Anti-GMO activists circulate Judy Carman’s latest suspect “study” to fan safety fears

She’s back.

Two years ago, Judy Carman, an adjunct associate professor at Australia’s Flinders University School of the Environment and a dedicated campaigner against genetically modified foods, published a paper claiming that she had discovered the anti-GMO silver bullet: an explanation of how GM foods could wreak havoc on human digestive systems. Carman claimed that genetically engineered corn and soybean feed was causing undue inflammation in pig intestinal tracts. Activists who had supported the long-discredited Seralini study on tumors in rats turned to Carman’s work, promoting is as proof that humans face similar health threats.gmo-pig-stomach

Despite the celebration of Carman’s pig research by anti-GMO advocacy groups, her studies have been discredited by the mainstream science research community. No clear definition of “severe,” “mild” or any other kind of inflammation was presented—Carman’s characterizations were purely subjective and based on visual evidence, which is often not indicative of actual inflammation.

Carman_GMO_PigFeed

Without an empirical standard for what constitutes inflammation, one could easily show the same data to demonstrate no discernable effects of genetically modified pig feed.

Read GLP Facts report on Judy Carman and her research

In addition, application of proper statistical tests showed no significant differences between pigs fed genetically modified corn or soybeans, and the control pigs. The publishing journal itself was suspect; it is not an independent source but ‘pay for play’ and funded by the organic food industry. The entire enterprise, wrote numerous scientists including American surgical oncological David Gorski and Australian geneticist David Tribe, appeared to be a “fishing expedition,” listing dozens of parameters without tying them to exactly what was eaten nor to whether what they were seeing was due to disease, or just chance.

Scientists also note that there is absolutely no field evidence corroborating Carman’s claims. Writing last year in the Journal of Animal Science, in the most comprehensive study of GMOs and food ever conducted, University of California-Davis Department of Animal Science geneticist Alison Van Eenennaam and research assistant Amy E. Young reviewed 29 years of livestock productivity and health data from both before and after the introduction of genetically engineered animal feed.

The field data represented more than 100 billion animals covering a period before 1996 when animal feed was 100 percent non-GMO, and after its introduction when it jumped to 90 percent and more. The documentation included the records of animals examined pre and post mortem, as ill cattle cannot be approved for meat.

What did they find? That GM feed is safe and nutritionally equivalent to non-GMO feed. There was no indication of any unusual trends in the health of animals over 18 years since 1996 when GMO crops were first harvested. Considering the size of the dataset, it can reasonably be said that the debate over the impact of GE feed on animal health is closed: there is zero extraordinary impact.

Carman redux

Three months ago, in December 2015, Carman published a review piece in Environment International that is again being heavily promoted by critics of genetically modified foods. It contains no original research. Rather, it is comments on other research papers focused on health effects of genetically engineered feed. While not heralding it as strongly as her and Seralini’s previously published and discredited work, activists have begun leveraging it to boost the message that “GMOs aren’t safe in the long term.”

judy-teamCarman and her colleagues reviewed 21 long-term whole-food feeding studies that included histopathological analysis of rat digestive tracts. Looking a studies on EPSPS gene herbicide tolerance, and insect resistance due to recombinant cry1Ab or cry3Bb genes, the team claimed that out of 47 crops approved for humans or animals, only nine had conducted such studies. Therefore, she maintained, 81 percent of approved genetically modified foods had no studies that supported their safety in animals.

Not quite, respond a number of researchers. First, the review looked only at histopathology studies that examined digestive tracts, just like her study of pigs and her disputed findings of inflammation.

Second, she and her team ignored all other studies, such as histology, analytical chemistry and other modern toxicology methods that have proven much more effective at predicting pathology than looking at intestinal tissue, which is difficult to interpret.

Carman’s study review strategy amounts to a “fishing expedition” in which “each trait is marked, looking for hundreds of histological endpoints,” according to Christopher Preston, Associate Professor of Weed Management at the University of Adelaide, South Australia.

“Most of these endpoints vary substantially with changes in diet and large amounts of a specific food would need to be in the diet to attempt to identify an effect,” he said. And then, once you find an “effect,” whether it be inflammation, a small tumor, or variation in organ size, you need to determine whether or not this finding is important.

Which leads us to statistical problems. An additional issue with “whole food” analysis of feeding animals is that you need an awful lot of animals. And the more “endpoints” or traits you’re looking for, the more animals you’ll need. None of these studies cited by activists—including Carman’s pig gut study—included enough animals to make any statistically significant conclusions

Ethical concerns

Carman’s analyses have been dismissed by regulatory authorities around the world. The Food Standards of Australia and New Zealand, as well as the United States Department of Agriculture, have not only not called for such whole food studies, they also state that other modern toxicological techniques are more effective, if not more so. The European Union does require “whole food studies”, but only on single-trait GM crops; importantly, the EU also calls for minimizing animal use. Carman’s studies have raised serious ethical concerns, as their study and similar investigations have resulted in the sacrificing of hundreds, if not thousands of laboratory animals to get results obtainable by other more humane means.

So, what will be the impact of Carman’s latest review on the GMO debate? A few activists worldwide are starting to ask for “whole food” studies, claiming that studies, as Carman’s paper states, “do not simply consider GM food as being composed of several substances of known safety, but as a novel entity, the safety of which needs to be evaluated as a whole.”

It’s important, and ironic, to note that none of the studies cited in the Carman paper documented any health or safety problems tied to GM food. However, Preston and others warn that activists are already trying to circumvent the overwhelming scientific consensus on animal and human safety by attempting “a bit of goal post moving.” Tests on the genetically modified protein have so far shown no effects. To sidestep that reality, activists are switching tactics and trying to reframe the safety debate by calling for whole-food feeding studies.

Under this new paradigm, GMOs will henceforth be considered as completely new entities (most testing actually compares GMOs to traditionally grown food, because the only difference is the modified section). When “long-term” 90-day studies also showed no harm, activists demanded ever longer studies even though scientists say studies longer than 90 days yield no more useful data. (There have been numerous studies on GMOs longer than 90 days, but only the discredited Seralini research has hinted at any unusual health problems).

Is it likely that genetic modification can produce latent affects after lingering in the body for years? If it does, it will be proper scientific experiments that expose it. So far, moving the goalposts further and further away hasn’t revealed any such evidence.

Andrew Porterfield is a writer, editor and communications consultant for academic institutions, companies and non-profits in the life sciences. He is based in Camarillo, California. Follow @AMPorterfield on Twitter.

13 thoughts on “Anti-GMO activists circulate Judy Carman’s latest suspect “study” to fan safety fears”

  1. So according to one study only, GM feed is harmfull for pig’s digestive ? But no such evidence came from the BILIONS pigs already GM fed around the world ?

    Reply
    • Why? Who would fund a study that lacks plausible hypothesis or even a causal link. Why not just study pig hoof composition or tail length when fed GE feed?

      Reply
        • This argument is a strong one, made by you mutiple times, and never strongly addressed (that I have seen). I think people have no good reply–which means that many of the Genetic Modifications that people have been using are poorly thought out, and supported only by hugly flawed (though peer reviewed) science.

          Reply
          • Thanks. I really think the science needs to be done, and i really believe that there is a strong probability that glyphosate in the 10s of micrograms daily disrupts our gut microbiome in some real ways. I’m hoping someone picks up the question very soon and does a proper research study.

          • SageThinker has been running around from GMO blog to GMO blog spreading ignorance. Just wanted to cross post an excellent refutation of her main points from over on Science Based Medicine, due to her irritating tactic of hit and run pseudo-intellectualism:

            “First, why don’t you stay on topic there champ. What, you think your ill-thought-out, fearmongering, “fed to me by quacks” comment is going to provoke Dr. Gorski or Novella to take down the post when it’s your evidence-free statements against numerous scientific reviews?

            Second, glyphosate is spread on fields to prevent non-crop plants from germinating and growing, to reduce competition between just-germinating plants. It is not an insecticide, it is not sprayed on crops that are ripening before being harvested. It also breaks down quickly in the soil. There is a gap of at least days, and much more likely weeks or months, between glyphosate being sprayed and you sinking your teeth into an apple. While your concerns might be more valid if it were an insecticide used to protect food shortly before harvest or during storage, it’s really not a meaningful concern for something sprayed on a field as a herbicide. Yes, glyphosate might be deadly if you drink it – but since you aren’t ever going to drink it (right? You don’t sit down with a cupful for breakfast, do you?) then your concerns seem hyperbolic.

            Third, the shikimic acid pathway is not present in humans. Being present in gut bacteria isn’t the same thing as being present in humans, and the statement that it is found in gut bacteria is at best a starting point of a set of hypotheses leading to “it causes harm in humans”. Among the things you have to prove are:
            1) That humans consume significant amounts of glyphosate.
            2) That glyphosate affects the reproduction of gut bacteria.
            3) That the gut bacteria affected are linked to human health.
            4) That the gut bacteria don’t simply evolve around it.
            Each one of these statements is a premise that needs to be checked. If one fails, your whole argument is invalid. The current studies of gut bacteria certainly indicate there are consequences to impacting the gut biome, but they are hardly linear with a high penetrance; you can’t prevent or cure diabetes (either type) with a dose of bacteria for instance. At best, you can currently show, in heavily-inbred mice, that the predisposition towards (diabetes, obesity, whatever) is impacted by gut biome, in a statistical manner. If you can manage that, you still have to demonstrate a comparable outcome in humans.

            Fourth, 35 molecules of anything is insufficient to poison even a bacterium. Even something like polonium, the most toxic substance in the world, would not be deadly to even a bacterium with only 35 molecules involved. A bacterium is made up of millions of proteins, phospholipids, water molecules, DNA and more, 35 molecules wouldn’t even be noticed.

            Fifth, even if your drip-drip-drip of glyphosate statement were true, you’re describing a scenario where the bacteria would quickly and easily evolve around the presence of glyphosate. Plants are already starting to do so, and they require at least a season, if not a full year, to replicate, and replication with modification is how they evolve. In a year, a bacterium could replicate something like 26,000 times (525,600/20, 20 being the number of minutes a bacterium requires to replicate, 525,600 a nod to Rent). The presence of glyphosate, assuming it inhibits their metabolism and reproduction, present in a low level, would simply result in evolutionary pressure to deal with it to continue producing shikimic acid. The concentration wouldn’t be high enough to wipe out the species, just enough to foster replication and selection.

            The “systematic review” from 2000 that you linked to also contains the lie, as it says “Experimental evidence has shown that neither glyphosate nor AMPA bioaccumulates in any animal tissue.”

            However, glyphosate *does* accumulate in cells that have the shikimic acid pathway, like soybean plant cells, and like the microbes within our human gut. You may quibble that the gut microbiom biofilm community is not “animal tissue” and semantically you may be correct, but morally and in the spirit of the meaning, you would be weaseling out of responsibility to the health of the people of the planet who are ingesting glyphosate on a daily basis at risk to their gut microbiota.

            Science involves precisely-phrased statements tested clearly. Your “semantic” point misses the point – if the systematic review states that it doesn’t accumulate in animal tissues, it is irrelevant and wrong to try to bring in plants and single-celled organisms. That’s not a semantic argument, that’s a scientifically sound argument that is akin to saying the findings of the best way to grow mushrooms are not applicable to the best way to grow chickens. Even if glyphosate does accumulate in plants and bacteria, the fact that it doesn’t bioaccumulate in animal tissues means that when we eat those plants and bacteria, the glyphosate we may eat doesn’t stick with us.

            Learn some science.”

            The original can be found here:

            https://www.sciencebasedmedici

          • Not only are you completely inept at science, you aren’t a very good liar either, notice all of these posts where she was being quite demonstrably abusive after it was pointed out that the emperor has no clothes:

            https://www.sciencebasedmedici

            https://www.sciencebasedmedici

            https://www.sciencebasedmedici

            https://www.sciencebasedmedici

            https://www.sciencebasedmedici

            She was banned as a result of this inanity. Of course, her response was that she was banned because of the ‘power of her dialogue’.

            You weren’t banned for the ‘power of your dialogue’. You were banned because you refused to provide any citations or backup for your claims, and when pushed to do so would respond by acting like a spoiled child who had her allowance taken away.

            The only thing your posts are evidence of is the power of narcissistic delusion.

            Enjoy your continued irrelevance.

          • In other words, i’m wrong because of false fact 1 and false fact 2, but if i’m right that glyphosate disrupts the human gut microbiome, then it won’t be a problem because they’ll just evolve around it… without cost. False fact 3, 4, 5 etc. You’re full of nothing. You’re everything that you accuse me of being, and more. You project.

          • Funny how you claim repeatedly that the science hasn’t been done and needs to be done . . . yet you claim that you know for sure that it does bioaccumulate.

            So which is it? If the science HASN’T been done, then you have no way of knowing. Pretty clear you want to have your cake and eat it too. Science does not work in the manner you think it does. That reflects poorly on you, not us.

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