I defy you to find even ONE peer-reviewed article that shows GMO or artificially-selected crops are any less nutritional and healthy than "natural" foods. Humans have been conducting artificial selection on crops for thousands of years; everything you eat has been evolutionarily "guided."
May this whet your appetite? I'm curious to hear what you think - It's a learning process for me as well. I apologize if earlier posts came off as grand standing, i meant it in a very laid-back manner.
-snip-
Now look, I'm not trying to say, nor claim, that I am some kind of super scientist that knows it all I want to learn just as much. There are concerns about GMO that should be addressed.
On my earlier statement that it's not about evolution - I do feel its much more a 'negative' mutation rather than a natural mutation. One of the sources above debates it from a few angles.
Hope it puts a little more perspective in the issue.
I'm going to ignore the special interest websites because their motives are suspect and stick to the journal articles published on PubMed (because that at least is a reputable source and a fairly good guarantee of peer-review). Maybe this will be a good lesson in sourcing. Since BiolSci is a journal's web page, we'll run with that one too.
Let's start with the journals. We have three publications here: Histochemical Cell Biology, Critical Review in Food Sciences and Nutrition, and the International Journal of Biological Sciences. Names like these sound impressive, but sadly these are three fairly minor journals. Not to say their authors findings aren't worthwhile, but often the value of a study becomes pretty clear simply from where it gets published - larger journals (Nature and its derivatives; Science) are pretty selective and tend to publish major findings. Lesser discoveries, or those with shaky experimental design often end up in other journals. Not to say an author's work isn't worthwhile, but publication is important. Something like schooling; somewhere like Hopkins, Stanford, or Berkeley have much better reputations than a local college.
That said, next step is dates. We have 2008, 2009, and 2009. Pretty recent. It's always worthwhile to see if there's anything more current (which I haven't done, as I don't have the time), but I won't fault articles 2-3 years old, although I would suspect there is research that either qualifies, adds to, or debunks this now published.
Enough snobbery on my part. To the articles!
"A Comparison of the Effects of Three GM Corn Varieties on Mammalian Health " is an interesting beast. The finding here is "signs of toxicity." To be clear, many foods produce signs of toxicity. The question is whether or not the foods actually produce toxicity, a question the authors merely speculate on. There aren't a whole lot of specifics here, and while the authors report they got statistical significance at certain p values, they don't actually show their data and statistical reference - in other words, we know the level of statistical significance, but that's it. Which is a little odd; usually we get some statistical data rather than just the assertion. The only problem is, the authors actually admit flaws in the methodology to begin with (sample size is far too low, but it's the data they had to work with), which brings the true significance of their findings into question. The real story here, though, is this: "If a “sign of toxicity” may only provoke a reaction, pathology or a poisoning, a so-called “toxic effect” is without doubt deleterious on a short or a long term. Clearly, the statistically significant effects observed here for all three GM maize varieties investigated are signs of toxicity rather than proofs of toxicity." And this: "Even if the significant differences are around 5% of all comparisons for each GM corn, we believe that they either constitute a very good possibility to represent signs of toxicity, or at the very least should be considered as sufficiently strong evidence to justify a repeat of the experiments incorporating longer feeding times, for several reasons." See the qualifiers in the phrasing? The results of this study are an indication of a need for more research with a better methodology, not that GMOs are inherently unhealthy. The authors also caution against lumping all GMOs together - they repeatedly mention this paper covers only three varieties of GMO maize (corn), and should not be broadly applied to GMOs as a category.
Onward...
Alas, I can't get full access to "Health Risks of Genetically Modified Foods" here at home, but the abstract is certainly nicely vague. More reference to possible effects, more calls for further study. Nothing concrete. An interesting few sentences from the abstract: "The results of most studies with GM foods indicate that they may cause some common toxic effects such as hepatic, pancreatic, renal, or reproductive effects and may alter the hematological, biochemical, and immunologic parameters. However, many years of research with animals and clinical trials are required for this assessment." In short, not much is known, we need more study. (Again, lots of things cause those common toxic effects, not the least of which is barbecued or overcooked/charred meats).
To "A long-term study on female mice fed on a genetically modified soybean: effects on liver ageing." I love long-term studies, and love them aprticularly on mice (which are a great model organism for humans). I'd love this one much better if I could actually get more than the abstract *sigh*. But let's go from the abstract; it'll highlight the key points, anyway. Which are: "This study demonstrates that GM soybean intake can influence some liver features during ageing and, although the mechanisms remain unknown, underlines the importance to investigate the long-term consequences of GM-diets and the potential synergistic effects with ageing, xenobiotics and/or stress conditions." In plain English: there may be changes to the biochemical pathways in the cells as they get older, we have no idea why, but we think it's worth studying more. [Please fund us.]
See a trend? "may be," "possible," "signs of," and calls for more research. No concrete evidence. Hell, no suspicious evidence. Signs of different cellular response to novel foods - not something that I'd call unexpected, given that some of these foods are indeed very different. But here's the other trouble - while animal models are good for a great many things, responses to foods can be very different, because we naturally eat different things in different ways. Studies try to mitigate this as much as possible, but the fact of the matter is the only way to know with certainty what the effects of a food are in a human is usually to feed them to a human. Same thing with medications.
The trouble with the articles you posted is they don't have any context. Non-GMO foods of various types are perfectly capable of producing the same signs of toxicity under the right circumstances. These articles are more a cautionary point about generalizing all GMO/non-GMO foods as safe/unsafe or healthy/unhealthy than they are a sweeping denouncement that GMO foods in general are inherently bad. That's what I was getting at with my "I defy you to find ONE study..." comment - you can't generalize.
As for negative mutation versus natural mutation - I have no idea what this is talking about or referring to. Both of those terms have scientific and contextual meaning, so you're going to have to elaborate on what exactly you're trying to say.
EDIT: I don't have time to go through and dissect the crap that SayNoToGMOs is publishing on their site, but it's an excellent example of how easy it is to contextualize the facts differently and prey upon people's misconceptions in order to fear-monger. A half-way critical perspective in reading those pieces will thoroughly debunk any of the claims they are attempting to make. Maybe someone else around here can run through a couple of those pieces and break them down to demonstrate.
