OPINION:
There is no doubt that “non-GMO” has become an advertising campaign. Lumping GMO technology into the “all-bad” bucket is just as much a scientific mistake as lumping fat, saturated fat, cholesterol or salt into this same bucket and then designing food products based on those exaggerated falsehoods.
In the case of fat and cholesterol, you only had to peer into a biochemistry textbook to decipher the nonsense, but the GMO issues are probably not so easily resolved. With GMO technology you have the ability to do the greatest good and also the greatest harm, and it is not readily apparent which way it will go out of the gate.
It takes decades in many cases to decipher the overall population effects of macro or even micro changes in food supply composition. There is not going to be any 50-year double-blind, randomized trial involving 100,000 people because it is impossible. Basically, you are stuck with epidemiology, which, to the say the least, mostly coughs up worthless associations to mislead the public via The New York Times’ food features.
If you want to see the effects of anti-science you can look at what happened to fat and carbohydrates during the past three or four decades. Carbohydrates replaced fat in the U.S. food supply and it was all encouraged by Federal food policy. Labeling and food product design all followed from the federal policy, which never had any scientific justification. The National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey database confirms that the public obeyed, and the result is that the majority of the public got fat and sick.
The average supermarket has 40,000 to 50,000 food items. That’s practically infinite variety, right? Wrong. The vast majority of those items involve wheat, corn, soybeans and sugar. Even the animal-derived foods involve those same carbohydrates. The variety you see in your local supermarket is a mirage, and it is killing a lot of people. The best diet is the one that makes you healthy, and it has been determined by trial and error over the millennia, not by the latest food fads.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston, Va.
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