This holiday season, if you have anti-GMO family...

[nwdiver]

Point out this fact;

Every Sweet Potato in the world is a Trans-Genic GMO.

The Natural GMO

Sweet potatoes aren't tubers, like potatoes. They're roots — swollen, puffed-up parts of the root. "We think the bacteria genes help the plant produce two hormones that change the root and make it something edible," Kreuze tells Goats and Soda.

Even better.. this is a mechanism we use to create GMOs today.

 

[Sharkbait]

I've learned a lot about Teslas since joining this group. At the young age of 70, I am now educated more than I need to know about sweet potatoes, which I absolutely detest. I'm sticking to supercharger locations with the unhealthiest, greasiest junk food I can find. My cholesterol is 140 and my A1c is 5.6. I crave an In-N-Out burger long before I hit the next supercharger

 

[rxlawdude]

I've learned a lot about Teslas since joining this group. At the young age of 70, I am now educated more than I need to know about sweet potatoes, which I absolutely detest. I'm sticking to supercharger locations with the unhealthiest, greasiest junk food I can find. My cholesterol is 140 and my A1c is 5.6. I crave an In-N-Out burger long before I hit the next supercharger

+1

 

[David_Cary]

Right but nature doesn't do a GMO to make plants more pesticide resistant so they can really load up the toxins. Every crop has been modified over time. And vintage crops are generally healthier to eat. The concept of modifying isn't bad by itself but the goal is almost never to make things healthier. It is to increase crop yields and sometimes to make food taste better. Increasing crop yields isn't always a bad thing either but again - healthy is not the goal.

 

[nwdiver]

Right but nature doesn't do a GMO to make plants more pesticide resistant so they can really load up the toxins.

The definition of 'toxin' depends on species and dose. Oxygen is a 'toxin'. Caffeine is a toxin to insects. Glyphosate is not toxic to humans. More importantly Glyphosate is significantly better than the alternative that would need to be used.

healthy is not the goal.

Also not true. Golden Rice is genetically modified specifically to be a healthier food.

GMOs are another tool in the sustainability tool box that we NEED to use fight climate change. We need to keep doing more with less.

 

[dgpcolorado]

Another example of GMO was the rescue of papaya growing in Hawai'i (I'm fifth generation Hawaiian born and papaya is my favorite fruit). A virus was damaging the crops and a coat protein gene from the virus was spliced into the papaya genome, which offered resistance to the blight. Last I checked the mechanism of the resistance wasn't well understood, although it may have been figured out by now.

Without the GMO papayas, the growing of them would have had to be abandoned; other solutions, such as hybrids or netting the fruit to exclude the aphid virus vector, were much less effective or very difficult to implement. Nevertheless, there remains a lot of pushback by anti-GMO factions; in my experience they are profoundly ignorant. [However, I am a molecular biologist (long retired) and they are not.]