GMO Fear Mongers Are Just as Wrong and Deadly as Non-Immunizing Hippies, Perhaps Worse

GMO fear mongers don't understand the concept of genetic modification and, due to the fact that they're lesser minds, want to destroy what they don't understand.  In their thirst for organics, they not only skew the facts about GMOs, but outright lie about them in order to push their agenda of technologically-backwards straw-hut village utopias.  In this post, I'm not going to prove that genetically modified organisms are the second coming of Christ, but I'm going to give examples of anti-GMO sites and meticulously demolish their arguments to reveal them as the evil they really are.

When I searched for "GMO" in Google, the first three websites to come up were anti-GMO websites. Fair, there is a lot of controversy in GMOs so it isn't uncommon for causes to have websites to spread their views.  The problem with each of these websites are that they all use the same type of pseudo-science and fear mongering that causes events like the Measels outbreak to occur.  When voices of fear and misinformation drown out the voices of science and reason, there are consequences.  Let's delve into each of the websites in order to properly see how they convey their message.

LabelGMOs.org is a lobbying website that wishes to have GMOs labeled in California.  The labeling of food products is an important aspect of the FDA and keeps many of us safe from undesired toxins in our foods, so this seems like a reasonable request.  However, when we look deeper into the websites ideals we can see the lobbyists' spin on their message. Looking at their FAQs page, they touch on many subjects in a disturbing manner.  Rather than explain why the foods are dangerous, they simply state that other countries label their GMOs and pose the question, "What do they know that we don't?" This air of malignancy and danger does nothing to answer questions, but only stirs up our primal fears of the unknown.  This paper released by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has an approach that looks at other countries that have mandatory labeling of GMOs and offers questions of whether the cost of labeling would be worth it, since they have yet to be proven dangerous.  The website of course goes on to suggest that work with Genetically Engineered (GE) foods aren't changing the world as we know it for the better.  However, a few credible sources tend to disagree with that outlook.

I must admit, the credibility of websites only decrease after the lobbying website.  The Institute for Responsible Technology was deceivingly named, as it had even more fear mongering than the previous website.  You can further investigate if you like, but the main argument I saw against GMOs was its page, "Ten Reasons to Avoid GMOs".  It begins by saying GMOs are unhealthy, which may seem like a reasonable way to start an argument against them.  This is also the only section of this web page that any sort of source for its argument, citing the American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) for its reasoning.  However, upon further review we can see that the AAEM is listed by Quackwatch (an association with over 150 scientific advisers and a close association with the National Council Against Health Fraud) as dubious, and a further investigation of its webpage shows that is regularly writes letters to schools about the dangers of WiFi.  The anti-GMO page goes on to list "dangerous side effects", "contaminate forever", and GMOs "harming the environment" without offering any sorts of reasoning or studies to prove their worth.  However, there is still no consensus on the effects of GMOs on the body.  Since there are no studies to back up their claims, we can clearly see that these websites are only using spooky words instead of science to convince people to avoid the foods of their choice.

The third website is no better.  It makes claims that range from GMOs ruining the average farmers (economically incorrect) and that countries are banning them (true, but ruled illegal due to lack of evidence).  That's right, a country ruled GMOs illegal, but it was overturned due to the lack of evidence.  The population of the world is being thrown into a witch hunt over the dangers of GMOs, and due the current lack of scientific evidence of safety, the uninformed deem them unsafe and try to illegalize or regulate them.

Overall, the websites that are against GMOs use propaganda to scare people to their side of the story instead of scientific facts.  They seem to forget that GMOs are saving lives in India and would rather whip the country into a fervor using scare tactics.  Think before you make a decision, and feel free to ask a person why they don't trust GMOs.  If they say they're just "generally scary", remember their face. Those are the people who hate the Indian population and want our country to suffer from measels due to their uninformed and terrible choices.

Written by Ethan Doiron-LaRue (1)