don's report archive

by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

Part of living a wellness lifestyle is to inform yourself about great issues of the day that affect you and the rest of the world. You can’t, of course, be an expert or personally involved in everything. There are limits to how much information you can obtain, integrate and fully understand, given the many challenges and commitments involved in earning a living, exercising and otherwise maintaining a more-or-less balanced existence. Time places even greater limits on how many of these larger-than-your-own-life issues you can affect, through personal involvement, as do financial constraints, interest levels, education, location and opportunities. Thus, you can not be expected to be an expert on AND involved in every cause, from nuclear proliferation, Japanese debt restructuring, saving the whales and other endangered species, stem cell research, global warming and other incredibly important issues. Yes, all can dramatically affect your prospects for sustaining a wellness lifestyle but no, you can’t master all these complexities, let alone play a meaningful role doing something about them. Choices are required, as in other elements of shaping and maintaining a worthy lifestyle consistent with your best possibilities for physical and mental well-being.

Just the same, a well-read enthusiast for personal responsibility and other qualities of self-management will have opinions on many if not all the great issues of our day. One such issue that has received a lot of attention in the past year or so is that of genetically modified foods. While I am not a food scientist or otherwise an expert on the matter, I do value my health and promote a wellness perspective on many lifestyle issues related to this topic, particularly that of a sound diet. Therefore, I formed a few impressions over time on genetically modified (henceforth GM) foods, as you probably have, just from observing this debate. I thought I would share my perspective on GM foods with you - maybe your opinions are similar or, if not, perhaps you can write in and set me straight.

There is a lot of opposition to GM food, particularly in Europe. In this country, proposed legislation at the national level would require labeling of all such foods home grown or imported. Some extreme groups have engaged in acts of vandalism to protest against GM food-related corporations, but most attention has been given to the mass demonstrations against GM foods during international conferences. My position on the matter is this: If we had more crises like this one, we’d enjoy a better world! GM foods are NOT a problem. Of course, I may be missing something - or lots of things but, at present, I don’t think so.

For starters, GM food crops need far fewer pesticides and herbicides - and will save many a tree and forest. These are very GOOD things! No evidence has been produced showing conclusively or even hinting that such modifications make food products unsafe for consumption. For another, GM foods are not new - they have been with us a long time, and have helped reduce the mischief of at least one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (famine).

Starting around 8,000 BC, farmers in agriculture-based societies learned to save the best seed from a harvest for future seasons. This led to the discovery that some seeds did better than others, depending on varied soils, weather conditions and so on. Microorganisms were first used around 2000 BC, when yeast was employed to make wine, beer and leavened bread. People had reengineered a better crop. In other words, GM foods are not new - only the scale of the modifications is new.

Ever heard of Nicolas-Francois Appert? Around 1795, he started the canned food industry by inventing a way to preserve fresh foods through heating and sealing. For this, Napoleon was most grateful, as the metal and glass containers holding first edition c-rations enabled the dictator to ravage Europe and Russia. Napoleon offered incentives for additional innovations for fresh, safe food, which gave a big boost to the nascent canned food industry!

Then there was Louis Pasteur, who in 1856 invented a way to promote food safety by figuring out how to use heat to destroy harmful organisms in foods. In 1865, Gregor Mendel conducted genetic experiments on pea plants in a monastery. You’ve heard of Birdseye, I’m sure. In 1914, Clarence Birdseye did a bit of GM work and discovered ways to quick freeze seasonal vegetables, meats and fish. In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick described the structure of DNA. Basically, all our food has long been genetically modified, owing to millennia of selection, grafting, hybridization and so on. (Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World, NY 2001 contains much detail on this point.)

Last year, in response to opposition to GM food science by environmental groups, over six hundred scientists signed a "Declaration in Support of Agricultural Biotechnology." GM technologies, these scientists hold, will enable more food of a nutritious nature to be grown on less land, with less use of chemicals, at lower prices. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto suggests in Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature that modifying or reshaping nature is one of the meanings of civilization and that those human societies that have MOST reshaped the environment are those that have thrived or become dominant.

Of course, if the latest advances in GM food science should later turn some consumers into new life forms or cause any number of serious health problems that opposing environmentalists warn against, then I’ll quickly change my thinking on this issue. For now, though, GM seems a very good thing, not a threat to humanity.

Well, that’s my perspective on GM foods. What do you think? All the best.

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the MENTAL DOMAIN under the skill area of factual knowledge. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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