Head into the supermarket today, and you will find countless items on the shelf that proudly bear non-GMO labels. They’re usually located near where a product claims it’s gluten or fat-free. The display of this label, while saying nothing at all about GMOs, is clearly meant to relieve you, the consumer. It assures you that the food you’re going to eat is healthy because it’s not genetically modified!
There’s an entire organization, the Non-GMO Project, set up with a little orange butterfly logo and everything to help you identify products that are not genetically modified. This heavily implies GMOs are unhealthy or even dangerous, but is it? According to the Non-GMO Project, genetically modified organisms are made of a combination of plant, animal, bacteria, and virus genes that never occur in nature, and there are no long-term studies to determine if they’re safe.
So, let’s see what the science says. Over 90% of all the cotton, soy, and corn grown in the United States in 2024 is genetically modified. Are there dangers or not, and what exactly are they? Is your GMP rice safe to eat, or are you doomed to become a food mutant?
The Dangers
Let’s start with some potential dangers of GMOs, as detailed by the Non-GMO Project. They point out on their site two things that may often be overlooked. One is that GMO seeds may be a burden to farmers and even damaging to their livelihoods. To prevent GMO crops from contaminating non-GMO and vice versa, safeguards need to be in place. Imagine how hard it is to prevent cross-pollination between crops that would result in new crops that may be unintentionally GMO or not. This can seriously affect how the food can grow, be labeled, and sold.
Additionally, GMO seeds are patented by the companies that make them. This means farmers can’t hold seeds or produce their own, and if they try to plant seeds produced by their own crops, companies like Monsanto can sue them for patent infringement.
GMO crops can also be extremely bad for the environment. One of the things being modified in many crops is their tolerance to herbicides. You want crops that are hearty and won’t die easily, and that seems good at first. But, herbicide tolerance means a drastic increase in herbicide use. In Canada alone, sales of herbicides like Roundup, which has been linked to cancer cases for years, increased by almost 200%.
It’s also been suggested that increased herbicide use has led to a decline in native plant species while allowing herbicide-resistant weeds to proliferate.
No Risk and Potential Improvements
There are some environmental factors to consider, but they are also contrasted with some benefits. Some herbicide use went up, but pesticides and other chemical use have been reduced globally by 37%, according to some research. Crop yields went up by 22%, and farm profits increased by 64%.
Because pesticides don’t need to be sprayed as often, greenhouse gas emissions also declined thanks to GMO crops. In 2018, this was the equivalent of 15 million fewer cars being on the road.
In countries less advanced than the United States and other Western nations, farming is traditionally much more rigorous and dangerous. GMO crops have significantly reduced pesticide poisonings in developing nations. In South Africa, a serious drop in farmers suffering ill effects from pesticides has been recorded. In China, one-third of farmers not using GMO cotton crops reported poisoning compared to 9% who did. In India, between 2003 and 2019, at least 38 million fewer poisonings have occurred, but that number could be much higher.
The first GMO crop in the United States was the Flavr Savr tomato in 1994. It was modified to slow the ripening process and stop it from going bad as quickly as other tomatoes. Research from The Institute for Responsible Technology quickly came out to denounce GMO foods. Their studies claim that toxic effects in rats happened almost immediately. No other scientists were ever able to replicate the results in lab conditions.
Numerous studies conducted by different groups in different countries around the world have been unable to find adverse health effects in subjects who consume genetically modified foods. Even at a microscopic level, there are no effects specifically associated with GMOs.
Rats fed GMO corn have also been studied to see if any defects can be passed down generationally. Even after four generations, rats show no adverse effect in any of the tissues or organs that one might expect damage to show up in if there were birth defects being passed on.
GMO crops are not modified in ways that would cause health issues in humans or any other animal that eats some. The work is extremely tightly regulated to ensure that the genes being used to modify these organisms are well understood, and regulation is far more strict than it is for non-GMO food.
Rather than being some dangerous Mad Science project, the gene in the Flavr Savr tomato stopped it from spoiling was already in the tomato. Scientists copied the gene and inserted it into a bacteria cell that was stripped of its harmful material, essentially using it as a shell to hold the gene and nothing more. Once inserted into the tomato, the gene interferes with the creation of an enzyme that speeds up spoiling, allowing the tomato to last longer. Nothing harmful was introduced, and nothing had the potential to cause allergies, cancer, mutation, or anything else beyond what was already there. The belief that they could is based solely on a poor understanding of science or outright lies.
Cancer research groups have also pointed out that there is no logic behind any fear of cancer from GMO foods because they simply don’t work that way. There’s no evidence that they have caused cancer in the past, nor is there a scientifically sound explanation for how they could. There have been no notable increases in cancer cases in the US since the introduction of GMOs.
GMO Foods Save Lives
In the Western World, it can be harder to appreciate just how important GMO crops are. For us, a tomato that stays fresher longer may not seem like a big deal. In parts of the world where famine is a real risk, and lives are lost every day, GMO crops have been credited with saving one billion lives. Crops with higher yields that resist insects and drought mean people who would otherwise starve get to eat.
GMO apples that don’t oxidize and turn brown as quickly help reduce food waste, and GMO soybeans can produce healthier oil. While the novelty of something like Arctic Apples is one example of how GMOs can alter the food we eat, at its core, it’s about ensuring there is enough food to eat and that food is nutritious.
Genetically modified rice that was created to increase the nutrient beta-carotene in the grain was expected to save millions of lives. Because it converts into vitamin A after consumption, it would have been invaluable in parts of the world where a lack of vitamin A costs a million lives per year plus half as many cases of blindness. Unfortunately, despite no evidence of any danger, Golden Rice was never planted or made available because anti-GMO groups, including Greenpeace, rallied against it and convinced governments to ban it. To this day, it has never been grown at scale despite studies showing it provides more vitamin A than spinach.
Nearly 800 million people on earth regularly experience hunger. About 9 million of those will die every year. GMO crops alone cannot solve that problem – they’ve already been around for decades, and clearly, hunger persists, but they can reduce those numbers. Higher crop yields with better nutrition and greater resistance mean more people can eat.
What GMOs Are Out There?
We’ve already addressed many GMO foods that exist in the world right now. From apples to corn to rice, there are a lot of options. Odds are you’ve already eaten grains, soy products, sugar, and all kinds of things that have been genetically modified already, maybe even without knowing it. There are also some more novel foods as well.
AquAdvantage salmon are genetically modified salmon that can grow to market size in half the time. This is one of the first living, breathing GMOs out there, and people seem to be more nervous about these fish than they are about plants despite the same lack of evidence that there’s any danger. The media took to calling them Frankenfish.
Pigs, known for producing an abundance of potentially toxic manure thanks to high amounts of phosphorus, have also been genetically modified in Canada. These new EnviroPigs have been engineered to naturally produce an enzyme, normally supplemented in their diets by farmers, that helps reduce the dangerous phosphorus. Some cows fart and burp less, which means 25% less methane.
One of the most dramatic creations from the world of genetic engineering is goats bred to produce spider silk. The genes to create the silk modified the glands in the goats that produce milk so that when you milk the goat, you get spider silk. These experiments have actually continued because spider silk has any number of potential uses in the world, it’s just preposterously hard to harvest normally, thanks to the fact spiders are remarkably small and also uncooperative.
Scientists are currently working on developing venomous cabbage. Genes from scorpions are being used to allow the cabbage to produce venom in its leaves that will be modified to be harmless to humans but will still serve as a potent deterrent to pests like caterpillars. As a natural form of pesticide, the process could save a fortune in chemicals while saving the environment at the same time.
All of these sound weird at first, and you can see how someone can easily spin any of them to sound dangerous. However, the obvious purpose behind the modifications and the benefits is pretty clear as well once you take some time to learn about them. That’s the purpose behind any GMO: to make things better.
The Controversy
If science says that there’s nothing wrong with GMO crops, then why are so many individuals, organizations, and even governments against them? A group of biotechnologists from Belgium once published a paper arguing that part of the reason there’s so much pushback against GMOs is that it just feels right. Our minds can easily wrap around why they should be bad, and so we just believe they are.
The fact is, most people who are opposed to GMOs don’t know as much as they think they know. The ones most opposed and think they know the most have been shown to know the least in studies. And there’s nothing wrong with not knowing something, almost none of us knew about GMOs before that first tomato, it’s worth learning about something before condemning it.
For some, like chefs, the concern with GMOs is less the science and more things like corporate control of food supplies. That’s much more of an issue than the potential health concerns.
The Anti-GMO Activist Who Switched
For what it’s worth, some people started against GMOs and actually changed their opinions after learning more about them. Environmental activist Mark Lynas used to actually destroy GMO crops. He felt that science was tampering with some of the fundamental building blocks of nature and that it was something he not only couldn’t support but actively had to try to stop.
As the years passed and he became concerned with more aspects of the environment, like climate change, he also got more into the science behind them and realized that his initial stance had been very anti-science. After learning about the processes behind GMO foods, he reversed his position and urged others who shared his prior beliefs to do the same and not stand in the way of progress that could feed hungry people.
As with anything, the key to understanding is learning and then making up your mind once you have all the details, not just some of them.