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2/28/2019 GMO Health Risks: What The Scientific Evidence Says
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GMO Health Risks: What The ScientificEvidence SaysBy Roxanne Palmer @rpalmerscience
03/30/13 AT 3:42 PM
2/28/2019 GMO Health Risks: What The Scientific Evidence Says
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M any Americans are concerned about the spread of genetically modified organisms throughoutagriculture -- and the perception that some members of the U.S. Congress are in the pocket of
the Monsanto Co. (NYSE:MON) certainly isn’t helping.
But just what are GM crops, and what evidence do we have to suggest that they are dangerous tohuman health?
Monsanto wasn’t always in the GM corn and alfalfa business. The company’s first product, introduced in1901, was the artificial sweetener saccharine. By the middle of the 20th century, Monsanto hadexpanded into the manufacture of many other chemical products, including plastics, herbicides andinsecticides, including DDT, now largely banned from agricultural use worldwide. From 1965 to 1969,Monsanto produced Agent Orange for U.S. military use in the Vietnam War -- as did several othercompanies, including the Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE:DOW) -- and has since been subject to numerouslawsuits related to the herbicide's contamination with a toxic dioxin compound.
One of Monsanto’s flagship herbicides is the comparatively innocuous Roundup, a weed killer madefrom the chemical glyphosate. Roundup kills plants by mucking with their ability to synthesize certainessential amino acids. It accomplishes this by inhibiting an enzyme called 5-enolpyruvylshikimate-3-phosphate synthase, or EPSPS.
In 1996 -- just a few years before Monsanto’s U.S. patent on glyphosate expired in 2000 -- the companybegan introducing genetically modified “Roundup Ready” crops that were impervious to Roundup,allowing farmers to use the herbicide without fear of harming their plants. Roundup Ready cropscontain a version of EPSPS that is unaffected by glyphosate, as noted in the Proceedings of theNational Academy of Sciences in 2006. This pesticide-resistant enzyme was taken from a bacteriagrowing on the waste at a Roundup factory.
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Genetic traits used to be literally shot into plants with a gun, using little metal bits coated with DNA.Nowadays, Monsanto employs a slightly different process, using a bacterium called Agrobacteriumtumefaciens to infect plant cells with pieces of DNA containing the desired traits, as pointed out byColorado State University's Department of Soil and Crop Sciences.
Monsanto also makes corn, potatoes, cotton and soybeans that can synthesize their own insecticidecalled Bt toxin, a trait grabbed from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis. Other GM crops are beingdeveloped to resist drought via the introduction of genes from other plants such as Arabidopsisthaliana, aka thale cress; moss; and yeast.
Genetic modification is the cornerstone of agriculture -- through generations of breeding, humans tookone species, the wild cabbage Brassica oleracea, and turned it into a host of different foods, includingbroccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower and kale. Now, biotechnology has accelerated theprocess and allowed breeders more precision in designing their crops. There is much disagreementabout the cost of these advances.
“There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safeto eat,” Pamela Ronald, a Univeristy of California at Davis professor, wrote for Scientific American in2011. But the American Academy of Environmental Medicine has warned of “serious health risks”indicated by animal studies measuring the effects of GM foods.
And much of the public is convinced that genetic modification is a health danger -- hence the fiercepush to label GMO food and broad restrictions on GM crops in Europe.
Some of the health concerns of food-safety advocates are warranted. There is plenty of scientificevidence to recommend caution with respect to certain kinds of genetic modification, especially if thereare genes involved that confer antibiotic resistance. But some of the studies that portray the mostdramatic health effects of GM crops have been called out by other scientists as deeply flawed.
One of the first major concerns that arose with the birth of GMOs was the possibility that graftinggenetic traits from different plants onto other crops could be dangerous to people with food allergies. Ifyou know you’re allergic to nuts, you know to stay away from them. But would you also have to keepaway from GM crops that contain nut genes? And how would you know which GM crops to stay awayfrom?
In 1996, the New England Journal of Medicine published a paper that identified a possible allergicreaction to GM soybeans. A team led by University of Nebraska scientists found that a Brazil nut proteinintroduced to improve the nutritional quality of GM soybeans was able to provoke an allergic reaction inpeople with Brazil nut allergies.
However, this problem can likely be nipped in the bud with proper safety testing. U.S. Department ofAgriculture researcher Eliot M. Herman noted in the Journal of Experimental Botany in 2003 that theGM soybean injected with the Brazil nut gene “was abandoned during development, no product wasreleased and no one was harmed.”
2/28/2019 GMO Health Risks: What The Scientific Evidence Says
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Currently, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration does not require biotechnology companies to dopremarket safety testing, including allergen testing (although the agency does recommend it). Calls formaking premarket safety testing mandatory have come from numerous groups, including the AmericanMedical Association, as reported by the Chicago Tribune. The prospect of hidden allergens could alsobe an arrow in the quiver of those who are pushing for labeling GMOs in the U.S.
Another health concern related to GMOs rests on the possibility that genes might be transferredelsewhere. The nightmare scenario would be an antibiotic-resistance gene getting inadvertently passedto pathogenic bacteria in a person’s stomach. Much of the work that's been done indicates that the rateof horizontal gene transfer from plants to animals and bacteria is probably very low. But, admittedly,there's a real gap in our understanding of how genes may or may not be transferred from GM crops --or other crops, for that matter -- into the cells of the gut and the bacteria that live in the digestive tract.
Authors of a 2012 report on animal-feeding studies in the journal Critical Reviews in Food Science andNutrition found that while it’s clear a small amount of DNA from the diet can survive digestion, we haveyet to see evidence that such dietary DNA can be integrated into the genome of an animal or even intothe genome of a bacterium residing in the gut.
“However, major methodological limitations and knowledge gaps of the mechanistic aspects of[horizontal gene transfer] calls for methodological improvements and further studies to understand thefate of various types of dietary DNA in the [gastrointestinal tract],” the researchers at the University ofMilan wrote.
The one major study of GMO feeding in humans that looked at horizontal gene transfer was publishedin 2004 in the journal Nature Biotechnology. Researchers looked to see if the Roundup Readytransgene -- the one that codes for the herbicide-resistant enzyme -- showed up in waste collectedfrom seven volunteers who had had their large intestines removed for medical reasons. While a smallamount of the transgene was found in bowel microbes in three of the seven subjects, the gene-transferrate did not increase after they ate the transgenic soy, leading the researchers to conclude thatwhatever gene transfer occurred did not happen during the experimental period.
In subjects with fully intact intestinal tracts, the transgene did not survive passage. The results indicatethat while horizontal gene transfer after eating GM crops might be feasible at low rates in certainmedically compromised people, it would probably be quite rare in most consumers.
A 2008 paper in the journal Environmental Biosafety Research by an Australian researcher whoreviewed the risks of GMOs associated with horizontal gene transfer concluded the potential dangerwas “negligible.”
Overall, it’s clear more research is needed about the ability of genes to move from GM crops into theanimals or humans who eats them.
Meanwhile, some individual studies have conclusively found GMOs to be harmful. But many of thesehave been harshly criticized for loading the dice.
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Gilles-Eric Seralini, a researcher at the University of Caen in France, took a second look at Monsantodata on experiments feeding GM corn to rats in three papers, and claimed the numbers actually showedthe animals fed GMOs suffered organ damage, based on the rodents’ growth and organ weights. Butseveral European Food Safety Authority reviews found that Seralini’s math was off, that the rats’ organweights were within an acceptable range, and that his team's conclusions were not supported by theevidence.
A 2012 paper by Seralini and other researchers purportedly found that a GM corn diet led to cancer inrats. But the study was released under extremely odd circumstances -- Seralini made reporters signconfidentiality agreements that prevented them from asking other scientists to give their opinions onhis research before an embargo lifted. And once other scientists got a look at the paper, the reactionwas almost universally condemnatory, as exemplified by the European Food Safety Authority.
One main objection stemmed from the fact that the rats used in the study belong to a strain calledSprague-Dawley, which is extremely prone to tumors later in life. While Monsanto did use Sprague-Dawley rats in its own experiments with GM corn, such trials lasted for 90 days, whereas Seralini’sexperiment went on for two years.
Many critics also said the number of rats used for such a long experiment -- 10 rats for eachexperimental condition -- was far too small, as Discover noted. In addition, there were curious gaps inthe mortality data for the control rats: It’s unclear whether they died after developing tumors.
A 2011 paper by Canadian researchers supposedly found Cry1Ab, an insecticidal protein made in certainGM crops, in the blood of women and in the cord blood of fetuses. But the study, examining just 30pregnant women (and their fetuses) and 39 nonpregnant women, also came under attack for itsmethods and conclusions by critics such as Food Standards Australia New Zealand. The method theresearchers used to detect Cry1Ab in the blood has been called into question, and the authors providedno dietary evidence on any of the study subjects. Without that, there’s no way to conclusively draw alink between anything found in the blood and GM crops.
“Too often in the GM-food debate, generalizations and extremism lead to sterile public and politicaldiscourse that obscures key issues: what sorts of GM crops might bring true benefits to agriculture andconsumers; how to avoid monopolization of farming choices; and what types of sustainable agriculturewe want in the future,” Nature editors said last September. “Polarized debates, not GMOs, are thepoison to be avoided.”
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