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Companies are changing their recipes to remove GMOs, and plenty of customers think that’s great. But these moves play more on irrational fear than actual science, and basing all your food choices on avoiding “unnatural” ingredients may not be as healthy as you’d think.
To label “GMOs” as being universally safe or unsafe is misguided. They’re not a kind of food, they’re a way of making food — one that’s been used successfully for many years. From Slate:
The people who push GMO labels and GMO-free shopping aren’t informing you or protecting you. They’re using you…They use your anxiety to justify GMO labels, and then they use GMO labels to justify your anxiety. Keeping you scared is the key to their political and business strategy.
Meanwhile, the obsession with avoiding GMOs ignores a lot of food-safety nuance. One example is Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which is used as a pesticide. When plants are genetically engineered to produce it themselves, consumers actually ingest less Bt than when farmers spray it onto un-engineered plants. So arguing against GMO plants that produce Bt is quite misguided — if you believe these plants are dangerous, then the spray-on pesticide you’ll get as an alternative is even more so.
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Chipotle is already being sued for their misleading anti-GMO marketing: Their soft drinks aren’t GMO-free, and their livestock eat GM feed. Which is fine. But it raises questions about just how much companies actually care about making their food “safe” from these supposedly dangerous ingredients.
“If they really wanted to improve people’s health, they should worry a lot more about the salt and fat in their burritos,” Gregory Jaffe, director of biotechnology at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told The Post in May.
Read full, original post: Why ‘GMO-free’ is a marketing ploy you shouldn’t fall for
