Are GMOs Good Or Bad For Us?

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Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• GMOs can be extra-healthy or dangerous, according to various factors discussed in today’s main feature.

  • Notably, genetic modifications themselves are not known to cause any harm, and can improve nutritional quality

  • However, problems arise when genetic modification is used to increase herbicide resistance, and the crops are then sprayed in carcinogenic herbicides that couldn’t otherwise be used.

• As we age, our collagen levels tend to get depleted more easily. Collagen is important not just for youthful good looks, but also for the health of bones and joints

  • Today’s sponsor NativePath are offering high-quality collagen without additives or harmful impurities

Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive

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🌽 MAIN FEATURE

Unzipping Our Food’s Genes

In yesterday’s newsletter, we asked you for your (health-related) views on GMOs, and got the above-depicted, below-described set of responses:

• About 55% voted for "GMOs are outright dangerous (cancer risk, unknown risks, etc) ☠️"

• About 19% voted for "GMOs are less healthy because of the modifications (lower nutrient density etc)"

• About

• About 13% voted for "The modifications are only health-neutral so I don't care (crop yield etc)"

• About 13% voted for "GMOs are extra healthy because of the modifications (they were designed for that, right?) 💪"

But what does the science say?

First, a note on terms

Technically, we (humans) have been (g)enetically (m)odifying (o)rganisms for thousands of years.

If you eat a banana, you are enjoying the product of many generations of artificial selection, to change its genes to produce a fruit that is soft, sweet, high in nutrients, and digestible without cooking. The original banana plant would be barely recognizable to many people now (and also, barely edible). We’ve done similarly with countless other food products.

So in this article, we’re going to be talking exclusively about modern genetic modification of organisms, using exciting new (ish, new as in “in the last century”) techniques to modify the genes directly, in a copy-paste fashion.

For more details on the different kinds of genetic modification of organisms, and how they’re each done (including the modern kinds), check out this great article from Sciencing, who explain it in more words than we have room for here:

Sciencing | How Are GMOs Made?

(the above also offers tl;dr section summaries, which are great too)

GMOS are outright dangerous (cancer risks, unknown risks, etc): True or False?

False, so far as we know, in any direct* fashion. Obviously “unknown risks” is quite a factor, since those are, well, unknown. But GMOs on the market undergo a lot of safety testing, and have invariably passed happily.

We’d like to include the studies, but since this is done for each product individually, we’d either have to include them all, or look like cherrypicking. So instead, here’s a guide to the process that’s used and the standards required:

FSA | How GM foods are assessed for safety 

*However! Glyphosate (the herbicide), on the other hand, has a terrible safety profile and is internationally banned in very many countries for this reason.

Why is this important? Because…

• in the US (and two out of ten Canadian provinces), glyphosate is not banned

• In the US (and we may hypothesize, those two Canadian provinces) one of the major uses of genetic modification of foodstuffs is to make it resistant to glyphosate

• Consequently, GMO foodstuffs grown in those places have generally been liberally doused in glyphosate

So… It’s not that the genetic modification itself makes the food dangerous and potentially carcinogenic (it doesn’t), but it is that the genetic modification makes it possible to use a lot more glyphosate without losing crops to glyphosate’s highly destructive properties.

Which results in the end-consumer eating glyphosate. Which is not good. For example:

You can read more about where glyphosate is and isn’t banned, here:

33 countries ban the use of Glyphosate—the key ingredient in Roundup

For the science of this (and especially the GMO → glyphosate use → cancer pipeline), see:

Use of Genetically Modified Organism (GMO)-Containing Food Products in Children

GMOs are extra healthy because of the modifications (they were designed for that, right?): True or False?

True or False depending on who made them and why! As we’ve seen above, not all companies seem to have the best interests of consumer health in mind.

However, they can be! Here are a couple of great examples:

Read in full: Genome Editing for Improving Crop Nutrition

(note, they draw a distinction of meaning between genome editing and genetic modification, according to which of two techniques is used, but for the purposes of our article today, this is under the same umbrella)

Want to know more?

If you’d like to read more about this than we have room for here, here’s a great review in the Journal of Food Science & Nutrition:

Should we still worry about the safety of GMO foods? Why and why not? A review

Take care!

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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

How to Eat to Change How You Drink: Heal Your Gut, Mend Your Mind and Improve Nutrition to Change Your Relationship with Alcohol – by Dr. Brooke Scheller

Whether you want to stop drinking or just cut down, this book can help. But what makes it different from the other reduce/stop drinking books we’ve reviewed?

Mostly, it’s about nutrition. This book focuses on the way that alcohol changes our relationship to food, our gut, our blood sugars, and more. The author also explains how reducing/stopping drinking, without bearing these things in mind, can be unnecessarily extra hard.

The remedy? To bear them in mind, of course, but that requires knowing them. So what she does is explain the physiology of what’s going on in terms of each of the above things (and more), and how to adjust your diet to make up for what alcohol has been doing to you, so that you can reduce/quit without feeling constantly terrible.

The style is very pop-science, light in tone, readable. She makes reference to a lot of hard science, but doesn’t discuss it in more depth than is necessary to convey the useful information. So, this is a practical book, aimed at all people who want to reduce/quit drinking.

Bottom line: if you feel like it’s hard to drink less because it feels like something is missing, it’s probably because indeed something is missing, and this book can help you bridge that gap!

Click here to check out How To Eat To Change How You Drink, and do just that!

May today see you well-prepared for the coming weekend,

The 10almonds Team