Fact-Checking Health Trends: Non-GMO

Recently, a new label’s been appearing all over grocery stores: non-GMO. It means that the product doesn’t contain genetically modified organisms (GMO). Seems like a good label to have, right? But a few days ago I found out that a certain brand of Himalayan salt now has that label. Seriously, salt? Salt has no genes to modify! I’ve even seen bottled water that says non-GMO (it also says gluten-free, hah). For those companies, it’s not about informing the public, it’s about making money. That’s when I decided that this label has become utterly useless. It just spreads misinformation and fear and takes advantage of the average person’s general lack of scientific knowledge. So this post’s going to be focusing on the facts about GMOs.

What is a GMO?

The exact definition of a GMO varies because nearly every organism that humans use has had its genetic makeup altered in some way. It’s hard to draw a line between GMOs and non-GMOs. The Food and Agriculture Organization (part of the UN), the World Health Organization (part of the UN), and the European Commission (part of the EU) define GMOs as organisms that have been altered in ways that don’t occur naturally by mating and/or natural recombination. The EU has since added organisms obtained through mutagenesis (messing with the organism’s genome with radiation or chemicals until you get a useful mutation) to the definition.

The USDA defines a GMO to be an organism that has heritable improvements given to it through genetic engineering or other more traditional methods. It defines genetic engineering as manipulation of an organism’s genes by introducing, eliminating or rearranging specific genes using modern molecular biology (especially with recombinant DNA techniques).

The problem with the current definition of GMOs is that it focuses on the process instead of the product itself. GMOs can have a very similar genetic compositions and physical traits compared to their non-GMO counterparts. Would there be any meaningful difference between the products in terms of consumption then?

Current GMO Foods

There are currently only 10 GMOs available to US consumers: corn (field and sweet), soybeans, cotton (for cottonseed oil), canola, alfalfa (for animal feed), sugar beets, papaya, squash, the Arctic Apple (a non-browning apple), and the Innate Potato (resists browning/bruising and produces less acrylamide, a probable human carcinogen, when fried). Most of these are merely modified to give them resistance to pests, disease, and/or herbicides. One additional GMO, the AquAdvantage Salmon (can grow year-round instead of only in spring and summer), is available to Canadians.

If you find a food that isn’t one of the above (or contains one of them) and yet still has the non-GMO label, it’s misleading advertising. There isn’t a GMO version of that food, so you’re not getting any benefits at all. It’s there to fool people who don’t know all the facts about GMOs into choosing that product over a possibly cheaper one.

Concerns of GMOs

The scientific consensus is that GMO-derived food is just as safe to eat as regular food but that each GMO needs testing on a case-by-case basis before introduction. Scientific institutions all across the world (including the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, The National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Royal Society of Medicine, the Union of German Academics of Sciences and Humanities, and the European Commission) all agree. The European Commission in particular funded 150 research projects on the safety of GMOs (carried out by over 500 independent teams) and found no special risks from GM crops.

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates GMOs. Each GMO has to pass the same legal requirements applied to all other foods, including testing for toxins and allergens. After testing, the producer of the GMO remains legally bound to ensure that it’s safe.

The Real Concerns

There are indeed a few concerns with GMOs that have some merit. However, many of these have more to do with the way we manage GMOs than the GMOs themselves. Here are the most common ones:

It’s creating herbicide-resistant weeds and insecticide-resistant insects: GM crops with resistance to herbicides (weed-killers) allow farmers to apply herbicides on their crops and kill just weeds. This had led to an increase in the use of herbicides, particularly glyphosate (sold as Roundup). Weeds, like all life forms, evolve, and eventually ones that are resistant to the herbicide emerge. To deal with them, farmers need to use more herbicides. However, the issue here is that farmers are relying too much on just one method of weed control. This is a problem with regular crops as well. Better training and implementation of alternative weed control methods (including non-herbicidal methods like crop rotation) will help ensure that resistance never gets high enough to pose a threat. That’s what the EPA and USDA are working to do. The same goes for insects.
The inserted genes could change over time: While this is technically possible, GMOs go through plenty of testing over multiple generations of the organism. If the inserted gene or genes are unstable across generations, scientists can detect it and reject the GMO. Careful regulation and monitoring, which the FDA already handles, is important. That said, ALL genomes change over time, including the ones in non-GMO foods. It’s not a problem unique to GMOs, and it doesn’t cause problems very often either. Many other non-GMO plants produced by more traditional genetic modification techniques like mutagenesis (which changes many more genes) have been stable for decades. For example, has the Ruby Red grapefruit (a variety produced by mutagenesis back in 1929) caused problems? Not really.
It could contain a harmful allergen or toxin: Genes from an organism that contains known allergens can transfer the allergen to the new GMO. That’s what pre-market testing is for. According to FAO and WHO guidelines, before approval, the transferred genetic material needs to be compared to all known allergens. Then, there needs to be further experimentation to determine if other unknown allergens are present. After that, as part of post-market monitoring, scientists test randomly sampled consumers to see if it’s causing any allergic effects. So far, there’s no evidence that GMO foods are any more dangerous than normal foods.
The new genes could contaminate other crops or animals: For plants, cross-pollination can happen if safety measures aren’t in place. There are already guidelines for these measures. They include a creating buffer zone around GM plants proportional to how far the pollen travels and staggering planting schedules so pollination happens at different times (farmers with both organic and GM crops already do this). If contamination does occur (the EU considers this inevitable), it can be effectively tracked down and eliminated. An incident involving StarLink corn demonstrated this pretty well. There are safety measures in place for the AquAdvantage salmon, too. These include making the salmon sterile and raising them in land-based facilities that aren’t near any rivers that lead to oceans.
It allows large corporations to have too much influence on the food supply: Yeah, monopolies suck, but it’s up to governments to limit the power of corporations. It’s a political debate that has nothing to do with the GMO itself. Many huge corporations dominate the food industry. Banning GMOs won’t solve the problem. It will just open up a space that another large corporation will fill.

The Baseless Concerns

Despite overwhelming evidence that the current GMOs in the market are safe to eat, anti-GMO groups, like Greenpeace, continue to make baseless claims about their effects. From misrepresenting data to citing discredited studies to outright lying and fear-mongering, these claims spread misinformation and steal the public’s attention from the real concerns. Here are some examples:

Farmers can’t replant GM seeds: While Monsanto does own the patent on the so-called “Terminator gene”, it never used it. The seeds from GM crops are totally viable. The thing is, farmers don’t bother saving and replanting the seeds. If you use the seeds from the plant (especially from hybrids like corn), you get a mix of inferior varieties. It’s simply not profitable. Most farmers were already buying seeds every year from older seed companies by the time Monsanto arrived. This practice started with the rise of commercial seed companies, not GMOs.
All research on GMOs is funded by agriculture corporations: Nope. Even in just the past decade, there were hundreds of independent researchers carrying out and publishing peer-reviewed studies. Numerous scientific institutions around the globe have reviewed the studies and determined that the current GMOs are safe.
Monsanto will sue you if it detects traces of its patented GMOs in your field from wind-blown pollen: This claim is false because it never happened before. Monsanto even claims that it will pay to remove its GMOs from fields that they don’t belong in. It seems to be based off of a 1999 lawsuit where Monsanto sued a Canadian canola farmer for growing its Roundup-resistant canola without paying for it. He claimed that pollen blowing onto his field or stray seeds from a passing truck were the cause. Tests showed that over 50% of his field had the gene, making that claim practically impossible. He later explained that he kept and replanted seeds from the part of his field closest to a neighbor’s Roundup-resistant canola that he had previously tested for the gene (after spraying Roundup, many plants there survived, so they had the gene). So, the judge ruled that he intentionally planted Roundup-resistant canola. He appealed, and the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that he did indeed violate Monsanto’s patent but didn’t benefit from it. In the end, he didn’t owe Monsanto money.
Genetic engineering is too new to be safe: Humans have been messing around with genomes for thousands of years, just with much less precision. Cross-breeding and other more traditional techniques change whole swaths of genes that aren’t easy to track. Modern genetic engineering only changes a few genes at most, and the changes they make are traceable. Not to mention, there are robust testing procedures in place before any GMO goes into the market. Genetically engineered foods have also been around for more than two decades. Scientists and researchers have published over 1700 peer-reviewed safety studies since their introduction. Among them are five substantial reports from the National Research Council that focused on human health and the environment. Its conclusion: GMOs aren’t any more or less safe than regular foods.
They can hurt beneficial insect species: Actually, since the introduction of insect-resistant GM crops (Bt crops), in almost all cases, the populations of harmless insects in crop fields has gone up. Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis. It’s a kind of bacteria that lives in soil, in water, on plants, and in grain silos. It produces a toxin that kills specific insects (different strains kill different insects) but is completely harmless to humans. In addition, there’s no solid evidence that it affects bees, and it degrades easily. For that reason, Bt-containing sprays have been in use for nearly a century, even in organic farming. Bt crops, which made the plant produce the toxin instead of depending on Bt sprays, allowed farmers to reduce the use of insecticides, which typically killed insects indiscriminately. There was a study in 1999 that seemed to show that pollen from Bt corn killed monarch butterfly larva. But five subsequent studies in 2001 showed that the larva didn’t encounter toxic levels of pollen in the wild. A 2012 study identified a more probable cause for the butterfly’s decline. Herbicides used on herbicide-resistant GM crops killed nearby milkweed plants (the larva’s only food source).
Genes from GMOs will transfer over to anyone that eats them: Genetic material can’t survive a trip through the gut and end up in our cells. I mean seriously, if that were true, I’d be part lettuce, part wheat, part chicken, part tomato, and who knows what else, and that’s just from my dinner! And besides, people are exposed to and eat the very same viruses and bacteria whose genes are in GM crops. In Hawaii, anyone who ate papayas infected with ringspot virus ate the viruses (with no ill effects) whose genes were used in the GM papaya (engineered to resist ringspot). Bt bacteria, whose genes are in Bt crops, live all over the place and are in organic insecticides. You probably eat some every day. The only practical way foreign DNA can get into our cells is by a virus. Viruses can sometimes pick up DNA from their hosts and then transfer them to other species. This happens all the time in nature, and it’s completely random. After all, viruses don’t care if their host is a GMO or not. In fact, we have about 100,000 pieces of viral DNA (8% of our genome), and some of it came from nonhuman species. Don’t like it? Blame Nature. Nature invented viruses.
Toxins from GMOs were detected in maternal and fetal blood: This claim came from a 2010 study that found Bt toxins in maternal and fetal blood. Not only was the study flawed (it used a method of measuring Bt toxins for plants, not humans), it’s completely moot because Bt toxins are completely harmless to humans. We have no receptors for them, which means they can’t interact with our cells. Also, the acid in our stomachs destroys them easily. In a study done in the 1950s that would have been considered totally unethical by today’s standards, 18 people ate a gram of a Bt spray called Thuricide AND inhaled 100 mg of the stuff each day for 5 days. Their physicals, blood tests, and x-rays on the sixth day and five weeks later showed nothing unusual.
GMOs are responsible for driving farmers in India to commit suicide: This one is completely bogus but anti-GMO groups keep repeating it over and over again. The claim goes that Bt cotton crops were a massive failure, and that the resulting debt drove hundreds of thousands of farmers to commit suicide. Yeah, no. Ever since Bt cotton was introduced in India, it’s been a roaring success. Over 90% of Indian cotton farmers have adopted it. The crop resisted insects and significantly reduced the usage of insecticides, saving farmers money. Cotton production also improved drastically going from 3 million tons per year before the introduction of Bt cotton to an average of 5.1 million tons per year. In fact, Bt cotton was so popular, counterfeit seeds started showing up in the market in the early to mid-2000s (which might have caused some unlucky farmers to mistakenly believe that their Bt crop failed). It takes some mental gymnastics to think that this level of success could be a failure. India does have a suicide problem to be sure, but it’s not related to GMOs or Monsanto. Some Indian states with high farmer suicide rates didn’t grow cotton, and 10 states that did grow cotton didn’t have many farmer suicides. Instead, the real problem is India’s inconsistent banking practices, which force farmers with little access to institutional credit to turn to private lenders (who charge ridiculous interest rates of up to 45%). These farmers (mostly small-holders with less than 2 hectares of land) are the most vulnerable to erratic changes in weather. One bad harvest, GMO or not, could push them into debt.
GMOs are linked to cancer, autism, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, gluten-related disorders…: Really, the list goes on and on. All of these claims are based on discredited/flawed studies, unscientific and definitely not peer-reviewed “studies” by anti-GMO groups, and/or pure fabrications. For example, the claim about GMOs linked to gluten-related disorders came from a fake study by the Institute for Responsible Technology. It’s run solely by Jeffrey Smith, an outspoken GMO critic, and isn’t an actual college, university, or research institute. The claim is also pretty ridiculous since GM wheat isn’t even available yet. The claim about autism, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s isn’t even based on any sort of research. It’s just a hypothesis in a pay-for-play journal (a journal where, for a fee, you can publish just about anything).

The Benefits of GMOs

With all the noise surrounding GMOs, information about the benefits they offer often gets drowned out. GMOs can solve a great many problems in the world’s food supply. Here are some of them:

They lower the price of food: GMOs are typically easier to grow than regular crops. Some don’t need as much pesticide. A few resist certain diseases. Others are hardier and require less weed-management. All of these translate to lower costs and/or better yields, and in turn, lower prices. In poorer countries, this can mean the difference between going hungry and having some quality of life.
GMOs can be more nutritious: This is one area where GMOs really have potential. One major example is Golden Rice. Golden Rice is a kind of rice that has been modified to produce beta carotene, which when digested, produces vitamin A. It gets its name from its distinctive yellow color. Vitamin A deficiency is a problem for more than 250 million preschool-aged kids around the globe. If left untreated, it can lead to blindness and then death. Most of those kids are in Southeast Asia where rice is a staple food. The developers of Golden Rice sought to fix this nutritional problem by making rice produce beta carotene instead of depending on two high-dose vitamin A pills every year from the government. In 2005, its successor, Golden Rice 2, was announced. This variety produces up to 23 times more beta carotene than the original Golden Rice and can provide the USDA’s Recommended Dietary Allowance with just 144 g/day. Other nutritionally enhanced crops currently in development are a nutrient-rich cassava, a flax-like plant called camelina that produces oils that are similar to fish oils, a carrot that helps calcium absorption, and antioxidant-rich tomatoes.
Genetic engineering can remove allergens and other harmful substances from foods: Just as genetic engineering can add nutrients to foods, it can also take undesirable parts, like allergens, out. Imagine a variety of wheat that doesn’t contain gluten or peanuts that don’t cause life-threatening allergic reactions. Both are in the works right now. Allergies from food could be largely eliminated. Other harmful chemicals in food can be reduced as well. The Innate Potato, which is available right now, has less asparagine, which turns into acrylamide when the potato is fried.
They reduce the use of insecticides: With the introduction of Bt crops, the use of insecticides has dropped significantly because the plants produce the same toxins as the bacteria in Bt sprays. In addition, with proper management, they also largely eliminate the need for broad-spectrum chemical insecticides that kill both good and bad insects. Bt toxins are only harmful to specific insects, so less chemical insecticides means the crops contain less harmful substances overall.
Genetic engineering can save crops: One prime example is the GM papaya from Hawaii. In the late 1990s, an outbreak of ringspot virus nearly wiped out papayas in Hawaii. The only viable solution was to genetically engineer a ringspot-resistant papaya by giving it some of the virus’s genes (specifically its coat protein). It worked, and it’s credited with saving Hawaii’s papaya industry. Genetic engineering has also produced varieties of cassava that resist cassava brown streak disease and bananas that resist banana xanthomonas wilt. Millions of people around the world, especially in developing countries, depend on cassava and bananas as staple foods. By saving these crops from disease, many lives are saved.
The herbicides used with GMOs have displaced more toxic ones: When Monsanto introduced glyphosate (Roundup) and glyphosate-resistant seeds (Roundup Ready seeds), glyphosate use increased dramatically. It’s is one of mildest herbicides available and has a toxicity level 25 times less than caffeine. It binds strongly to soil (it stays put), and soil bacteria easily degrade it. Glyphosate’s increased use displaced other more harmful herbicides like atrazine. Unlike glyphosate, atrazine easily contaminates groundwater, and once it’s in water, it degrades slowly. There’s also evidence that it’s an endocrine disruptor (it throws your hormones out of whack). Glyphosate isn’t the perfect herbicide in terms of health, but it sure beats some of the other stuff out there.
They lead to less tilling: Tilling the field (turning the soil over) is a primitive and rather ineffective way to control weeds. It also leads to more soil erosion and runoff. Not only that, greenhouse gasses can escape from the soil during the process. It also takes time and fuel to plow the field, adding to farmers’ carbon footprints. With Roundup Ready crops (especially corn and soybeans), weed-control is more effective, which means less tilling is required. This has led to an increase in conservation tillage (leaving crop residue on the field instead of plowing it). Conservation tillage reverses all the aforementioned negative effects.
With the threat of climate change looming, they can help alleviate world hunger: Global warming not only causes warmer temperatures overall, it also intensifies water cycle effects. That means rainy places will get even more rain, and dry places will get even drier. This will shift the areas of arable land around. GM crops can be engineered to survive harsher climate conditions, such as drought, temperature extremes, floods, and higher salinity water. It’s going to be a powerful tool in securing our food supply when there are many more people to feed, and the climate is more extreme.