Genetically Modified Organisms Quotes

The world has genetically modified opinions, but mine are organic. Taste them and you will see.

genetically modified organism (GMO): (n.) member of the public who has regularly consumed the biotech industry’s food products.

that I fear what may come from genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in our food supply. We literally have no idea what these GMOs may do to our interior environment and which genes may inadvertently be turned on or off. I’m a big believer in science studying natural processes, then trying to follow that as much as possible.

The next step in the process of making modern farming more efficient and profitable was genetic modification. In bioengineered plants, lectins are artificially inserted. Scientists selectively add foreign genes into a plant’s basic genome to command the plant to manufacture specific lectins that enhance the plant’s ability to resist insects and other pests. This is one form of genetically modified organisms (GMO).

A talk show, for example, with one scientist who says genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are safe and one activist who says they are dangerous looks “balanced,” but in reality that is ridiculously skewed, because nearly nine out of ten scientists think GMOs are safe for consumption. At some point, in the midst of all the bickering, the public simply gives up and goes back to relying on simpler sources of information, even if it is a meme on Facebook.

History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers ; but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that current food production can sustain world food needs even for the 8 billion people who are projected to inhabit the planet in 2030. This will hold even with anticipated increases in meat consumption, and without adding genetically modified crops.

For evolution to be true, there would have been innumerable transitional forms between different types of creatures. Therefore, for every known fossil species, many more must have existed to connect it to its ancestors and descendents [sic]. This is yet another example of evolutionary conclusions coming before the evidence. Really, the claim is an implicit admission that large numbers of transitional forms are predicted, which heightens the difficulty for evolutionists, given how few there are that even they could begin to claim were candidates. . . . Evolutionists believe that mutation provides new information for selection. But no known mutation has ever increased genetic information, although there should be many examples observable today if mutation/selection were truly adequate to explain the goo-to-you theory. . . . Adaptation and natural selection are biological facts; amoeba-to-man evolution is not. Natural selection can only work on the genetic information present in a population of organisms--it cannot create new information. For example, since no known reptiles have genes for feathers, no amount of selection will produce a feathered reptile. Mutations in genes can only modify or eliminate existing structures, not create new ones. If in a certain environment a lizard survives better with smaller legs, or no legs, then varieties with this trait will be selected for. This might more accurately be called devolution, not evolution. . . . Note that even if such a mutation were ever discovered, evolutionists would still need to find hundreds more to give their theory the observational boost it desperately needs.

It’s true, organic food is more expensive to grow, and we have to be willing to pay for it. Some people see that as a luxury. I always come back to the same question: Would we rather give our money to the farmer or the pharmacist, the grocer or the doctor? Do we want to spend a fortune in the future trying to fix the damage being done today? Once we compare the potential risk and reward, the extra cost of eating clean food may seem worth it. Eating is the single most important thing we can do to stay healthy. If good, clean food isn’t worth our money, what is? Organic blackberries cost double the normal kind? How does that compare to the price of chemotherapy? How does burning out your insides with toxic chemicals and destroying your immune system and puking out your guts and losing all your hair stack up against spending three dollars more on that organic produce? Your body responds to what you put inside it. It’s simple. How could anything else be possible? You’d accept that if we were talking about your car. Why not your body? Clean also means food that contains no genetically modified organisms—GMOs. This is the really scary stuff, and it’s in the news every day as the big corporations fight every effort to label engineered foods. The fact that the industry is against truth in labeling tells us all we need to know.

I had to be at work at 8 am this morning, so I set my alarm clock for 7:49. Naturally, my body woke my brain up at 1:11 precisely, and I laid in bed trying to convince myself two things: one, that I function better on little sleep, and two, that I am a genetically modified human that requires 1/8th the required sleep of organically grown men.

the planned destruction of Iraq’s agriculture is not widely known. Modern Iraq is part of the ‘fertile crescent’ of Mesopotamia where man first domesticated wheat between 8,000 and 13,000 years ago, and home to several thousand varieties of local wheat. As soon as the US took over Iraq, it became clear its interests were not limited to oil. In 2004, Paul Bremer, the then military head of the Provisional Authority imposed as many as a hundred laws which made short work of Iraq’s sovereignty. The most crippling for the people and the economy of Iraq was Order 81 which deals, among other things, with plant varieties and patents. The goal was brutally clear-cut and sweeping — to wipe out Iraq’s traditional, sustainable agriculture and replace it with oil-chemical-genetically-modified-seed-based industrial agriculture. There was no public or parliamentary debate for the conquered people who never sought war. The conquerors made unilateral changes in Iraq’s 1970 patent law: henceforth, plant forms could be patented — which was never allowed before — while genetically-modified organisms were to be introduced. Farmers were strictly banned from saving their own seeds: this, in a country where, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, 97 per cent of Iraqi farmers planted only their own saved seeds. With a single stroke of the pen, Iraq’s agriculture was axed, while Order 81 facilitated the introduction and domination of imported, high-priced corporate seeds, mainly from the US — which neither reproduce, nor give yields without their prescribed chemical fertiliser and pesticide inputs. It meant that the majority of farmers who had never spent money on seed and inputs that came free from nature, would henceforth have to heavily invest in corporate inputs and equipment — or go into debt to obtain them, or accept lowered profits, or give up farming altogether.

Plasticity in all the brain's systems is an innately determined characteristic. This may sound like a nature-nurture contradiction, but it is not. An innate capacity for synapses to record and store information is what allows systems to encode experiences. If the synapses of a particular brain system cannot change, this system will not have the ability to be modified by experience and to maintain the modified state. As a result, the organism will not be able to learn and remember through the functioning of that system. All learning, in other words, depends ont he operation of genetically programmed capacities to learn. Learning involves the nurturing of nature.

Today, genetically modified ingredients are found in at least 75 percent of all non-organic U.S. processed foods, including in many products labeled as “natural” or “all natural.” But are they good for us? Our government says GMOs are no biggie, yet the European Union, Australia, and Japan have restricted or banned them. Based on animal research, the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM), an international organization of physicians, has stated that there are serious health problems linked to eating genetically modified foods, such as infertility, immune system problems, accelerated aging, insulin problems, cholesterol regulation, gut problems, and organ damage.

Perhaps nowhere is modern chemistry more important than in the development of new drugs to fight disease, ameliorate pain, and enhance the experience of life. Genomics, the identification of genes and their complex interplay in governing the production of proteins, is central to current and future advances in pharmacogenomics, the study of how genetic information modifies an individual's response to drugs and offering the prospect of personalized medicine, where a cocktail of drugs is tailored to an individual's genetic composition. Even more elaborate than genomics is proteomics, the study of an organism's entire complement of proteins, the entities that lie at the workface of life and where most drugs act. Here computational chemistry is in essential alliance with medical chemistry, for if a protein implicated in a disease can be identified, and it is desired to terminate its action, then computer modelling of possible molecules that can invade and block its active site is the first step in rational drug discovery. This too is another route to the efficiencies and effectiveness of personalized medicine.

It is conceivable that an interplay of genes and epigenes coordinates human embryogenesis. Let us return, yet again, to Morgan's problem: the creation of a multicellular organism from a one-celled embryo. Seconds after fertilization, a quickening begins in the embryo. Proteins reach into the nucleus of the cell and start flicking genetic switches on and off. A dormant spaceship comes to life. Genes are activated and repressed, and these genes, in turn, encode yet other proteins that activate and repress other genes. A single cell divides to form two, then four, and eight cells. An entire layer of cells forms, then hollows out into the outer skin of a ball. Genes that coordinate metabolism, motility, cell fate, and identity fire "on." The boiler room warms us. The lights flicker on in the corridors. The intercom crackles alive. Now a second code stirs to life to ensure that gene expression is locked into place in each cell, enabling each cell to acquire and fix an identity. Chemical marks are selectively added to certain genes and erased from others, modulating the expression of the genes in that cell alone. Methyl groups are inserted and erased, and histones are modified to repress or activate genes. The embryo unfurls step by step. Primordial segements appear, and cells take their positions along various parts of the embryo. New genes are activated that command subroutines to grow limbs and organs, and more chemical marks are appended on the genomes of individual cells. Cells are added to create organs and structures-forelegs, hind legs, muscles, kidneys, bones, eyes. Some cells die a programmed death. Genes that maintain function, metabolism, and repair are turned on. An organism emerges from a cell.

Watching what you eat ought to include knowing what what you eat ate.

Researchers developed ways to extract genes from one species and insert them into the genetic code of another—a technique that can, among other things, cause invading insects to kill themselves. The organisms produced in this fashion, which we eat, are called Genetically Modified Organisms or GMOs, sometimes Genetically Engineered Organisms (GEOs) or, for this chapter, Genetically Modified Food (GMF).

Dr. Banks and his team could have learned a lot from watching The Secret of NIMH a few times. Maybe it would have convinced them that modifying the genetic code of living organisms wasn’t as much fun as they thought it was.

These groups were a new kind of vehicle: a hive or colony of close genetic relatives, which functioned as a unit (e.g., in foraging and fighting) and reproduced as a unit. These are the motorboating sisters in my example, taking advantage of technological innovations and mechanical engineering that had never before existed. It was another transition. Another kind of group began to function as though it were a single organism, and the genes that got to ride around in colonies crushed the genes that couldn’t “get it together” and rode around in the bodies of more selfish and solitary insects. The colonial insects represent just 2 percent of all insect species, but in a short period of time they claimed the best feeding and breeding sites for themselves, pushed their competitors to marginal grounds, and changed most of the Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems (for example, by enabling the evolution of flowering plants, which need pollinators).43 Now they’re the majority, by weight, of all insects on Earth. What about human beings? Since ancient times, people have likened human societies to beehives. But is this just a loose analogy? If you map the queen of the hive onto the queen or king of a city-state, then yes, it’s loose. A hive or colony has no ruler, no boss. The queen is just the ovary. But if we simply ask whether humans went through the same evolutionary process as bees—a major transition from selfish individualism to groupish hives that prosper when they find a way to suppress free riding—then the analogy gets much tighter. Many animals are social: they live in groups, flocks, or herds. But only a few animals have crossed the threshold and become ultrasocial, which means that they live in very large groups that have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.44 Beehives and ant nests, with their separate castes of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultrasociality, and so are human societies. One of the key features that has helped all the nonhuman ultra-socials to cross over appears to be the need to defend a shared nest. The biologists Bert Hölldobler and E. O. Wilson summarize the recent finding that ultrasociality (also called “eusociality”)45 is found among a few species of shrimp, aphids, thrips, and beetles, as well as among wasps, bees, ants, and termites: In all the known [species that] display the earliest stages of eusociality, their behavior protects a persistent, defensible resource from predators, parasites, or competitors. The resource is invariably a nest plus dependable food within foraging range of the nest inhabitants.46 Hölldobler and Wilson give supporting roles to two other factors: the need to feed offspring over an extended period (which gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help out Mom) and intergroup conflict. All three of these factors applied to those first early wasps camped out together in defensible naturally occurring nests (such as holes in trees). From that point on, the most cooperative groups got to keep the best nesting sites, which they then modified in increasingly elaborate ways to make themselves even more productive and more protected. Their descendants include the honeybees we know today, whose hives have been described as “a factory inside a fortress.”47

The prevailing feeling is that too many opportunities are opening too quickly and that our ability to modify genes is outpacing our capacity for making wise and farsighted use of the skill. The result is that we’re at present using only a fraction of the potential of genetic engineering. Most of the organisms now being engineered are those with the weakest political lobbies – plants, fungi, bacteria and insects. For

The Psychopathology of CCD What am I doing tomorrow? Don’t ask me. Just follow the dance of my double helix, its sinuous spiral twisting like an impetuous nursery of stars on a collision course with the child care nebula. Maybe you can read my palm pilot for my schedule -- I’m just a drone serving the queen bee, serving some other queen, in some master plan unknown to me, possibly unknown even to the Omniscient Beeing, no longer smug in Her certainty, her kids rooting for the teat of extinction, thirsty, hungry, wet and gone clubbing all night. I can’t handle the stress anymore, pesticides, cell phone radiation, genetically modified crops, a Starbucks on every other block, global warming, gay marriage and now this economic crisis. Fuck it! I’m not going back to the hive. I’ve flying to Bali and opening up a yoga/dance studio with an organic café. “Wait! I’m coming with you.” “Me too!

The 49-year-old Bryant, who resembles a cereal box character himself with his wide eyes, toothy smile, and elongated chin, blames Kellogg's financial woes on the changing tastes of fickle breakfast eaters. The company flourished in the Baby Boom era, when fathers went off to work and mothers stayed behind to tend to three or four children. For these women, cereal must have been heaven-sent. They could pour everybody a bowl of Corn Flakes, leave a milk carton out, and be done with breakfast, except for the dishes. Now Americans have fewer children. Both parents often work and no longer have time to linger over a serving of Apple Jacks and the local newspaper. Many people grab something on the way to work and devour it in their cars or at their desks while checking e-mail. “For a while, breakfast cereal was convenience food,” says Abigail Carroll, author of Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal. “But convenience is relative. It's more convenient to grab a breakfast bar, yogurt, a piece of fruit, or a breakfast sandwich at some fast-food place than to eat a bowl of breakfast cereal.” People who still eat breakfast at home favor more laborintensive breakfasts, according to a recent Nielsen survey. They spend more time at the stove, preparing oatmeal (sales were up 3.5 percent in the first half of 2014) and eggs (up 7 percent last year). They're putting their toasters to work, heating up frozen waffles, French toast, and pancakes (sales of these foods were up 4.5 percent in the last five years). This last inclination should be helping Kellogg: It owns Eggo frozen waffles. But Eggo sales weren't enough to offset its slumping U.S. cereal numbers. “There has just been a massive fragmentation of the breakfast occasion,” says Julian Mellentin, director of food analysis at research firm New Nutrition Business. And Kellogg faces a more ominous trend at the table. As Americans become more healthconscious, they're shying away from the kind of processed food baked in Kellogg's four U.S. cereal factories. They tend to be averse to carbohydrates, which is a problem for a company selling cereal derived from corn, oats, and rice. “They basically have a carb-heavy portfolio,” says Robert Dickerson, senior packagedfood analyst at Consumer Edge. If such discerning shoppers still eat cereal, they prefer the gluten-free kind, sales of which are up 22 percent, according to Nielsen. There's also growing suspicion of packagedfood companies that fill their products with genetically modified organisms (GMOs). For these breakfast eaters, Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam may seem less like friendly childhood avatars and more like malevolent sugar traffickers.

That the marketability of added nutrients is at an all-time high is evidenced by the fact that artificial sweeteners now contain them. Packets of Splenda Essentials have B1, B5, and B6 “to help support a healthy metabolism.” In fact, vitamins and minerals are so thoroughly embraced that they’re the only synthetic ingredients with carte blanche approval for inclusion in certified organic products, even when those vitamins and minerals are produced with genetically modified (GM) bacteria or have been synthesized from noxious petrochemicals. GM technology and toxic chemicals are otherwise banned from organics. Vitamins

The energetic vibration of this food is dense and its absorption detrimentally affects our energy systems. It is our choice as a community whether we accept these unnatural “foods” onto our kitchen table. It is most appropriate to communicate with our elected representatives and food stores that we demand all foods be labelled clearly. Then we may express our choices at the check-outs by purchasing foods that contain natural, non genetically modified, organically produced plants.

Fruits: blueberries, strawberries, apples, melons, pears, peaches •  Miscellaneous: celery, peppers, tomatoes •  Root vegetables: potatoes, sweet potatoes, squash •  Leafy green vegetables: all lettuces, kale, cabbage, spinach, other greens •  Animal protein: beef, poultry, dairy, eggs (especially because these animals, when not organically fed and properly pastured, are fed a diet of antibiotics, growth hormones, and genetically modified foods that will exacerbate your existing hormonal imbalance)

Genetically modified organisms. You are what you eat…

She thinks of Stanley's colored pencil drawings of theoretical businesses: a cafe, a bookshop, and, always, a grocery store. When she was ten and he was fourteen, he was already working as a bag boy at Publix, reading what their father called "hippie books." He talked about stuff like citrus canker, the Big Sugar mafia, and genetically modified foods and organisms. He got his store manager to order organic butter after Stanley'd read (in the 'Berkeley Wellness' newsletter) about the high concentration of pesticides in dairy. Then, for weeks, the expensive stuff (twice as much as regular) sat in the case, untouched. So Stanley used his own savings to buy the remaining inventory and stashed in his mother's cold storage. He took some butter to his school principal and spoke passionately about the health benefits of organic dairy: they bought a case for the cafeteria. He ordered more butter directly from the dairy co-operative and sold some to the Cuban-French bakery in the Gables, then sold some more from a big cooler at the Coconut Grove farmer's market. He started making a profit and people came back to him, asking for milk and ice cream. The experience changed Stanley- he was sometimes a little weird and pompous and intense before, but somehow, he began to seem cool and worldly.

I mean, he could blow old Capitalist-Stevie here away." Felice doesn't respond. She pulls the backs of her ankles in close to her butt and rests her chin on the flat of one her knees. She thinks of Stanley's colored pencil drawings of theoretical businesses: a cafe, a bookshop, and, always, a grocery store. When she was ten and he was fourteen, he was already working as a bag boy at Publix, reading what their father called "hippie books." He talked about stuff like citrus canker, the Big Sugar mafia, and genetically modified foods and organisms. He got his store manager to order organic butter after Stanley'd read (in the 'Berkeley Wellness' newsletter) about the high concentration of pesticides in dairy. Then, for weeks, the expensive stuff (twice as much as regular) sat in the case, untouched. So Stanley used his own savings to buy the remaining inventory and stashed in his mother's cold storage. He took some butter to his school principal and spoke passionately about the health benefits of organic dairy: they bought a case for the cafeteria. He ordered more butter directly from the dairy co-operative and sold some to the Cuban-French bakery in the Gables, then sold some more from a big cooler at the Coconut Grove farmer's market. He started making a profit and people came back to him, asking for milk and ice cream. The experience changed Stanley- he was sometimes a little weird and pompous and intense before, but somehow, he began to seem cool and worldly. Their mother, however, said she couldn't afford to use his ingredients in her business. They'd fought about it. Stanley said that Avis had never really supported him. Avis asked if it wasn't hypocritical of Stanley to talk about healthy eating while he was pushing butter. And Stanley replied that he'd learned from the master, that her entire business was based on the cultivation of expensive heart attacks.

Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer have grown into global seed giants, now controlling 45 percent of all the seed sold in the world. Short of going completely organic and dropping out of growing commodity grains, how is a farmer supposed to avoid raising corn and soybeans that have been genetically modified to withstand Roundup?

​More than GM Foods I am afraid of GMM People. Genetically and Mentally Mutated People. The Entire Ecosystem Mutates.

The seed we were planting was Pioneer Hi-Bred’s 34H31, a strain that the catalog described as “an adaptable hybrid with solid agronomics and yield potential.” The lack of hype, notable for a seed catalog, probably reflects the fact that 34H31 does not contain the “YieldGard gene,” the Monsanto-developed line of genetically engineered corn that Pioneer is currently pushing: The genetically modified 34B98, on the same page, promises “outstanding yield potential.” Despite the promises, Naylor, unlike many of his neighbors, doesn’t plant GMOs (genetically modified organisms). He has a gut distrust of the technology (“They’re messing with three billion years of evolution”) and doesn’t think it’s worth the extra twenty-five dollars a bag (in technology fees) they cost. “Sure, you might get a yield bump, but whatever you make on the extra corn goes right back to cover the premium for the seed. I fail to see why I should be laundering money for Monsanto.” As Naylor sees it, GMO seed is just the latest chapter in an old story: Farmers eager to increase their yields adopt the latest innovation, only to find that it’s the companies selling the innovations who reap the most from the gain in the farmer’s productivity.

Why I buy organic whenever possible By definition, if a food is certified organic it is not genetically modified and was not sprayed by glyphosate. I don’t think this is the only reason to buy organic produce, however. I view it as an investment in my health, our family’s health, and the health of our planet. The chemicals being used in modern agriculture aren’t affecting only us; they’re affecting the health of our soil. If you don’t have healthy soil, you can’t have nutritious food. Human health starts in the dirt. We need to protect this precious commodity. When you spend your money, you are placing your vote in a way. You are empowering an industry. I, for one, choose to empower our organic farmers and regenerative agriculture. They are healers just as our doctors are. Only with them can we enrich our soil, increase biodiversity, and heal ecosystems large (our planet) and small (your gut). Let’s rally behind them and give them the support they deserve.

Genetically Modified Food produce proteins that the DNA does not recognise and so is unable to use these proteins in the reproduction of a new cell. The result is mutated cells.

Despite the fear evoked by the idea of genetically modified organisms, those of the natural variety are hard to beat when it comes to posing serious threats to humanity. Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of bubonic plague, is estimated to have killed as many as a third to a half of all Europeans in the Black Death epidemic of the mid-fourteenth century. The bacterium made a comeback appearance in the Great Plague, another wave of annihilation that swept through the Continent in 1665–1666.

Ecuador’s 2008 constitution also includes extremely detailed provisions about the environmental laws, policies, and programs needed to fulfill these ambitious goals. For example, the constitution prohibits genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from being used in agriculture, clarifies that access to safe drinking water is a fundamental human right, and emphasizes the importance of sustainable modes of transportation, going so far as to mandate that bicycle lanes be given priority in urban areas.

In this vision, the worlds is conceived as multiple and performative, i.e. shaped through practices, as different from a single pre-existing reality. This is why, for Bruno Latour, politics should become material, a Dingpolitik revolving around things and issues of concern, rather than around values and beliefs. Stem cells, mobile phones, genetically modified organisms, pathogens, new infrastructure and new reproductive technologies brings concerned publics into being that create diverse forms of knowledge about these matters and diverse forms of action - beyond institutions, political interests or ideologies that delimit the traditional domain of politics. Whether it is called ontological politics, Dingpolitik or cosmopolitics, this form of politics recognizes the vital role of nom-humans, in concrete situations, co-creating diverse forms of knowledge that need to be acknowledged and incorporated rather than silenced. Particular attention has gone to that most central organization of all for political geographers: the state. Instead of conceiving the state as a unified actor, it should be approached as an assemblage, which makes heterogenous points of order - geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological particularities - resonate together. As such, the state is an effect rather than the origin of power, and one should focus on reconstructing the socio-material basis of its functioning. The concept of assemblage questions the naturalization of hegemonic assemblages and renders them open to political challenge by exposing their contingency.

To the best of our knowledge, there’s no evidence that GMOs (genetically modified organisms that have been designed or manipulated to produce certain characteristics) can affect your child’s microbiome in any way.

Although we pay lip service to science, the emphasis on empirical evidence and logic that distinguish true science from pseudoscience or other imitations is absent from much of the debate over topics such as climate change, vaccination and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

In 2016, over 100 Nobel laureates – about one third of all living Nobel medal holders – wrote an open letter to Greenpeace criticising their position on genetically modified organisms and on Golden Rice in particular.

The first step to healing the gut lining is understanding the causal insults, then eliminating or minimizing these. Here is a list of the potential triggers: Sugar Allergy/sensitivity to gluten (or other grain allergens), dairy, or other foods Allergy/sensitivity to chemicals such as those found in processed foods (sodas, artificial sweeteners, preservatives, dyes, binders, and so on) Herbicides (such as glyphosate) Pesticides GMO foods (genetically modified organisms) Alcohol Antibiotics—orally or in animal-based foods sourced from CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) Anti-inflammatories—such as aspirin or other NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs like ibuprofen), or steroids Stress In addition

So from this we can see that there is a tension between nature and individual organisms. Everything alive or organic in nature has a finite life and dies eventually—even Methuselah lived less than a thousand years. But it usually dies after reproducing offspring with a genetic code in one way or another different from that of the parents, with their information modified. Methuselah’s genetic information is still present in Damascus, Jerusalem, and, of course, Brooklyn, New York. Nature does not find its members very helpful after their reproductive abilities are depleted (except perhaps special situations in which animals live in groups, such as the need for grandmothers in the human and elephant domains to assist others in preparing offspring to take charge). Nature prefers to let the game continue at the informational level, the genetic code. So organisms need to die for nature to be antifragile—nature is opportunistic, ruthless, and selfish.

Continuing to do research on genetic modification, and occasionally using successfully modified organisms for specific purposes such as the production of expensive drugs, make good sense. Helping developing countries to produce more food is a worthy aim, but it is sometimes used as an excuse for an alternative agenda, or as a convenient way to demonise opponents. There is little doubt that the technology needs better regulation: I find it bizarre that standard food safety tests are not required, on the grounds that the plants have not been changed in any significant way, but that the innovations are so great that they deserve patent protection, contrary to the long-standing view that naturally occurring objects and substances cannot be patented. Either it’s new, and needs testing like anything else, or it’s not, and should not be patentable. It is also disturbing, in an age when commercial sponsors blazon their logos across athletes’ shirts and television screens, that the biotechnology industry has fought a lengthy political campaign to prevent any mention of their product being placed on food. The reason is clear enough: to avoid any danger of a consumer boycott. But consumers are effectively being force-fed products that they may not want, and whose presence is being concealed. Our current understanding of genetics and ecology is inadequate when it comes to the widespread use of genetically modified organisms in the natural environment or agriculture. Why take the risk of distributing the material, when the likely gains for most of us – as opposed to short-term profits for biotechnology companies – are tiny or non-existent?

Soy Even though a wide range of products made from soybeans have been marketed as a health food in recent years, research proves that (unfermented) soy is extremely unhealthy. Most soy products in the United States are not fermented. Unfermented soy is a problem for the following reasons: 1. It contains dangerous quantities of antinutrients, which are substances that block the body from absorbing important nutrients. The most notable are hemagglutinin, goitrogens, and phytic acid. Hemagglutinin promotes unhealthy blood clotting and blocks oxygen. Goitrogens prevent iodine from reaching the thyroid. Without iodine, the thyroid can enlarge and malfunction. Phytic acid blocks the body's absorption of essential minerals like calcium and magnesium. 2. It has lots of phytoestrogens, which do damage by mimicking estrogen inside the body. 3. It contains lysinoalanine, a known toxin, and nitrosamines, which are known carcinogens. 4. It has harmful levels of the mineral manganese and dangerous amounts of aluminum from being processed in aluminum containers. 5. It has a high risk of contamination with mycotoxins. 6. It is almost always genetically modified. As you can see, soy has pretty much everything going against it. Fortunately, it's easy to avoid processed soy in the United States because it must be listed as an ingredient on product labels. Most soy in Asian cuisine is different because it's been fermented. Fermentation greatly decreases the antinutrient and phytic acid levels. Fermented soy products include tempeh, miso, and natto. Most of these products are still highly processed and artificial, though, and soy sauce naturally contains MSG. To avoid GMO soy, make sure that any fermented soy product you eat is organic, or better yet just don't eat it at all. Even in areas of the world like Asia where fermented soy is common, people actually don't eat much of it. A 1998 study found that Japanese men eat only about eight grams of soy per day (a teaspoon or two). The average misguided American consumes far more than this when he drinks a glass of soy milk or eats a soy burger (and these soy products aren't even fermented).