door to these other ailments.
...
"That our immune system is skewed away from fighting infections, and toward fight things that it's not supposed to be fighting, like things in the environment or foods -- that's one thing that people think may be in play," Rudders said.
...
An oft-cited 2008 study in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology compared peanut allergies among Jewish children living in Israel and the United Kingdom. Peanut allergies were more common among the children in the U.K. than in Israel. This was associated with the fact that 69 percent of the Israeli children received peanuts by 9 months of age, compared with 10 percent of the infants in the U.K.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/08/03/food.allergies.er.gut/

The easiest problem to document and understand about GMOs is that they rely on petroleum and therefore are setting us up for famines. The problem for agriculture and by extension all of us, is that the world is going to run out of petroleum. The price of food is very low right now but it is tied entirely to oil prices. As demand for oil exceeds production the price of both gasoline and food will spike.

We grow GMO corn using petroleum so that we can put ethanol into gasoline so we are using petroleum to grow an alternative to petroleum. How could that possibly be the answer to the end of petroleum? Especially when ethanol is worthless in terms of MPG (10% ethanol = 10% reduction in mileage).