19,853 People Can't Be Wrong ... Can They?

There are days when I think that Canadians will never, ever, become rational, scientifically literate, thinkers. Today is one of those days.

As of right now, 19,853 people have signed a petition asking the Girl Guides of Canada to take GMO ingredients out of girl guide cookies [Girl Guides of Canada: Take all GMO ingredients out of Girl Guide Cookies].

The petition is organized by Maya Fischer and Linda Cirella in Victoria, BC. Here's what they say ...

Our family tries to only buy food that is non-GMO or organic. The reason we're so concerned is because there have been no long-term studies showing that it is safe for people to eat or grow GMO foods. In fact, GMO studies on animals have shown infertility, immune system problems, accelerated aging, faulty insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine actually asks physicians to advise patients not to eat foods with GMO ingredients.

The really sad part is the message that those two women are sending to young girls across Canada. They're saying that science doesn't matter. You can just make up stuff to support your biases and prejudices.

UPDATE: Please read: With 2000+ global studies confirming safety, GM foods among most analyzed subjects in science.

A popular weapon used by those critical of agricultural biotechnology is to claim that there has been little to no evaluation of the safety of GM crops and there is no scientific consensus on this issue.

Those claims are simply not true. Every major international science body in the world has reviewed multiple independent studies—in some cases numbering in the hundreds—in coming to the consensus conclusion that GMO crops are as safe or safer than conventional or organic foods, but the magnitude of the research has never been catalogued.

Still the claim that GMOs are “understudied”—the meme represented in the quotes highlighted at the beginning of this article—have become a staple of anti-GMO critics, especially activist journalists. In response to what they believed was an information gap, a team of Italian scientists catalogued and summarized 1783 studies about the safety and environmental impacts of GMO foods—a staggering number.

The researchers couldn’t find a single credible example demonstrating that GM foods pose any harm to humans or animals. “The scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazards directly connected with the use of genetically engineered crops,” the scientists concluded.

The research review, published in Critical Reviews in Biotechnology in September, spanned only the last decade—from 2002 to 2012—which represents only about a third of the lifetime of GM technology.

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