--> Getting back to health, there are plenty of other things you can do to alter the health of the population through genetic engineering. Right now, if a person goes on a diet and stops eating large portions, their metabolism slows. Their body begins to shed bone mineral density and muscle mass and actually slows their use of calories. This, again, is an adaptation designed to conserve biology or to protect the survival of the species. What if this were programmed out of the species? What if people had a very high metabolism regardless of their current caloric intake? | | Yet, I think there are many other important applications of genetic engineering. One of the most notable today would be altering the behavioral characteristics of our species.
We have a genetic code that programs us with certain behaviors. If you are a male of the species, you're programmed with behaviors of conquering resources, owning land, declaring war on your neighbors, controlling access to reproductive resources, and you tend to have a more aggressive, confrontational behavior than females of the species. | | This is something that could be completely eliminated through genetic engineering. With engineering, the biochemistry responsible for this quest for calories could be altered, creating a person who isn't hungry all the time and who doesn't seek out refined carbohydrates or overeat even when there's plenty of food available.
Interestingly, our hardware and software has also developed to reward us through brain chemistry when we consume refined carbohydrates and fat. Why are these rewarded? They are rewarded because carbohydrates and fat represent the taste of energy. | | As you can see, genetic engineering has a lot of possibilities, but in each of these possibilities you will also have unintended side effects in the same way we do today with chemical-based medicine. You might give someone enhanced brain density, but then it might turn out the unnaturally dense brain matter could have unintended consequences such as seizures or mental disorders. It might result in a reduced life span. | | I'm only presenting possibilities for the future -- a future when we as a civilization have enough maturity to pursue something as complex and potentially dangerous as genetic engineering. Today, we are merely infants. Most adults still act like children, and this is even more true in the fields of medicine and health technology, where full-grown adults still cling to their egos like four-year-olds. We'd have to mature a long, long way before we're truly ready to start playing God with out own genetic code. | | Down the road, here's how genetic engineering might be put into use to enhance human health: If you look at a lot of the health problems afflicting us today, such as diabetes, heart disease, obesity or even mental disorders, they are the result of a mismatch between the hardware we developed as a species and the present environment. For example, our ancestors lived in an environment where food and calories were scarce. |  Downplaying notions of population control and land reform, industry advocates push the idea that genetic engineering will solve world hunger. Despite altruistic thetoric, genetic engineering companies design sterile crops to ensute that farmers— large agribusinesses and subsistence farmers alike—must keep on buying their proprietary seeds. There was a time when ptudent farmers kept theit best seed stock for next year's crop. Now they get sued for doing so. | | Whereas the promise of gteatly increased crop yields from genetic engineering has proven elusive, some fear that genetically modified genes that convey sterility could cross to nonproprietary crops, with catastrophic results.
Given the significant real and potential drawbacks of bioengineering and agrochemistry, alternative approaches deserve a closer look. Over the long run, intensive organic farming and othet nonconventional methods may prove our best hope for maintaining food production in the face of population growth and continuing loss of agticultutal land. | | Perhaps genetic engineering might yet substantially inctease crop yields—but at the tisk of releasing supercompetitive species into agticultural and natural environments with unknowable consequences.
Meanwhile, global grain reserves—the amount of grain stored on hand at a given time—fell from a little mote than a yeats worth in 2000 to less than a quarter of annual consumption in 2002. Today the world is living harvest-to-harvest just like Chinese peasants in the 1920s. Now that's progress.
Clearly, more of the same won't wotk. | | Despite altruistic thetoric, genetic engineering companies design sterile crops to ensute that farmers— large agribusinesses and subsistence farmers alike—must keep on buying their proprietary seeds. There was a time when ptudent farmers kept theit best seed stock for next year's crop. Now they get sued for doing so. |  Biological engineering is not ordinary biotechnology or genetic engineering. It is the application of engineering principles to the construction of novel genetic structures; in contrast, genetic engineering is often a trial-and-error process, with numerous unanticipated results. Many of the reasonable concerns about genetically modified foods and animals come from this hit-or-miss aspect of biotechnology. Biological engineers take a more systematic approach, using an increasingly deep understanding of how DNA works to make microorganisms perform narrowly specified tasks. |  But when the Manitoba scientists used genetic engineering to knock out those senses, the cancer cells would simply lie inert and not reproduce.
Even more astonishing, the receptorless cancer cells soon turned to their normal, non-cancerous state.
"If you blind it, the cancer cell just dies," said Dr. Arnold Greenberg, one of three molecular biologists making up the research team. "It surprised us, and everyone else who saw it."
"Researchers never thought of this before. It's quite novel," said team leader Dr. Eva Turley, who discovered and named the RHAMM receptor three years ago. | | All of these are patented analogs of human insulin and were created through a genetic engineering process.
Aventis Pharmaceuticals, in a press release for the new product Lantus, stated: Safety Information:
Human insulin therapy may be associated with hypoglycemia, worsening of diabetic retinopathy [non-inflammatory disorders of the retina], lipodystrophy [changes in fat metabolism], skin reactions (such as injection site reaction, pruritus [itching], and rash) allergic reactions, sodium retention, and edema [swelling due to fluid accumulation]. |  Jumping genes are beginning to look like Mother Nature's version of on-the-fly genetic engineering. The more we understand how they work, the more they may reveal about how our immune systems protect us against disease and how our very genetic structure responds to environmental stress. This could open up whole new avenues to immunize people against disease, restore compromised immune systems, and even reverse dangerous mutations on a genetic level. remember all that "junk DNA"? | | What governments need not promote are genetic engineering and more intensive fertilizer- and irrigation-based farming—the very practices pushed by industry as the key to extending reliance on its products.
Emerging inrerest in supporting an agrarian land ethic is embodied in the slow food and ear-local movements that try to shorten the distance between crop production and consumption. Yet energy efficiency in the delivery of food to the table is not some radical new idea. Romans shipped grain around the Mediterranean because the wind provided the energy needed to transport food long distances. | | The future of humanity depends as much on this philosophical realignment as on technical advances in agrotechnology and genetic engineering.
Capital-intensive agricultural methods will never provide the third of humanity that lives on less than two dollars a day a way out of hunger and poverty. Labor-intensive agriculture, however, could—if those people had access to fertile land. Fortunately, such methods are also those that could help rebuild the planet's soil. |  The process of genetic engineering of food often involves the use of a live virus, small enough to enter cell nuclei and, thereby, infect other genetic material. Cancer in chickens often results from infection with the Rous Sarcoma virus. The chicken cancer virus is used as a carrier to implant the growth hormone gene into farmed fish so they will grow faster. Once the virus has infected the fish, it will likely end up on your dinner plate and also infect you. | | When these viruses are used as part of genetic engineering, they combine with one another to create new plant and animal diseases. By eating these new foods, foreign genetic material from these viruses can be absorbed through our intestines and become incorporated into our cells. Thanks to genetic research and food production, we are now on the verge of creating new diseases against which we have no natural or unnatural way of defending ourselves. | | Before genetic engineering enabled us to modify food on a molecular level, plant breeders who wanted to create more efficient crops (hardier or more fruit-bearing, for example) would irradiate seeds by blasting them with a ray gun that could have come straight out of Star Trek, and then hope for the best. Most of the time, seeds couldn't even sprout after being irradiated, but every once in a while this heavy-handed genetic manipulation produced a beneficial trait.
Even the sun can cause mutation—not just by frying your skin and causing skin cancer, but on a global scale. |  The OCA addresses crucial issues of food safety, industrial agriculture, genetic engineering, children's health, corporate accountability, Fair Trade, environmental sustainability and other key topics.
Shop Natural www.shopnatural.com
A resource for natural and organic products from nutritional and food products to personal care and pet care.
Tom's of Maine www.tomsofmaine.com
This company offers natural personal care products made without artificial or animal ingredients or chemicals.
Wholesomebabyfood.com www.wholesomebabyfood. |  Big food corporations and the biotech industry understand that consumers are more and more concerned about food safety, genetic engineering, and chemical-intensive agriculture, and are reading labels more closely. They understand that pesticide and mercury residues and hazardous technologies such as genetic engineering and food irradiation will be rejected if there are truthful labels required on food products. Industry-sponsored H.R. 4167 is gaining momentum and must be stopped! Act now! |  You cannot feed animals things like blood, slaughterhouse waste, manure and municipal garbage, and you cannot use untested and hazardous technologies like genetic engineering or fruit irradiation. The animals have to be raised on pasture - which is their natural behavior - where every day of the growing season, weather permitting, they are out on pasture eating grass and foraging as they have evolved to do. |  Rhio: Health Activist and Radio Show Host
Author, Actress and Investigative Reporter
Listen in as Rhio provides commentary on some of the most pressing health issues of our time, such as genetic engineering of seeds, food irradiation, electro-magnetic pollution, etc. In 1997, Rhio started "Rhio's Raw Energy Hotline" on one of her phone lines in New York City where she lives. The hotline, which is updated once each month, provides information for people who are interested in the raw/live food lifestyle, including upcoming events in the New York area as well as worldwide. |  Flavonoids as flower pigments: The formation of the natural spectrum and its extension by genetic engineering, Plant Breeding 106: 1-26.
Franken, P., Niesbach-Klosgen, U., Weydemann, U., Marechal-Drouard, L., Saedler, H., and Wienand,
U., 1991, The duplicated chalcone synthase genes C2 and Whp (white pollen) of Zea mays are independently regulated; evidence for translational control of Whp expression by the anthocyanin intensifying gene In, EMBOJW. 2605-2612. Fukada-Tanaka, S., Inagaki, Y., Yamaguchi, T., Saito, N., and Iida, S., 2000, Colour-enhancing protein in blue petals. | | Flavonoids have been the focus of attempts to modify flower color by genetic engineering (Tanaka et al., 1998). There also is interest in using them as drugs or dietary supplements because of their strong antioxidant activities (Harborne and Williams, 2000; Battel and Matsuda, 2003). In plants, flavonoids have several functions including attracting insects for pollination and dispersal of seeds, acting in defense systems (e.g., as UV-B protectants and phytoalexins), signaling between plants and microbes, and regulating auxin transport (Winkel-Shirley, 2001). | | Genetic engineering in floriculture, Plant
Cell Tiss Org Cult 80: 1-24. Tanner, G. J., Francki, K. T., Abrahams, S., Watson, J. M., Larkin, P. J. and Ashton, A. R., 2003,
Proanthocyanidin biosynthesis in plants. Purification of legume leucoanthocyanidin reductase and molecular cloning of its cDNA, J Biol Chem 278: 31647-31656. Tanner, G. J., 2004, Condensed tannins. In K. Davies, ed, Plant Pigments and Their Manipulation (pp.
150-184). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Tiffin, P., Miller, R. E. and Rausher, M. D. | | Information on Sodium American Heart Association
Making Healthy Food Choices
American Diabetes Association
Mothers for Natural Law
An advocacy group against the genetic engineering of food.
Portion Control for Parents and Kids
American Diabetes Association
Protein Nutrition Fact Sheet
Northwestern University articles & links
Visit www.FitAdvocate. com for the direct link to these and many other articles.
"Going with the (Whole) Grain"
Article from the Harvard School of Public Health
"Carbohydrates in Nutrition"
Ron Kennedy, M.D. |  If they win at getting synthetic chemicals like ripening agents and thickeners added to the list of allowable ingredients, or even genetic engineering to pass muster, then "organic" will move further and further away from "pure."
In 1996, the two houses of Congress unanimously enacted the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA). Through this historic action, Congress presented the EPA with the immense challenge of implementing the most comprehensive overhaul in decades of the nations pesticide and food safety laws. |  GE foods may be missing important food elements or have changes in the nutrient ratios. genetic engineering may accidentally or intentionally remove or deactivate substances in food that the engineers may consider undesirable in food. The engineered food, or the missing substances, may have qualities that we do not yet understand.
The use of GE foods results in decreased effectiveness of antibiotics. It is now commonplace in genetic engineering to introduce antibiotics in genes as a marker to indicate that the organism has been successfully engineered. |  Another claim is that radiation and chemicals are regularly used on food crops to promote mutations (mutagenesis) and that the random changes that occur in the DNA are similar to those produced by genetic engineering. One GM advocate, for example, cited a manuscript26 listing all of the registered crops in the world that have a mutagenized parent—2,275 varieties of 175 species. According to Schubert, however, the list included "flowers and many other non-food crops, and the vast majority are not now and never were used commercially. | |
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