Continuing on with this silliness. GMO.

I agree that it's a true contradiction in terms for someone to be so concerned about his health and the sources of his food and then smoke. I have a friend who is an environmental activist and also smokes, and I can never understand that.

I did a search for the word "smoke" to find out what the gossip is about. That's the extent of my listening to gossip. People who gossip have a problem with self esteem, and should work on becoming a happier and more loving person. GMO's, fatty foods, and laziness (letting others do all the physical work) will kill you before things like tobacco, car wrecks, etc. will. The wrong kind of food and lifestyle is just a slower death, but heart disease, diabetes, and many others are caused by food (if you want to call it food). Though I might not agree with someone's choices, I am not their judge. We're supposed to love each other, not make enemies of each other. We must look in the mirror before we blast others for their choices.

This message was edited May 19, 2013 7:46 AM

hi I am the king I rule this thread to stay open lol


This message was edited May 16, 2013 7:06 PM

I thought it was nancynurse who started the GMO discussion. http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/1299045/

Solace Nancynurse can't hold a candle to Bernie.

Nancynurse started the original thread, but it got so lengthy that people asked that a new one be started so Bernie did so. Doesn't make it his thread, though. I just think people got tired of repeating their positions when the other side wasn't really listening. Some good stuff came out of it, though.

This message was edited May 19, 2013 7:47 AM

Bernie, just unwatch the thread if our chatting bothers you!

Nancy's first thread expressed concern about roundup residuals, which i did not agree with, no mention of GMO, other than "roundup tolerant" and then the Don Quixote people that imagine GMO is a threat took it over as a platform for their cause.

I agree with Greenhouse that some good came out of it, we all expressed our opinions, no minds were changed, and the only thing we seemed to agree on was that it was time to let it die a natural death.

But those people that still have something to say, should be allowed to say it until they reach the point they are only talking to themselves.

Ernie

Bernie is right GH you have no right to tell him to unwatch anything. Do you think you are the thread police? I don't remember voting for you.

Bernie is attempting to tell people that because he started this thread, which is just a continuation of Nancy's, he can decide when it's closed. That doesn't bother you but my suggesting that he can unwatch the thread if he doesn't want to see any more entries does? Oh well.

This message was edited May 19, 2013 7:48 AM

^_^ You all are hilarious! I have enjoyed our lengthy discussions and it is good to have a forum where we can all express ourselves on whatever topic that we chose. this has been quite lively at times, and will always give a nice balanced approach...eventually...

As far as smoking is concerned, lung cancer isn't the only damage that it can do. My mother died of emphysema and my father of heart disease which smoking made its contribution. Each one had died too soon as well as my grandfather. My sister-in-law finally quit when she had to go through chemo and radiation...what an awful thing to have to endure.

My sister and I had no interest in cigarettes whatsover. I used to close my bedroom door and open my window at times as I was smoked out of any common living areas...how can you tell your parents what to do? Still, it was the social norm at that time as most people smoked.

These days there is a lot more information about the subject, and the tobacco companies do not rule quite as much. Still, so many youth are lured into it...I really wonder what is the motivation??? Anyone here hold stocks in their portfolio on tobacco companies?

My understanding is that the person who starts the thread CAN close it. It has happened before. He said it's closed so I don't understand why that's such a big deal. There is nothing stopping anybody from starting another one. If you don't believe me ask Admin. Nancy hasn't been on this thread in a long time BUT since Bernie started it HE can close it. Just bc you don't know the DG rules, Bernie does, don't blame him. Just start another thread...

Zeesh, what an unfriendly bunch all of sudden! Bye!

OK, Lisa, why don't we know when to quit...?? You are right. Whoever wants to start a new thread, or not...

I think Bernie is a she, or maybe I'm mistaken.

This message was edited May 19, 2013 7:49 AM

Sorry for the gender mistake, Bernie. I saw a photo once, you had posted, and thought it was you. Might have been your wife.

Solace, i am glad he cleared that up for you. Country sounded to me like he would be a good neighbor, but he sure never sounded like he would be a good wife.

Ernie

My name is Ernie and I live with my one and only Bride Linda. We have been married 46 and a half years but whose counting. We have lived in this house 41 years and I don1't plan on moving.

We are retired and have a two acre yard that is inhabited by three Golden retrievers, three cats ,five pheasants, a green house bunny, And nine working girls that give us and our friends fresh eggs lol. Oh
poo I almost forgot the eight parakeets and the 3 cockatiels.

Bernie I have a fully insulated shop with heat. I gave most of my big tools that I had duplicates of to my son. I have lots of toys left. I am a wood worker, metal fabricator, welder, and machinist. Favorite project I built a 32 foot boat and a trailer to carry it, I commercially crab fished for five years with it.

That's enough about me how now about you?

Follow the plight of Indian farmers using GMO methods, seeds,

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1082559/The-GM-genocide-Thousands-Indian-farmers-committing-suicide-using-genetically-modified-crops.html

Nice to see you weighing in again, Nancy. I was puzzled by Ernie's statement that "Nancy's first thread expressed concern about roundup residuals, which i did not agree with, no mention of GMO, other than 'roundup tolerant' and then the Don Quixote people that imagine GMO is a threat took it over as a platform for their cause." The title of your thread was actually "GMO'd Vegetable Seeds?"

I had heard about what's happening in India and wondered what the story was. Thanks for posting it.

And these deaths are to be blamed on GMO. Give us a break. People have been committing suicide for years to 'escape' the results of their poor decisions in financial matters...

Google 'suicide stock market'

BTW, Prince Charles (like King George III) is mentally incompetent, although some prefer to say that he is just "misunderstood".

I was going to comment but felt better of it. I will now leave this thread forever.

Also this Brazilian study regarding a link between GMOs and leukemia:

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/350126

and here's the complete article in the Journal of Hematology and Thromboembolic Diseases:

http://esciencecentral.org/journals/JHTD/JHTD-1-104.php?aid=11822%3Faid%3D11822

This message was edited May 19, 2013 11:25 AM

And yet there are still no actual facts to backup their research... Tell me GG, how EXACTLY Bt kills a targeted insect vs a non-targeted lab rat...

BTW, an you also explain to me the difference between “sugar” from a GM sugar beet and non-GM sugar beet (or any other source of sugar). Go ahead, give it a shot...

As you know, I personally have no concerns about the safety of GMOs or Round Up. I also support the right of people to make choices about what they eat and think we should provide them with the information they need to do so as long as they pay for it.



This message was edited May 19, 2013 11:39 AM

I am a little confused since I am not a scientist at all. Where are these GMO toxins produced? in the corm kernel itself that we eat? Are they feeding these toxins to the mice after extracting them from the corn? Or does the plant produce toxins in the soil? or in itself but not the fruit or vegetable? Thanks for any clarification on this!

Gardadore, I'm not a scientist either. I was just impressed that this was a carefully conducted study published in a peer-reviewed journal indicating some problems with GMO foods. Several people on this thread have insisted that there's no science to back up the concerns expressed here, so I thought they might find the study of interest.

I have a scientific background but none of you has taken my posts seriously I thought you were all scientists considering you all appear to be experts on GMOs. I am not for GMOs in food I don't need to wait years for somebody to tell me it's bad for me. I believe that we tried that with Asbestos.

I don't appreciate being called unfriendly bc I told you what the rules are on DG, talk about shooting the messenger. No, Bernie is not a woman the pic was another DGer, not his wife. If you had read the post you would know this...I won't be back on this thread and ive seen many members true colors...me, me, me

Like Evelyn said "why don't we know when to quit? "

I am out of here,

down with the Nurse Gang

The "Indian suicide" article, while very sad, was not about foods from GM crops being toxic, or potentially toxic, or having unproven, possible, hypothetical effects after decades of use.

It was about desperate, starving people committing suicide. Full of potent emotion, hardly mentioning the underlying facts. No relevance to "GMO dangers", Roundup toxicity or reasons for food labeling. It was very heavy on emotional tear-jerking, but EXTREMELY MISLEADING about the way it seemed to blame GMOs for the suicides.

I was surprised that the article didn't go into whether it was lies by Monsanto, governmental greed, government stupidity, or the farmers' not knowing that Bt corn has no boll weevil resistance.

The article spoke about cotton weevils devastating a crop ... AS IF it were the fault of GMOs ... as if the GM cotton had betrayed the farmers. That is like blaming an electric car for not curing your hair-loss. (I am assuming it was Bt-enhanced cotton.)

Bt does NOT control boll weevils. Never did (as far as a little research showed me.) I know nothing about farming and I found that out in about 3 minutes.

As they found in Mississippi before 2001, if you stop spraying with the things that DO control boll weevils, and don't use pheromone traps, you get a lot of boll weevils. Monsanto knows that, the Indian Ag department knows it.

If Monsanto or the Indian government claimed otherwise, they lied. That wouldn't surprise me, but then the tear-jerking articles should be about lying corporations and governments, not "the hazards of GMOs".

I'm not saying that every poverty-stricken Indian farmer needs to go to schools he can't afford, but the Indian government should have said something like "these seeds PLUS xyz controls will let you use fewer sprays".

And maybe Monsanto executives SHOULD be nailed to fences while we throw stones at them - I don't know enough to say, but they sure have made a lot of enemies. The POTENTIAL of their innovations is great, in reducing toxin usage and imprioving food production with less overt environmental impact, but the way they market reminds me of the Mafia.

None of the above has one iota of relevance to GMOs, other than the fact that Bt-crops REDUCED use of chemical insecticides so much that caterpillar-control sprays that USED TO control boll weevils are no longer used enough to control boll weevils as a side benefit, and you have to use pheromone traps or something else instead.

I seem to see a pattern (in cited articles, not what people are posting here) of using emotion and avoiding facts to enflame passions and create beliefs contrary to facts. If that's intentional by those authors and organizations, I don't respect that.

On the other hand, it may partly be the difference between psychological types. Some people are feeling-oriented and some are thinking-oriented. That's just an observation, not a value judgment EXCEPT for the fact that people of either type can seldom truly understand the other way. Not understanding it, they can 't appreciate it, and often look down on it or dismiss it as a valid point of views. Maybe some of these emotional articles that I think are deliberate, unprincipled, manipulative propaganda that hides facts in order to deceive people, are actually just emotion-focused people prin ting up what they feel is important and significant, and leaving out what I think are THE relevant facts because they just aren't that interested in technical details.

- - -



Wikipedia:
Genetically engineered Bt cotton is not protected from the boll weevil.[10]

This guy makes it sound like "everyone knows" that Bt doesn't control boll weevils at all.
The SUNY link below would agree, but it sounds more partisan, or at least more politicized.

"Boll weevil eradication effort"
May 18, 2001
Blake Layton Mississippi Extension entomologist | Delta Farm Press

http://deltafarmpress.com/boll-weevil-eradication-effort
"Historically, when growers applied caterpillar treatments to non-Bt fields they often used insecticides that also were active against boll weevils. This coincidental boll weevil control was a great supplement to boll weevil eradication programs that were conducted before the introduction of Bt cotton. However, Bt fields require fewer treatments for caterpillar pests and this means less coincidental control of boll weevils by grower applied sprays. "


http://life.bio.sunysb.edu/ee/geeta/Bt-Cotton.html



This message was edited May 20, 2013 8:16 PM

Sorry it got so late and this is scattered. My one-paragraph summary of the "linked to leukemia and anemia" articvle is that it looks like a deliberate misrepresentation of a good scientific paper.

>> A new study shows that Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO) toxins are linked to leukemia and anemia. Research shows toxic effects at the lowest dose tested.

My impression is that is wealse-worded deceit. Sorry, guy. The peer-reviewed article you cited did NOT say that or anything remotely like it. leukemia and anemia.are diseases, and the blood cell irregularites in mice dosed with near-lethal amounts of experimental microbial spores are so far removed from GM crops that it made me red in the face when I saw how big the misrepresentation was.

At first I typed "liar, liar, pants on fire", but I wnated to sound more adult than that. However, deliberatly misleading, in flamtory misleading sleaze probably merits getting down in mud with the auhtioor an d qanswering on his or her own level.


Who is E. Hector Corsi? Hmm, "a digital journalist". His or her list of articles seems focused on sensationalism. Going by this one article and how badlty it m isrepresented its source, unprincipled sensationalism .
http://www.digitaljournal.com/user/737203/news


we evaluated, in Swiss albino mice, the hematotoxicity and genotoxicity of four Bt spore-crystals genetically modified to express individually Cry1Aa, Cry1Ab, Cry1Ac or Cry2A, administered alone by gavage with a single dose of 27 mg/Kg, 136 mg/Kg or 270 mg/Kg,

The BACILLUS was genetically modified to produce one or another Cry protein, then the spores were forced into the mice's stomachs, NOT GM corn or cotton, rather concentrated Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) spores that have themselves been GMed to produce all one kind of toxin (not the "standard, traditional" Bt toxin, but rather something new, fourkinds of "Cry" toxins). .

Now, how realistic are the doses studied, if someone is going to misrepresent this paper and say "GM crops cause leukemia"? NOT realistic, and the real-science authors say that in the full text. The doses used and effects observed make a case for more studies on mechanisms and real-world toxicity. That's science.

The misquote tried to create the impression "GMOs cause leukemia". BZZZT, That's propaganda.

If the low dose of 27 mg/Kg was of the pure protein, and not 27 mg/Kg of the spore crystals, that might have been a HUGE amount of bacterial spores - but I don't know. I also don't know how much of the Cry toxins would actually be in the food products we eat IF they were added to the standard Bt toxins: probably zero in sugar or corn oil, but in an ear of corn? I don't know.

If they are using 1,000 times a reasonable concentration, that would be understandable because these guys are looking for POSSIBLE effects, which would make a cause for more research to clarify the mechanisms involved and to establish the toxicological risks ... i.e., study whether the hematotoxicity they were able to cause has an y real-world correlate,

But if they were using 100,000 times any reasonable real-world concentration, I would be skeptical and consider pretty contrived. After all, when you go to TOO high a concentration of something, you sometimes create unrealistic effects, like "water will kill you if you drink so much that your stomach explodes".

Hmm, they say:
The profile of observed cytotoxic effects of these Cry toxins can be related to their high concentrations and the exposure time. Such exposures at these high concentrations are not commonly found in the environment.

That's fair, and they admit in the full text that they are testing up to close to doses that will kill mice rather promptly. They are TRYING to create cell dmage so they give the mice as much as they can take and still live long enough to study. The authors of the online paper (open-access but allegedly peer-reviewed, and they certainly SOUND like reasonable scientists) aren't pushing an anti-GMO agenda, they're trying to get more studies funded to analyze the underlying mechanisms and EVENTUALLY determine what is safe in the real world.

(I hope they eventually determine how much of the toxicity comes from the spores themselves and how much from the Cry toxins! GM corn & cotton won't make spore crystals, on ly the toxins themselves.)


for genotoxicity analyses, micronucleus test was carried out in mice bone marrow cells

If I'm right, that's a tissue culture test ... maybe not, the full-text makes it sound more like "we looked at the cells under microscopes".

A significant reduction in bone marrow cell proliferation demonstrated cytotoxic but not genotoxic effects.

Now that's odd. They did the bone marrow test to detect genotoxicity and observed no genotoxic effects. But they DID find cytotoxic effects during the genotoxicity test.
>> For hematotoxicity evaluations, blood samples were drawn by cardiac puncture and processed in a multiple automated hematology analyzer;

. I don't know what hematology analyzers can detect today.

>> Spore-crystal administrations provoked selective hematotoxicity for the 3 exposure times, particularly for erythroid lineage

I'm going to have to go to the full-text article to address that, but I noticed these right off:

1.
>> Among the viable alternatives for the replacement of these synthetic pesticides, entomopathogenic biological agents show potential for use in biological control programs and integrated production, because they leave few human side effects and have low impact on natural enemies and the environment [3,5,6].

They know the difference between "bad" insecticides and "probably less-bad" insecticides.

2.
>> The primary threat to the effectiveness of long-term use of Bt toxins is the evolution of resistance by pests [21], and one of the strategies to delay the emergence of resistant pests is the combined use of Cry toxins that are effective for the same target species. The simultaneous expression of binary combinations of Cry toxins minimizes the chance of insect resistance to Bt-plants [22]. In addition to the binary combinations, advances in genetic engineering promise the expression of multiple Cry toxins in Bt-plants, known as gene pyramiding [23].

Oh, good! At least someone is thinking about the fact that all these issues will be irrelevant on ce bugs develop immunity. Well, the issues of food prices, starvation, and need for classic, "bad" insecticides would remain.

So this is not even about the traditional Bt toxin (gamma endotoxin, maybe?) , it is about a cluster of DIFFERENT toxins they are pyramiding in to the plant genome - a toxic cocktail. I'm very sympathetic to studying the effects of those new ones, and how much evolutionary experience we have with these Cry proteins!

This is where I lean towards the more alarmist side: now that we have "power tools" like GE, we do have to be careful to keep reins on our hubris and enthusiasm for "look what I can do now!" "Can", yes, but "should" takes more thought. An d there do need to be better control methods than the profit motive by itself.

I'll try to analyze the " selective hematotoxicity particularly for erythroid lineage" tomorrow if I have time.

3.
>> In our previous experiments, exposures greater than 270 mg/Kg had caused signs of toxicity and death, so this concentration was considered the maximum tolerated.

Oh, they tested from 1/10th up to the promptly-lethal dosage? Well, sure they're going to see major cytotoxicity, DUHH!

4.
>> The profile of observed cytotoxic effects of these Cry toxins can be related to their high concentrations and the exposure time. Such exposures at these high concentrations are not commonly found in the environment.