2.A wonder food to be taken with a pinch of salt - Sunday Times
3.Response to Monsanto's omega-3 GM soybean - GeneWatch UK
4.Monsanto Wants to Save Our Oceans - La Vida Locavore
EXTRACTS: Great news for farmers, consumers and our overfished seas, or so we are told... a soya bean genetically modified to produce the omega-3 fatty acids that reduce the risk of heart disease and confer a wide range of other health benefits.
When I first read these remarkable claims in New Scientist last week, I found myself plunged back into familiar territory, a kind of big sky country where nothing is ever undersold and where nothing is what it seems. (item 2)
---
---
1.Problems with Monsanto's omega-3 GM soybean
This compilation comes from the articles below and other points put to us about the problems with Monsanto's omega-3 GM soybean.
*Saving the seas from overfishing?
It's unlikely that this GM soya will save fish stocks, as oily fish will still be (unsustainably) harvested for fish meal for aquaculture and animal feed.
Monsanto says its soya is primarily designed for feeding to humans, not fish, so the big problem of finding substitute foods for farmed fish remains unresolved. (article 2)
The answer to overfishing has nothing to do with landbased sources of omega-3s. It has to do with international laws to limit fishing and enforcement of those laws. (article 4)
Omega 3 is actually produced by algae, which are then eaten by fish. Why not simply grow the algae and extract the Omega 3 from the algae, rather than relying on fish or GM plants? Research is already underway in this area.
It's not only fishing that causes environmental problems. Mass production of soya also creates serious environmental problems. (article 3)
*Improving our diets?
Eating a healthy balanced diet gives you enough omega 3s without any need for additives in processed food. For the same reasons, hunger, poverty and nutritional problems in the developing world can't be fixed by growing commodity crops. What people need are better diets. (article 2)
The nutrient-by-nutrient approach to engineering 'healthy' fats back into the food chain is essentially a scam. Factory farming of meat and the use of products such as palm oil in margarine has shifted people's diets to consist of increasingly unhealthy fats. Engineering omega-3 oils back in to fundamentally poor diets is not a credible approach to improving people's health. (article 3)
It's probably true that omega-3s have decreased in our diets. We remove omega-3s when we take animals off pasture and feed them grain instead, for example. But... it's more true that we've astronomically increased the omega-6s in our diets in the last half-century. The two nutrients compete within our body, so it's not the absolute amount of either one that we eat but the ratio of one to the other that matters.
The problem is less that we eat few fish and more that we eat a lot of processed foods made with corn oil, palm oil, and hydrogenated soybean oil and we eat grain-fed animal products. (article 4)
Biofortification is not a substitute for a healthy balanced diet based on eco-agriculture. Other vitamins and compounds are important, and only an approach that integrates diet and environment can address these issues.
*Not tested sufficiently
The GM approach involves trying to engineer a complex biochemical pathway into a plant. Plants have very complex chemistries. Interfering with this chemistry means there is a lot of potential for unexpected and unpredictable side effects, e.g. could other, unintended chemicals be created beside the intended omega 3 fatty acid, as a side product maybe?
The products will not be tested sufficiently to tell whether they are safe, which would require large scale long-term clinical trials. (item 2)
Food safety is impossible to assess under current testing regimes because they do not look closely enough for any unintended compounds. So, even though the US FDA say this GM soya is safe, the effects of eating this soya remain unknown.
*Contamination of the food chain
The problem with engineering supposedly healthy ingredients into the bottom of the food chain is that it may not be reversible if something goes wrong. In the long-term, other products will become contaminated: this does not happen when new ingredients are added to a final processed product rather than a plant. (item 2)
Even if soya doesn't cross pollinate to the same extent as some other crops, contamination will still inevitably occur, e.g. by unintentional mixing with conventional soya.
BASF says it is developing similar GM canola (oilseed rape) plants. This will be a disaster as we know canola outcrosses very readily leading to widescale GM contamination of neighbouring crops.
---
---
2.A wonder food to be taken with a pinch of salt
Charles Clover
The Sunday Times, November 8 2009
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6907852.ece
Great news for farmers, consumers and our overfished seas, or so we are told. The biotechnology industry in America claims it has invented something that could finally live up to the promises of 20 years ago and benefit consumers and the environment as well as farmers. It is a soya bean genetically modified to produce the omega-3 fatty acids that reduce the risk of heart disease and confer a wide range of other health benefits.
The main source of omega-3 fatty acids has hitherto been fish oil. So Monsanto's GM soya bean, which has just received a notice of safety from the US Food and Drug Administration, could, it is claimed, relieve pressure on the world's fish stocks as well as improving the health of millions. In the process it could make people who loathe GM technology, such as the Prince of Wales, have to eat their organic Fairtrade cotton hats.
Or could it? When I first read these remarkable claims in New Scientist last week, I found myself plunged back into familiar territory, a kind of big sky country where nothing is ever undersold and where nothing is what it seems.
Don't get me wrong, I have never been entirely at home with those who believe genetic manipulation goes against the will of God. We've been at it for centuries anyway. Nor am I one of those who would refuse a designer heart if it happened to have been grown in a pig. I believe we should at least listen to people such as our chief scientist, Professor John Beddington, and his colleagues at the Royal Society who think Britain must not rule itself out of the GM technology market and that GM technology could one day be needed to feed the world.
That is not a trivial task. The wobble in the world's food supply that began two harvests ago, which set rice and grain prices soaring, made scientists think about how we can feed a society of 9 billion people in 40 years' time. Since the green revolution in the 1960s, world food production has risen from 1.84 billion tons to 4.38 billion tons. Scientific development is clearly vital to the new agricultural revolution - as Professor Sir David Baulcombe, chairman of a Royal Society study, said last month. It is just that there are different views about which technology has the answers. Indeed the most immediate things that the society recommends - using ecology to manage pests in crops, for example - aren't anything to do with whizzo GM science at all.
The green revolution succeeded but its ugly downside was that industrial agriculture did not do much for the countryside, the rural poor, or arguably the quality of our food. In the countries that used the first GM crops, the same features have persisted and pesticide use has soared - contrary to predictions. GM monocultures have grown at the expense of rainforest and the climate. The big biotech companies have made huge profits.
Which brings us to the question of whether the new GM soya is going to feed the world - or is it really designed to feed the American appetite for food additives? Certainly an omega-3 enhanced oil that doesn't taste of fish and could be added to margarine and other processed foods has its attractions. The soya oil with omega-3s that Monsanto has engineered seems to be taken up by the body more efficiently than current linseed-based additives. The crop is more suited to temperate North America than Brazil, so it might not displace much rainforest.
Will it take pressure off the world's fish? I'm not so sure. GM soya isn't going to stop people catching small fish and grinding them up as fishmeal. Monsanto says its soya is primarily designed for feeding to humans, not fish, so the big problem of finding substitute foods for farmed fish remains unresolved.
The greatest fallacy would be to suggest that Monsanto’s new product might somehow tackle the problem of the 84,000 Americans who died of heart disease and might not have done if they had eaten a sufficient amount of fatty acid in their diets, according to a 2005 study. Those people who died of heart disease had poor diets. Eating a healthy balanced diet gives you enough omega 3s without any need for additives in processed food. For the same reasons, hunger, poverty and nutritional problems in the developing world can't be fixed by growing commodity crops. What people need are better diets.
What nobody tells you about GM crops is how far off are those that are theoretically worthwhile. Compared with air travel, biotech is still building with wire, wood and paper. Remember golden rice, the crop that was going to address vitamin A deficiency? That’s still under development. The Royal Society says that developing crops that are resistant to disease, drought, salinity, heat and heavy metals will take eight to 16 years. It will take longer than that to develop wheat or rice capable of fixing nitrogen from the air, thus reducing the need for fertiliser.
Monsanto's new soya is undoubtedly part of a new era. The agri-business giants have learnt from their failure to win general public approval, particularly in Europe. They have realised that to achieve that they must provide benefits to the public. I suspect that biotech companies will eventually invent something we need - and the opposition to GM, justified until now, will fall away. But does the world need Monsanto's fishy soya? The jury is out.
---
---
3.Response to Monsanto's omega-3 GM soybean
GeneWatch UK, 27 October 2009
http://www.genewatch.org/article.shtml?als[cid]=564515&als[itemid]=565536
This week's announcement by Monsanto that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued a Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) notice for omega-3 oil made from a genetically-modified (GM) soybean enables food companies to develop and test foods containing the ingredient (1).
Responding to the announcement, Dr Helen Wallace, Director of GeneWatch UK, said:
"The nutrient-by-nutrient approach to engineering 'healthy' fats back into the food chain is essentially a scam. Factory farming of meat and the use of products such as palm oil in margarine has shifted people's diets to consist of increasingly unhealthy fats. Engineering omega-3 oils back in to fundamentally poor diets is not a credible approach to improving people's health".
In addition, GeneWatch warned that the products will not be tested sufficiently to tell whether they are safe, which would require large scale long-term clinical trials.
"The problem with engineering supposedly healthy ingredients into the bottom of the food chain is that it may not be reversible if something goes wrong," said Dr Wallace. "In the long-term, other products will become contaminated: this does not happen when new ingredients are added to a final processed product rather than a plant. There is a long history of 'magic ingredients' turning out to be harmful to some people and even having the opposite effect on health from that originally claimed" (2).
Mass production of soya also creates serious environmental problems (3).
Dr Helen Wallace, Office: 01298-23400; Mobile: 07903-311584
Notes for Editors
(1) See joint Monsanto, Solae press release on: http://www.sys-con.com/node/1158479 . Solae is an alliance between the multinational companies DuPont and Bunge Ltd.
(2) For example, antioxidants (including the beta-carotene engineered into GM 'Golden Rice') may be beneficial to some people but harmful to others, and some may increase risk of cancer. See, for example: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19125631.500-the-antioxidant-myth-a-medical-fairy-tale.html . The experimental GM 'purple tomato', claimed to reduce cancer risk, is engineered to contain increased levels of anthocyanins, a poorly tested antioxidant.
(3) See, for example: http://www.theecologist.org/trial_investigations/336873/killing_fields_the_true_cost_of_europes_cheap_meat.html
---
---
4.Monsanto Wants to Save Our Oceans
Jill Richardson
La Vida Locavore, November 2 2009
http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/2690/monsanto-wants-to-save-our-oceans
Oh yes, it's true. Monsanto is here to rescue us from overfishing. How, you ask? By engineering a variety of soybean with extra omega-3. And last week, the FDA decided that the oil of the new omega-3 soybean is GRAS - Generally Recognized as Safe.
The confirmation of GRAS status enables food companies to develop and test foods containing the new omega-3 oil, which are important steps towards consumers being able to benefit from this omega-3 product in a variety of food products with an acceptable taste experience.
As you can see on Monsanto Today, Monsanto is very pleased to give the world such a great product - one which will provide a source of omega-3s in our diet without a fishy flavor, and one which will mean we don't need to overfish the oceans in order to get enough omega-3s.
http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto_today/2009/pledge_omega3_soybeans.asp
I'm sorry, but that's like inflating the tires on a Hummer and saying you're doing something to help fight global warming. Let me explain.
It's true we have a big omega-3 problem in our diets. But the omega-3s are only half the story. The other half are omega-6s. The two nutrients compete within our body, so it's not the absolute amount of either one that we eat but the ratio of one to the other that matters. You want to have something like 2-4 times as many omega-6s as omega-3s. But we've got way, way, way more omega-6s than that (compared to omega-3s).
It's probably true that omega-3s have decreased in our diets. We remove omega-3s when we take animals off pasture and feed them grain instead, for example. But I think it's more true that we've astronomically increased the omega-6s in our diets in the last half-century. Check out this chart of omega-6: omega-3 ratios from a previous diary I wrote about the systematic removal of omega-3s from our diets.
Ratio of Omega-6 to Omega-3
Egg yolks, pastured: 2:1
Egg yolks, grain fed: 52:1
Butter, organic and grass-fed: 1.5:1
Butter, grain fed: 9:1
Beef, grass fed: 3:1
Beef, grain fed, 17:1
Omega-6 to Omega 3 ratios of various plant oils
Flaxseed or linseed: 0.2: 1
Canola: 2:1
Canola (for light frying): 3:1
Walnut: 5:1
Soybean: 7:1
Wheat germ: 8:1
Olive oil: 12:1
Hydrogenated soybean: 12:1
High oleic sunflower: 19:1
Corn: 46:1
Palm: 46:1
Sesame: 137:1
Less than 60% linoleic sunflower: 200:1
Cottonseed: 259:1
Safflower: No omega-3s at all
The problem is less that we eat few fish and more that we eat a lot of processed foods made with corn oil, palm oil, and hydrogenated soybean oil and we eat grain-fed animal products. Omega-3s aren't shelf stable. They go rancid quickly. That's why you don't typically find them in processed foods. The Monsanto article recommends using their new soybean oil in salad dressing. If you're making salad dressing, why not use flax oil instead if omega-3s are what you're going for?
The answer to this problem is going to be found in eating whole foods instead of processed foods and eating grass-fed animal products instead of grain-fed ones. The vast tracts of land planted in soybeans are the problem here, not the solution. The solution isn't going to come from tweaking the type of soybeans grown on 20-25% of U.S. cropland.
UPDATE: I should also add that the answer to overfishing has nothing to do with landbased sources of omega-3s. It has to do with international laws to limit fishing and enforcement of those laws.