Recently, an article/blog post made its way online talking about how Canada's updated nutrition labelling requirements still do not require GMO-labelling and that Health Canada, which came up with the new requirements, ignored GMO activists demanding GMO-labelling as part of nutritional labelling requirements.
Health Canada was/is right. GMO labelling has no place in the category of nutrition labelling, or anywhere on packaging for that matter.
GMOs, as thought of in advocacy campaigns, are organisms whose DNA has
been modified in a lab to introduce a gene that would give the organism
an advantage in survival. For example, Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" canola contains a glyphosate resistance gene that makes the crop resistant to Roundup. DNA has 3 principal components: a phosphate backbone, a sugar (deoxyribose, the "D" in DNA) and a nucleic acid (the "NA" in DNA). What encodes genes in DNA are the nucleic acids, of which there are only 4: Adenine (A), Cytosine (C), Thymine (T), and Guanine (G). All genes in DNA, from male-pattern-baldness in humans to glyphosate-resistance, is made from different combinations of A, C, G and T.
Nutritional labelling refers to nutrition content of food, and its DNA is not a nutritional component of it. Nutritional labelling refers to physical components of the food that are metabolized and absorbed differently in the body. For instance, carbohydrates are different from fats, which are different from proteins. In each of those 3 major categories, there are subdivisions that extensive research has led to, such as saturated and unsaturated fats. Each of these components takes a very different route once inside the body. The source of fats, carbohydrates and proteins does not affect the route it takes in the body. Fibre from corn is not fundamentally different from wheat fibre, although the rate at which it's broken down may differ between the plants.
The same issue applies to DNA. DNA is broken down in the stomach into its individual nucleic acids or short strings of nucleic acids. In all cases, the broken down DNA is inert because only small parts of genes are taken up in the body. It works much like software installation: if you install 5% of a software program on your computer, the software won't work. You need 100% installation for software to work. The nucleic acids and polypeptides (short strings of nucleic acids) from a wheat plant become indistinguishable from those of a bacteria, so the route the DNA takes in the body is the same, irrespective of the organism the DNA came from. Whether our food is GMO or not does not affect nutritional routes in the body, so there is no place for GMOs on our nutrition labels.
The other issue with GMO labelling of food is the question of what constitutes non-GMO food. The anti-GMO campaigns are based on the idea that changing the DNA of a naturally occuring organism makes it a GMO. The fear comes from the lab-based nature of GMOs as a clear symbol of how unnatural the genetic modification is. Thing is, there are ways of genetic modification that we have done through artificial selection. In nature, natural selection ensures that only the strongest genes survive. Artificial selection ensures that the genes with the greatest benefit to humans survive. For instance, the domesticated Holstein cow (the black and white one we're most familiar with) was found to be an excellent milk producer. Over centuries of breeding, Holstein cows have become very good milk producers, because Holstein cows that produced a lot of milk were selected for breeding by the farmer, thus ensuring that genes responsible for higher milk production survived and became more common in the cow herd over the generations. As a result, the genetic make-up of a domesticated cow is very different from a wild cow, so the domesticated cow has been genetically modified through breeding. Recently, scientists have found a much more effective way of modifying the genetic make-up of organisms through modern lab techniques. The only thing that changed in genetically modifying organisms is that we do it in a lab setting now, rather than in a breeding setting. GMOs have really been around for centuries, through domestication and artificial selection, so most things we eat are GMOs, even if they haven't been modified in the lab.
GMOs are common and have been common for a long time. They are different combinations of 4 nucleic acids found in everything we eat, so labelling GMOs as a nutritional quality is misleading and flat-out wrong.
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