Editorial: A golden age for GM crops?
Good news for fish stocks at last. A genetically modified soybean that produces oil containing omega-3 fatty acids – recommended for heart and brain health – could supplement fish as a source of these nutrients.
Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration made public its ruling that the oil produced by GM soybeans is safe to eat, meaning food companies can begin testing it in products such as margarine.
Developed by biotech giant Monsanto, the soybean is the first GM plant that has claimed health benefits for consumers, not just economic benefits to farmers. Two other companies, BASF (PDF) and Du Pont, say they are not far behind.
BASF has developed GM canola plants that produce similar oils, while Du Pont makes them by fermenting micro-organisms, and says it plans to launch its first "omega-3" pill early next year.
Death watch
Omega-3 fatty acids have been estimated to reduce the risk of heart attack and stroke by up to 26 per cent, and of sudden cardiac death by 45 per cent. Earlier this year, a study by the Harvard School of Public Health concluded that a lack of omega-3 in the diet is the sixth leading cause of preventable deaths in the US (PLoS Medicine, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058).
A review of 97 studies in 2005 concluded that omega-3s are as effective at reducing the risk of heart attacks and strokes as statins, the leading class of cholesterol-lowering drugs.
Some plants, such as linseed, naturally produce an omega-3 called alpha-linolenic acid (ALA), and one way to increase the amount of omega-3 in our diet is to eat these plants or margarines and other foodstuffs that contain added ALA.
However, only a tiny amount of ALA is converted by the body into a fatty acid it can use, prompting some nutritionists to say the labelling on omega-3-enhanced margarines is misleading.
Fish oils are rich in two related omega-3s, docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), which is important for nerves and the brain, and eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), which is vital for cardiovascular health.
Gene tricks
BASF has inserted five genes from algae that naturally make EPA and DHA into the canola genome. Its product is still in development.
Monsanto has taken a different approach. It inserted two genes into the soybean genome, one from a plant related to primrose and one from a fungus. The modified soybean produces stearidonic acid, or SDA. Like ALA, SDA is converted into EPA in the body, but in much higher proportions – about a third, Monsanto says.
"To get 1 gram of EPA, you'd have to eat about 3 to 4 grams of SDA, and about 14 to 20 grams of ALA," says David Stark of Monsanto. However, Stark acknowledges that hardly any of the SDA is converted into the DHA needed for brain health.
Good for fish
The modified plant oils could ease the pressure on fish stocks, currently the principal source of omega-3 fatty acids.
At present, there is no official recommended daily intake of omega-3s. According to GOED Omega-3, an umbrella group for manufacturers of omega-3-containing products, the optimal intake is only reached in fish-eating nations such as Japan and Iceland, with typical per-capita consumption in western nations a fifth of this level.
Monsanto claims that meeting GOED's recommended intake in western nations could require as little as 400,000 hectares of its soybean crops. Less than half a hectare, it says, would provide the same amount of EPA as 10,000 servings of salmon.
One worry is that farmers may clear tropical rainforests to grow the oil-producing plants. But Solae of St Louis, Missouri, which will be commercialising the GM soybean, says that the crops are more suited to the temperate climate of North America.
Jack Winkler, head of the Nutrition Policy Unit at London Metropolitan University, is enthusiastic about the prospect of plant-derived omega-3s. "There are not enough fish in the sea to provide people with the EPA and DHA that we need. [This] is a very positive way forward."
Daniel Pauly, a fisheries specialist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, also welcomes the move. "Our stressed marine ecosystem would benefit from an alternative to fish oil as a source of omega-3s," he says.
However, in Europe at least, the new sources of omega-3s may encounter public resistance. Helen Wallace of GeneWatch UK, a lobby group in Buxton, Derbyshire, says: "It will be interesting to see if people in the US believe the benefits exist." Europeans have traditionally been wary of genetically modified crops and Wallace says they are also suspicious of medical claims about food. All this makes the future uncertain for the products in Europe.
Editorial: A golden age for GM crops?
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Have your say
Are any fish harvested now solely for their oil content? If so then this could ease pressure on fish stocks.
""It will be interesting to see if people in the US believe the benefits exist." Europeans have traditionally been wary of genetically modified crops and Wallace says they are also suspicious of medical claims about food."
The dietary supplement industry in the US is doing very well because Americans do believe these benefits exist (although they may over-believe it where the supplements have never been tested for efficacy). The purpose of the FDA is to ensure safety and efficacy of these products and claims.
If Europeans are wary of GM crops then that's their problem. Their leftists have hijacked the issue and any rational debate is basically not allowed. That is to the detriment of Europeans. They're suspicious of medical claims about food even where medical benefit has been established perhaps because bogus claims have been allowed to go unchecked.
Europeans were never too worried about the communist threat either, and like our own religious fanatics probably aren't too sure about science or even if gravity exists. Their lack of DHA in the brain could actually lead to defective reasoning, preventing them from using the foods and supplements that could help their thinking. The anti-GM leftists are then fostering a vicious cycle of keeping themselves in power because the population can't think their way out of it.
Please mind your words.
We saw what chemistry did in the last fifty years. There are hundreds of chemicals now that are carcinogens, and they are used as pesticides, fungicides, aso. And now we have something more, the GM foods.
Why so many Americans have allergies? Maybe it is a fact that correlates with all those GM foods they are eating.
Also, if you didn't know, the only other country besides US where you can advertise prescription drugs on tv, in magasines, etc, is New Zeeland. You will not see all those adverts that end with "ask your doctor about..." in Europe.
Maybe you are okay eating GM foods, that, by their name, are modified, and maybe you are also okay living in a medicated society.
GM foods have not been on the market long enough, nor common enough, to be causing allergies. The increase in allergies may well be due to birth control pills that disable the sensing of MHC compatibility between couples which makes their offspring more prone to have allergies to various substances. And indeed, there certainly are some chemicals causing allergies and other problems, especially gender-bending chemicals.
But chemistry has brought amazing advances in society over the last fifty years too. So has agricultural research: the yield of some crops has more than doubled. And so has electronics, medicine, and many other fields.
GM crops are safe to eat. As a scientist I know the science involved and they are quite safe. These crops, along with other agricultural research, will help mankind eat and live better.
With that said, there should be some watchdog in place. Conventional breeding can also cause problems with foods. There was a celery developed some years ago that caused a skin irritation in workers who prepared it for market. Plants produce all kinds of substances in their tissues that we eat, break down and detoxify.
Prudent public health measures and common sense should be the maxim along with a basic understanding of science, not knee-jerk anti-science hysteria from those who don't understand it. The biggest threats from food nowadays are bacterial contamination and chemical contamination in the fields and in processing.
They also said it was safe to eat margarine - now with deadly trans-fats.
Seeing as all ex-industry goons inhabit fda, we should think for ourselves, and not trust them.
"We saw what chemistry did in the last fifty years. There are hundreds of chemicals now that are carcinogens, and they are used as pesticides, fungicides, aso."
You're not supposed to drink macroscopic quantities of pesticides. Microscopic pesticide residues do not cause cancer.
Before modern pesticides they used to use arsenic compounds, copper salts, neem oil, sulfur, paraffin oils and various other substances. They're not very effective, so you had to use them in fairly large amounts. "Organic" farming, which is just a arbitrary set of restrictions arrived at through no particular sensible criteria, is not pesticide free, it uses these older pesticides which are not nearly as safe or as thoroughly tested.
"Why so many Americans have allergies?"
Because they live in near sterile environments?
"Maybe it is a fact that correlates with all those GM foods they are eating."
Inconsistent with the fact that we have plenty of allergic people here in Europe even though we have a strong irrational paranoia of GM crops.
Lack of any plausible mechanism.
"Maybe you are okay eating GM foods, that, by their name, are modified[...]"
There's no such thing as "natural" or unmodofied foods. We made chickens, we made cows, we made bananas, we made strawberries, we made all these varieties of apples, citrus fruits, cabbages, wheat, corn, barley, rye, rice. The unmodified ancestors of these foods are pathetic next to their modern relatives.
It all happend in just the last ten thousand years and it's still going on at a furious pace. These species are so heavily modified and so darned good at providing food for humans that they no longer have any chance of surviving in nature without our constant protection.
Modified foods can be divided into two categories, random monkeying around(conventional breeding, hybridization and mutation breeding techniques) and selective modification(GMOs). If anything you ought to have stringent safety tests on the former rather than the latter, given that you don't even know which genes changed, which genes turned on or off in the former, but you know precisely what you did to create the later.
Soylent: THANK YOU for the the only several paragraphs of rationality I've seen in these comments so far.
Jeremy, please leave out the "leftist" garbage, your case doesn't need it, and the anti-GM people are, in my experience anyway, generally unscientific "new-agers", not "leftists" with "defective reasoning".
This "leftist" has no objections to genetic modification, if it is subjected to proper scientific study and control. (That doesn't, however, mean that I approve of the bullying and underhand tactics often used by Monsanto).
"Europeans were never too worried about the communist threat either, and like our own religious fanatics probably aren't too sure about science or even if gravity exists"
Hey Jeremy,
Remember they "invented" gravity in Europe. And what a good thing it is; it keeps your feet on the ground. Too bad it is such a weak force it can't keep your thoughts together which makes you talk a lot of nonsense.
Sir, I'd suggest you extract your head from your posterior. As a leftist atheist with a strong belief in the sensible application of science i worry that you may have problems comfortably sitting down.
Now that the GM genie is out of the bag, it is impossible, for example, to find non-gm corn anymore. What choice do they have but to rubber stamp GM soya? It isn't as though they can stop it if they said otherwise.
Corn already is genetically modified. It was modified by the Aztecs and others thousands of years ago and continuously since. So are wheat, apples, pigs, sheep, horses, grapes and dogs.
Perhaps these products should have a warning label that says, "Caution---this product is harmless to your health, but you may cause panic anyway."
GM means you take genes from totaly different species and put them there artificially. this can be done ONLY in the lab.
cross breading is when you have different breeds and you cross-breed them, isn't it?
what can you say about a child who has a black parent and a white parent? does this make him/her GM in some way?
Some people think that crops can only be genetically modified in the lab. That is not true.
Microorganisms such as virus and bacteria invade plants all the time and insert DNA into plants. Virus are especially good at this and often times after being infected by a virus the plant offspring carry that virus genome along with their own DNA as long as that plants lineage continues.
This is also true of humans. Everytime you get a cold or flu you have been genetically modified as long as you live and your off spring may also carry the virus DNA.
So manipulating DNA of plants and animals in the lab is no different than nature does thru infection and parasitism.
"Now that the GM genie is out of the bag, it is impossible, for example, to find non-gm corn anymore."
Aren't you forgetting something? Humans made corn, it's an entirely human creation.
If you want "natural" corn you have to go all the way back to it's wild ancestor, teosinte: http://www.life.illinois.edu/ib/363/image/Teosinte2.jpeg
These so-called high tech genetic engineers use a gun like device to shoot DNA into plant cells and then hope for the best. If it does what they want, it is approved. They do not do enough tests to see what else it will do. High tech? I think not.
this is the biggest misleading when talking about GM, to say well, it has been done for thousand years, when cross-breeding is a totally different stuff.
about testing, well, what is natural stood the test of time. what we do now thinking we are gods and play with nature as we want, is too recent, just a generation. we don't know how thoose genes that are put there in a GM apple for example can affect us and our kids. what about rBGH? what about clonned meat?
Cross breeding is NOT totally different. You can cross a plum with an apricot and the offspring will have totally new genes that the plum lineage never had. They're not mutations of old plum genes, they're totally new to the plum genome. Those genes were inserted. The result is called a "plumcot" and this technique can be used with other plants and has been for a while.
Indeed, some of the hysterical fear about GM crops is that their pollen will pollinate native species and spread the genes. That's what nature has been doing for a long, long time and still is---even in humans.
There are several points in genetic propagation at which humans can assist and steer genetic characteristics. Tree grafting, hybridizing, cross-breeding, gene insertion, forced mutation, cell fusion, cloning, bacterial and viral vectors to insert genes; synthesis of some genes; RNA interference to silence genes, etc.
Yeah, right. Let me know when you have managed to cross a plum with a jellyfish....
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