Irrational Percept - Health(ier) food

AdamTM
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Irrational Percept - Health(ier) food

 

I just got back from my grandma that gave me some "unaltered" bread.

Meaning bread made from "unaltered" wheat ("because all the genetics...&quotEye-wink

Noticing a vast flood of "bio" products, products that are supposed to be grown in a "natural way" i call this an irrational percept.

Those products are vastly overpriced, and even sold under the agenda as "health food", while they are nothing more than exploiting the percept that "industrial food" is unhealthy.

Even sold in germany with a government approved symbol for 3 times the price of regular products, while proven to be as "healthy" as anything else.

A recent study of "Stiftung Warentest" a sort of consumer awareness organisation in germany did a study on 25 orange juices, including 5 "bio" products.

It turned out that the best juice was the cheapest industrially packaged juice scoring the grade "good" (american grade B) in quality, ingredients and taste, while all the "bio" products scored inadequate to fair (in american grades D to E).

 

Discuss please, also feel free to tackle all the percepts connected to it, like keeping animals on industrial farms in "inhuman conditions".

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Visual_Paradox
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I don't understand the fear

I don't understand the fear some people have of genetically modified food or food produced through industry. It makes no sense.

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jmm
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Visual_Paradox wrote: I

Visual_Paradox wrote:
I don't understand the fear some people have of genetically modified food or food produced through industry. It makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense.  It's only been around for about a decade, so we're basically in the dark concerning any potential side effects.  We just don't know.   


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jmm wrote: Visual_Paradox

jmm wrote:

Visual_Paradox wrote:
I don't understand the fear some people have of genetically modified food or food produced through industry. It makes no sense.

It makes perfect sense.  It's only been around for about a decade, so we're basically in the dark concerning any potential side effects.  We just don't know.   

We just dont know = fear of the unknown = no sense. 

Why fear something if you dont know it, and more important, the experts say its safe, some nonexperts say its baaaaaad.... 

who do you believe? of course the nonexperts, since science cant be trusted. 

 

THIS makes no sense.

Second, whats there to fear?

DNA can not be altered by eating some modified version of it.

 

Elaborate on your fear or stop being irrational

 

Lastly, buying eggs from "free" chicken, or industrially held chicken has no effect, its just your misstrust of the industry that affects your choice, since the industry and corporations were depictured as the incarnated devil since at last 80 years now in the media.

Get over you conditioning and you will see that you have no other basis to trust the "free" chicken on than you have the industrial one.

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Hambydammit
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Most of the people I know

Most of the people I know who buy free range eggs do so because they object to the treatment of the chickens in large industrial food companies.

As someone in the food industry, I can say that people's concern with food safety is legitimate, but misplaced.  Genetically altered food is not the enemy.  Almost every piece of produce you buy at the store has been genetically altered.

Addatives are potentially dangerous, and the FDA is often more concerned with helping a big company get more food to market than with making sure that a particular chemical is really safe.

Furthermore, processing inevitably removes nutrients from food.  Sometimes, they're put back, but the fact is, processed food with addatives is usually not as good as fresh, unprocessed food.  Food that has been treated with chemical pesticides is usually not as good as food treated with non-chemical pesticides.  Some chemicals are worse than others.

Like anything else, food science is science, and most of the time, when people make judgments about things they know little or nothing of, they make a lot of mistakes.

 

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AdamTM wrote: Lastly,

AdamTM wrote:

Lastly, buying eggs from "free" chicken, or industrially held chicken has no effect, its just your misstrust of the industry that affects your choice, since the industry and corporations were depictured as the incarnated devil since at last 80 years now in the media.

Get over you conditioning and you will see that you have no other basis to trust the "free" chicken on than you have the industrial one.

I buy free range eggs for the same reason I buy free range meat... I've seen factory farms... I've stood in stalls while steers were neutered and branded...  I'll stop there.

I don't see the necessity to treat animals this way just because it is cheaper or faster when we have the reasonable ability to give them at least a tolerable life for the year or so before they are on our dinner plate.  I also do believe the stress on an animal effects the quality of high grade meats. 


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I'm not really concerned

I'm not really concerned about genertically modified foods as much as I am about food additives and animal welfare concerns, but I can see a reasonable line of thought for avoiding them.  Different foods have different nutritional values, potential for allergies, etc. from each other, and if you modify the DNA sequence of a living thing you're changing something about how that living thing works.  I think it's irrational to assume that this change will be harmful, but not irrational to think that it has the potential to make the food either better or worse in some relevant way.  Without knowing exactly how the DNA was modified or what the consequences are, it seems reasonable to me to let other people be the guinea pigs and wait to see if anyone has any problems.  Similarly, I never participate in experimental medical procedures.  They might be perfectly safe, but sometimes they're not... so why not wait and see if someone else gets harmed by them instead of taking the risk myself?

That said, it would be nice to know more about the actual genetic modifications done to the foods.  If any change to a food's DNA is just labelled "genetically modified", how can we tell the difference between different varieties of genetically modified strawberries, for example?  At least different breeds of apples, olives, etc. have distinct names which they can be identified by.


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It might help if companies

It might help if companies like Monsanto didn't sue farmers because they replanted their crops from that years seed gathing (as farmers have done since forever). See, some other farmers planted Monsanto seed and the wind blew it out of their farms into other fields. It cross polinated the crops on those other fields and those farmers ended up with GM crops from Monsanto even though they didn't plant or want it. They got sued for fuck sake.

So I'm happy for people to grow and eat GM crops. Just make sure you don't mess with anyone elses crop.

I'd be interested to what people think of this interview (audio file): Jeffrey M.Smith author of Genetic Roulette speaks about the documented health risks of eating GM food.

Rational or irrational?

 


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AdamTM wrote: We just dont

AdamTM wrote:

We just dont know = fear of the unknown = no sense.

Why fear something if you dont know it, and more important, the experts say its safe, some nonexperts say its baaaaaad....

If I don't have any knowledge of something, you can be damn sure that I'm not go just jump headlong into thinking "well, golly, I don't know so it must be ok!"

I understand people's reservations about genetically altered food nor do I think it's unreasonable for people to be cautious.  I would just do a whole lot of research to know what I'm getting myself into.

And experts disagree all the time.  It's better to be educated than listen to the first expert who says something is ok. 

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I feel better when I eat

I feel better when I eat food with less chemicals. I think there is some truth to unhealthy food processing. It's not going to kill you if you eat it every now and then, but I'd rather eat home-grown tomatoes than pesticide-covered ones.

Are you suggesting animals aren't treated inhumanely on farms?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0ZUfBa3gMA

It doesn't want to make me go vegan, it just wants me to help the poor things. They deserve a happy, healthy life in our hands.

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Visual_Paradox wrote:I don't

Visual_Paradox wrote:
I don't understand the fear some people have of genetically modified food or food produced through industry. It makes no sense.

I have read about it something in an independent press. These GM plants are tested in a laboratorilly isolated fields for quite a short time, everything seems OK, but when they're planted outside, things gets worse. Reputedly, some of these plants kills or repels bees and other beneficial bugs, and sometimes are hospitable for other, bad bugs. It messes up with ecology, and the worst thing is, that the pollen spreads also by wind, so fields around becomes genetically modified too.
Reputedly, scientists takes some gene sequence, they consider as useful, and inserts it somewhere into a plant's DNA, and try if it will work. Dunno how they have mapped the whole DNA, and if they knows what every gene does, probably not.
I'm definitely against genetically modified plants. At first, original plants were resistant, but then people breeded and cross-breeded them, so they became big, good looking, sometimes wholly new, but also vulnerable. Now scientists modifies them, flicks together, while they should rather seek for original, old breeds of plants.
I think it's possible, that if we will eat mutated plants, our cells may also get mutated too (like in a sense of a cancer, for example), but that's only my irrational assumption, I'm a fan of homeopathics (because they work on me) and a transmission of a bioinformation through water, which occurs, good or bad, commonly with food.

Pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, "conservation" by radiation, and so on, these are nasty things too. One guy I heard about has a cellar, and down there is a normal, relatively good looking apple. From the year before last year's season. He says he wouldn't try to eat it anymore. I think he should sell it as an accoutrement for a nearest Snow White theatre play.
You know, fruits and vegetables should rot when their time comes, it's better than to eat something, which can't even rot naturally.
 

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Quote:I have read about it

Quote:
I have read about it something in an independent press. These GM plants are tested in a laboratorilly isolated fields for quite a short time, everything seems OK, but when they're planted outside, things gets worse. Reputedly, some of these plants kills or repels bees and other beneficial bugs, and sometimes are hospitable for other, bad bugs. It messes up with ecology, and the worst thing is, that the pollen spreads also by wind, so fields around becomes genetically modified too.

You gotta be careful with some of the "independent presses."  There's no doubt that there is some bad science done in the name of industry, but I've noticed that vegans are just about as good at skewing reality as Christians.  (No offense to any vegans reading this, unless you believe something silly like veganism being better for the human body than a balanced diet.)  I agree with 'moral vegans' that being cruel to animals when there are better ways is pretty bad, but a lot of vegan 'propaganda newsletters' greatly exaggerate the bad and downplay the good parts animal products play in a good diet.

Quote:
Reputedly, scientists takes some gene sequence, they consider as useful, and inserts it somewhere into a plant's DNA, and try if it will work.

(Ahem...)  Genetic science is a bit more involved than that.  Sounds like the guy who wrote the article wasn't a scientist.  Imagine that.

Quote:
I'm definitely against genetically modified plants.

Foods that are off your list:

Avocado

Banana

Lettuce

Tomato

Grapes

Strawberries

Oranges

Apples

Pears

Brussel Sprouts

You're not going to like this one... soy beans.  (Sorry vegans.)

Carrots

Onions

Peas

Wheat

Rye

(Ahem... chocolate... yep... it's from a plant that's been genetically engineered.)

Parsley

Garlic

Corn

...

...

I could go on, but you can do it for yourself.  Walk through the fresh produce section of any store and glance around.  Virtually everything has been genetically engineered.  You see, the yield for most plants is too small to make them economically viable.  To farm enough "old breed" corn to feed the current population, we wouldn't have any room left for other important crops like wheat.  When scientists engineer for yield, they also try to improve the size, and sometimes the flavor or nutrition.  Sometimes, genetic engineering works great.  If you tried old breed corn, you wouldn't like it much, nor would you get much nutrition out of it.  Same for bananas.  The problem is not genetic engineering.  It's the way genetic engineering is used. 

Quote:
At first, original plants were resistant, but then people breeded and cross-breeded them, so they became big, good looking, sometimes wholly new, but also vulnerable.

This is true.  Wheat has become much less tolerant of pests and disease, so more pesticides and herbicides are necessary to continue producing the same crop size.  However, you seem to think that genetic engineering always leads to this conclusion.  It doesn't.  If the engineers were not constrained by economics and pressure from the food and chemical industry, their work could be a lot more directed, cautious, and beneficial.  The problem is not engineering, it's the fact that we have 6 billion people on the planet, and they just keep fucking, and they just keep making more babies, and that's a damn lot of people to feed.  The problem is that the economic incentive for big food and big chemical is not a healthier public, but a fatter public.

Quote:
I think it's possible, that if we will eat mutated plants, our cells may also get mutated too

You need to stop listening to Coast to Coast AM.

Quote:
I'm a fan of homeopathics (because they work on me)

Damn.  I almost don't want to tell you this, but you're a fan of the placebo effect.  Luckily, you won't believe me, and they'll continue to work.

Quote:
and a transmission of a bioinformation through water, which occurs, good or bad, commonly with food.

This is what Richard Dawkins lovingly calls "Bad Poetry in Science."  Those words sound really good.... OOOOH.... I'm getting a transmission of bioinformation.... WOW!

If you can eat food without receiving information from biological sources, you've invented a cool trick.  Just so you know, Bioinformation is the name of a science journal, not a homeopathic miracle.

Quote:
Pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides, "conservation" by radiation, and so on, these are nasty things too.

Irradiation is completely different than chemical treatment.  Don't lump them together.  Also, do some actual reading about what irradiation is, and what it does, before you make this broad statement. 

There are actually such things as natural pesticides.  There are even non-chemical pesticides.  This year, I'm trying something that is supposed to kill insects with exoskeletons more or less universally, and it has no active chemical agents.  I don't know if it will work for me, but it's used by a lot of organic farmers.  The point is, you're being a little scared pawn by believing that everything about the food industry is corrupt and evil.  You're making yourself into a fringe nut-job when you could be learning real science.  If you're really worried about the food industry, take a year and grow your own food, and then come back and tell me about the evils of using science to make your food better.

 

 

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Hambydammit wrote:You gotta

Hambydammit wrote:
You gotta be careful with some of the "independent presses."  There's no doubt that there is some bad science done in the name of industry, but I've noticed that vegans are just about as good at skewing reality as Christians.  (No offense to any vegans reading this, unless you believe something silly like veganism being better for the human body than a balanced diet.)  I agree with 'moral vegans' that being cruel to animals when there are better ways is pretty bad, but a lot of vegan 'propaganda newsletters' greatly exaggerate the bad and downplay the good parts animal products play in a good diet.

This has even less credibility, when I rely on my memory, from reading the articles years ago. Yeah, there's of course a warning, that the published articles (found mostly on internet) may not reflect a stance of the magazine and it's owners. But if just a bit of these articles would be true, it would be really important. It's a bad thing, that some even reflects a reality. By bad science, you maybe mean modifying plants, so they won't produce fertile seeds, so farmers can't sow the remains next year and must buy some new from the gigantic companies, like Monsanto, which genetically designed these seeds. It's good for their business, but it's gaining a control over a food production. We of course have to eat and these guys will decide what...and maybe once, when times becomes tough, if ever.
I'm a henchman of the golden middle way, which is meant to be optimal, but also the most diffcult. Everyone is different, and everyone needs to eat something else. Vegetarianism and veganism isn't for everybody. It depends, for example, on a blood type. 60% of people has type 0 (or O), which is the oldest and such a people were hunters and pickers of what's growing around. They're not efficiently processing a cereals and a milk products, which is a domain of farmers' or herdsmen cultures, (blood types A and B) which evolved much later (I mean both cultural and blood type evolution). According to some sources, AB people are most accustomed to the modern life style. All right, so where's my big, wooden club...


Hambydammit wrote:
Damn.  I almost don't want to tell you this, but you're a fan of the placebo effect.  Luckily, you won't believe me, and they'll continue to work.
Well, if you tell me how does it exactly work and what limits it has... Then either I will stop using homeopathics or you will start. Now there isn't even clearly defined how and why the placebo effect works. Explaining it may bring the homeopathy more credibility and improve the medicinal science.
As far as I know, homeopathics works also on people who are neutral towards them, but when given to a sceptic, the sceptic disbelief works against the beneficial effect, so it's less noticeable. Sometimes, it's healthier to not be a sceptic for a while, specially when a scepticism is technically a contaminative affection of a process, which is a thing we are trying to avoid in all laboratory tests. A positive affection by a belief also isn't kosher, but who cares, we're not in a lab now, the immediate goal is to be healthy, not methodically correct. After then, anyone can be sceptic as it's necessary.

Hambydammit wrote:
Foods that are off your list: 

Well, that's quite a long list. Aren't there laws for marking the GMF by a special logo? Unfortunately, I have only seen a "genetically unmodified" logo, and not very often.

Hambydammit wrote:
If you're really worried about the food industry, take a year and grow your own food, and then come back and tell me about the evils of using science to make your food better.

Already done, I live in a central-european village, it's common that people have some vegetables patches around a house, also a fruit trees, bushes, and so on. It's like sort of a small farm for a personal use. (some neighbours also still have farm animals)
I don't know if it's because a hydroponia, or whatever, but many vegetables from a supermarket tastes like a cardboard, or looks like they haven't been ever exposed to a sun, which I guess it's how they grow. Homegrown vegetables are usually much better, though sometimes bitten by bugs, slugs, caterpillars, mice, and so on. I doubt they would ever voluntarily touch a hydroponically grown, irradiated stuff.

But it is completely unnecessary to use genetic modifications to feed all people on the world. There's a thing called permaculture, and it's a method of effective designing a living place, to self-sustainably produce fruits, vegetables and even farm animals, without a most of chemical pesticides. (well, these new breeds of fruit trees requires things like a blue vitriol solution and NPK fertilizers, but you got the point) It's basically an intelligent usage of everything, things which produce a waste, which is usable for something else, should be placed near, whereever is a flowing water, then the water on it's way out should do some work, some plants, like a tobacco, planted near trees repels bad bugs, and so on...
Note, that there is no lack of food on the world. There's in fact already an overproduction and wasteful use of it. If it would be properly shared and distributed on a global level, nobody would have to die of hunger. The greatest waster of food and energy on a person is USA. It's called an american lifestyle and consumer's society. I have heard guys from around who were at USA for holiday to be appalled, how some people live and behave there, a local people would be ashamed of it. Of course it doesn't match for all americans, and other nations are not holy too, but doesn't make the wasting of sources any smaller.

The fucking also isn't a problem, it can be solved, not by killing the people (or letting them die by a hunger) but by actually feeding them. It's a well known economic effect. When people are poor, they've got to keep fucking and having a lot of children who mostly survive and will bring them some food, when they will be old.
If a famine would be solved, with an economical rise there will be a rise in population, but this will by time drop, people will be comfortable with having a reasonable number of children, and by time, the population will drop, like in Europe. It's the only moral way of solving the population overgrow.

Hambydammit wrote:
Irradiation is completely different than chemical treatment.  Don't lump them together.  Also, do some actual reading about what irradiation is, and what it does, before you make this broad statement. 

I lump it together, because I don't like it. I don't like it completely irrationally, but I just don't feel good when my food is exposed to a radiation. You have surely played Fallout. When something naturally rots, then it's kind of relaxing, it shows that something is still OK. I have already seen a better way to preserve food longer, which almost isn't scientifically noticeable (well, there are interactions with things, showing, that something is going on, but it's based on a scientifically ignored Tesla's patent).

Hambydammit wrote:
(Ahem...)  Genetic science is a bit more involved than that.  Sounds like the guy who wrote the article wasn't a scientist.  Imagine that.
I hope man...and at the same time, I hope it's not.
 

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Quote:By bad science, you

Quote:
By bad science, you maybe mean modifying plants, so they won't produce fertile seeds, so farmers can't sow the remains next year and must buy some new from the gigantic companies, like Monsanto, which genetically designed these seeds.

Not even remotely.  By bad science, I mean using less than thorough data, proceeding with experiments that have not been warranted by the evidence, or falsifying results for the sake of economics or grant writing.

Quote:
I'm a henchman of the golden middle way, which is meant to be optimal, but also the most diffcult. Everyone is different, and everyone needs to eat something else. Vegetarianism and veganism isn't for everybody. It depends, for example, on a blood type. 60% of people has type 0 (or O), which is the oldest and such a people were hunters and pickers of what's growing around. They're not efficiently processing a cereals and a milk products, which is a domain of farmers' or herdsmen cultures, (blood types A and B) which evolved much later (I mean both cultural and blood type evolution). According to some sources, AB people are most accustomed to the modern life style. All right, so where's my big, wooden club...

There's some scientific evidence at the heart of this, but it's been so covered up by bullshit that it's hard to find.  Yes, there are blood types that seem to require more meat-specific nutrients than others, but the rest of this, including the modern vs. hunter/gatherer, is unsubstantiated.  It's very dangerous and unscientific to run with a single piece of data (or even a few pieces of data that seem to be correlated) and create a whole system from it.

Quote:
Now there isn't even clearly defined how and why the placebo effect works. Explaining it may bring the homeopathy more credibility and improve the medicinal science.

Actually, neurology is homing in on this pretty quickly.  We know, for instance, that a certain part of the brain is active when we are doing brand-specific tasting, and it is not when we are doing blind tasting.  In other words, the well known effect that food tastes better when it is more expensive is real.  A different part of your brain is responding positively, and releasing chemicals that alter the way you experience the food.  The brand name, in this case, is money.  When a person has a pre-existing belief that more expensive things are better, this part of the brain responds when that condition is met.  The same thing works for placebos.  When you get a brand name -- (Doctor Approved Pill That Will Work) the part of your brain that makes you enjoy expensive food more kicks in releasing chemicals that alter the way your body behaves.

I'm afraid it's not going to give homeopathy more credibility as anything other than an inert drug (placebo) treatment.  The clear indication is that certain pathways form in our brains and become essentially hardwired.  When the condition that triggers the hardwiring is met, the brain responds appropriately, releasing a coctail of real chemicals which in turn effect the body in a positive way.

Quote:
As far as I know, homeopathics works also on people who are neutral towards them, but when given to a sceptic, the sceptic disbelief works against the beneficial effect, so it's less noticeable.

This is VERY hard to prove.  First, people who sell and research homeopathic remedies are biased in their favor.  Second, the pharmaceutical industry is biased against them.  Third, the much smaller "scientific natural remedy" community -- people who use naturally grown chemical remedies based on the real, scientific existence of those real, scientifically verified chemicals -- are generally biased against homeopathics and pharmaceuticals.  Furthermore, individuals who say they are neutral are typically not as neutral as they think.  I don't mean just for homeopathics.  I mean for everything.  When detailed surveys are given to people who claim to be neutral on an issue, a bias is almost always uncovered.

Furthermore, it has been clearly demonstrated that belief is not always necessary for the placebo effect to work.  (Jarvis WT. Arthritis: Folk remedies and quackery. Nutrition Forum 7:1-3, 1990.)

Quote:
A positive affection by a belief also isn't kosher, but who cares, we're not in a lab now, the immediate goal is to be healthy, not methodically correct.

Geez...

Give me a lab, and you take your intuition, and let's see who's healthier.

Quote:
Well, that's quite a long list. Aren't there laws for marking the GMF by a special logo? Unfortunately, I have only seen a "genetically unmodified" logo, and not very often.

No, because the GMF thing is a red herring.  Everything you eat has been genetically modified.  You have been genetically modified from your parents.  Genetic modification is what evolution is.  When scientists do it in the laboratory, they're doing the same thing that happens in nature, and the results are the same -- the offspring's mutations are either neutral, beneficial, or negative.

Oh, also, from the last post, you don't get mutations from eating things.  You get mutations from recombination, point mutation, and crossover.  When you eat something, you're metabolizing chemicals that will never get anywhere near your DNA.

Quote:
I don't know if it's because a hydroponia, or whatever, but many vegetables from a supermarket tastes like a cardboard, or looks like they haven't been ever exposed to a sun, which I guess it's how they grow. Homegrown vegetables are usually much better, though sometimes bitten by bugs, slugs, caterpillars, mice, and so on. I doubt they would ever voluntarily touch a hydroponically grown, irradiated stuff.

Very good for you.  Yes, homegrown stuff is usually better tasting.  Commercial stuff has been genetically engineered to have longer shelf life, better color, etc.  Usually, nutritional content and flavor are sacrificed when necessary.

I've done hydroponics.  They're good for herbs (no... I mean cooking herbs.  I'm the only person I know who doesn't mean pot when I say that.), decent for tomatoes, and pretty damn good for hot peppers.  Since hydroponics are removed from many of the nonessential variables outside (soil composition, rain, environmental contaminants) the flavors tend to be a little less robust, but there is literally nothing to fear from the method.

Quote:
But it is completely unnecessary to use genetic modifications to feed all people on the world.

Horse-shit.  Do you know what the yield is for "unmodified" corn?  Pretty much zero.  It's damn near inedible in its unmodified form.  Most of the vegetables you eat are the result of centuries of directed modification.  Most naturally occurring foods are not adapted to feeding six billion people.  The only reason... seriously, the ONLY reason there are six billion people on the planet is that we learned to engineer otherwise unsuitable crops.

Please, be careful of bad poetic science.  Genetic engineering is not good or bad.  It's simply guided selection instead of random selection.  In the laboratory, it's a very specific form of guided selection.  Instead of letting an organism use its own methods for recombining DNA, it's done manually.  The result is still DNA.

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There's a thing called permaculture, and it's a method of effective designing a living place, to self-sustainably produce fruits, vegetables and even farm animals, without a most of chemical pesticides.

Yep.  There's a community like that about three hundred miles north of me.  The population density is something like that of rural Nebraska.  You know there are six billion people on the planet, right?

Look, I'm not defending the food industry.  It's a scam.  I know.  I work in it.  What I'm trying to get across is that your beliefs are based on a little bit of questionable science extended to ridiculous extremes.  Your fear of genetic engineering is unscientific and unfounded.  The thing to fear is the unscrupulous use of it to make more money instead of creating sustainable, non-chemical means to feed ourselves.

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Note, that there is no lack of food on the world.

Precisely because every industrial farm in the world uses genetically modified plants, and our farm animals are genetically modified to be extra large, etc..

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The greatest waster of food and energy on a person is USA. It's called an american lifestyle and consumer's society. I have heard guys from around who were at USA for holiday to be appalled, how some people live and behave there, a local people would be ashamed of it. Of course it doesn't match for all americans, and other nations are not holy too, but doesn't make the wasting of sources any smaller.

You're exactly correct.  The U.S. is an embarrassment to me.   I don't know the exact average, but I know that most Americans drive well over 15,000 miles a year in giant SUVs.  I have an 8 year old car with less than 70k miles.  I walk or bike almost everywhere, and I recycle everything I can.  I buy most of my food from local markets, and grow some.  The thing is, my consumption compared to most Americans is miniscule, and I know that it's still embarrassing compared to many parts of the world.  I have no problem condemning our consumerism.

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The fucking also isn't a problem, it can be solved, not by killing the people (or letting them die by a hunger) but by actually feeding them.

Well, I certainly don't advocate killing people or letting them die of hunger.  However, several of my friends are ecologists dealing specifically with extinction events and climate change, and let me tell you, the population is a HUGE problem.

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If a famine would be solved, with an economical rise there will be a rise in population, but this will by time drop, people will be comfortable with having a reasonable number of children, and by time, the population will drop, like in Europe. It's the only moral way of solving the population overgrow.

What you're not taking into account is that sustainable ecological niches only work within certain rather slim parameters.  The ecological consequences of non-food waste emissions, over-fishing, over-farming, and habitat destruction are incontrovertible. 

I'm not really proposing a solution here.  To be honest, I don't think there is one.  As you say, killing people or letting them starve is simply not an option, but the realistic possibility of constructing ecologically sound food production facilities for the entire world is vanishingly small, and the continuing effect of human consumption will eventually make much of the world uninhabitable, and will destroy many of our food sources.

Oh, you're also not taking cities into account.  I can fit a million people into a few square miles, which is fine, except that none of them have enough space to produce food.  If population densities remained small, what you're suggesting might be viable, but not the way we live now.

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I lump it together, because I don't like it. I don't like it completely irrationally, but I just don't feel good when my food is exposed to a radiation.

I prefer to know the truth, whether I like it or not.

 

 

 

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Hambydammit:
Ok, good reply, I get it Smiling I just want to add, that I see a difference between genetically modifying by a cultivation, and inserting a DNA sequence from let's say a jellyfish into a corn. Cultivation is acceptable, people does it for thousands of years, but gluing together a DNA of species which have nothing in common, is something to which our bodies are not accustomed at all, and it maybe will have unpredictable effects. And we would hardly notice them, in the huge amount of modern civilization diseases.

When I'm referring to a "poetic science", it's mostly related to New Age Movement. Here, it's possible only to describe things "poetically", while in science they're still not defined. There's only a hope, that it will be scientifically defined soon, with several examples, how science later found a sense in old practices, which were at first rejected as a superstition or nonsense.
For example, existence of bacteries or acupuncture. Scientific approach is good, after all, it's dominant in our society, but it's often very slow and those who ignorantly skips the steps of verification and just tries it, are usually ahead, they experience (I don't say that understand) new things before they are verifiable by a current technologic level of science. Of course, without a science the phenomenon won't be fully understood,  classified and described in generally accepted therms (which will may make a lot of new things possible), just vaguely empirically known, but that won't stop laics and NAM sympathizants from their searching, trying and describing things they discover by a pseudo-scientific poetical language.

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Luminion,

I think it's important to distinguish between "science" and "scientific communities".  Science is just a method of testing propositions... anyone can perform science on just about anything they have access to, if they understand the principles of the scientific method and falsification.  Getting information accepted by a scientific community takes a bit more work, and unfortunately I've heard anecdotes of people who did good scientific investigations and then weren't taken seriously simply because they didn't have a PHd.

You're right that scientific communities do lack a lot of knowledge, but who doesn't?  If you accept things as true just because someone says they are, then you don't have knowledge, you just have belief.  If that belief is false and you accept it as true, then you'll likely make a lot of bad choices based on that false belief.  But, you're right that to simply assume that something is false just because no scientific community has verified it to be true is equally bad.  Professional scientists tend to focus on research that will get them prestige and grant money, so a lot of ideas that are generally assumed to be not credible will get ignored by professional scientists.  The important thing to realize though, is that this doesn't mean that they have to be ignored by science... because remember, science is just a method that anyone can use.

So, if there's something that you thing is worth trying, then yes, try it... but watch carefully to see how consistently and how well it works.  If you know other people that want to try it, great... the bigger your sample size, the more reliable your results.  Make sue that you have a good objective method of measuring your results... if all you have is a vague feeling, there are many things that can cause that other than what you're testing.  If possible, perform a double-blind study... have one person arrange things so that no one knows whether or not they're working with the actual thing being tested.  Granted, your results won't be as credible as a fully funded professional research project, but you'll be a lot more confident in your findings than if you had just assumed it was true....


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Luminon:You gone on and on

Luminon:

You gone on and on about things, in now a couple of different threads, and to sum it up, your stance on most things appears to be:

a: Science doesn't know everything, therefore any claim is as good as another. (If that's true, then I assert my dominion over you by the dark powers of nincompoop and order you to paypal $50,000 to RRS)

b: I did X and got Y effects  (with no controls)  therefore it must be correct both that X caused Y (not proven nor controlled for) and will again (not tested).

c: "They" are all trying to keep us regular folks in the dark because of (list whatever interests apply to your current conspiracy theory)

The problem with conspiracy theorists and believers in crackpot medicine is that to believe in either one, you have to believe that "The MAN" not only has some evil plan of destruction for you, but that all the thousands of people who are "in" on the deal will remain silent, or easily discredited.

If I discovered that some weed growing in my backyard could cure psoriasis, for example, My grandchildren's grandchildren would be assured a future of vast wealth. But ONLY if I was able to prove its efficacy, in a lab, in tests repeatable by others. Because once it was proved, every dermatologist in the world would be passing out the stuff like candy and I'd get a cut form every pill.

The idea that I'd have some magical mystery cure to something as awful (and I have it so I can attest that its beyond suck) as psoriasis and NOT have it tested 15 ways to Sunday by any university I could get to take it on, is ludicrous. It wouldn't even be in MY OWN interests not to get it studied.

Similarly, if I could come up with a cure for serious fatal diseases, or even a reliable cure for some of the worst symptoms of those diseases, the dollar signs go up according to the severity and commonality of the illness.

You have to do intellectual backflips to make these kinds of theories even KIND OF make sense, and that should always be your first clue to stop and look at your thought processes.

My Dad, God bless him (and no apologies for the verbage) always said the only thing he'd ever have as a bumper sticker was: "Question everything, especially if you're certain it's true."

I've not always taken that advice, and have found to my sorrow nearly every time, that I probably should have.

 

Being open-minded isn't the same thing as being vacant.


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Hambydammit wrote:There's

Hambydammit wrote:

There's some scientific evidence at the heart of this, but it's been so covered up by bullshit that it's hard to find.

Yeah. Isn't that the truth about anything touched by greed and self-interest?

Going back to GM food, I think part of the public perception is a growing distrust of big business. The assumption is like that of pharmacuetical companies: they are willing to screw over everyone else as long as it makes them more money. And this is true.

(As an aside: that's my definition of "evil." The willingness to fuck over somebody else for personal gain.)

There's just so much disinformation (from all sides) that it's damned near impossible to make rational decisions. 95% of the process now involves determining who has what interest, and how that can skew their claims, and trying to account for personal intention. What should be a 5 second decision suddenly takes hours or days.

No wonder people turn to religion! It'd be nice to just accept certain things as a given, and not have to think about it. It's not that the logical thinking is hard; it's the sorting of disinformation from real information that makes it difficult.

Fuck 'em. I gonna start believing everything. GM food is bad, and will destroy civilization. Civilization will crumble without GM food, which is perfectly harmless. God exists, though he doesn't. Homeopathy is the ultimate cure for a sick society, though it doesn't work. Astrology will reveal to me the winning lottery number, though I can't use it because my non-existent God doesn't like me betting. We are a product and input of/to evolution, though God created 6k years ago (give or take). (Oh, he also created all that fossil light in transit from those distant galaxies, which are really just a light show on a sphere centered on the earth with a radius of about 6k light years.) My head is going to explode, but it won't, while I bang it against this wall.

"Yes, I seriously believe that consciousness is a product of a natural process. I find that the neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers who proceed from that premise are the ones who are actually making useful contributions to our understanding of the mind." - PZ Myers


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QuasarX: thanks for clearing it up, had I put them almost all into one proverbial sack. I have seen too much intelligent people to say, that something is impossible, though I saw it before several times on my own eyes and people I can trust confirmed it independently as a part of their daily routine, using the same scientific methods like any scientist would use. There's clearly a difference between the community and the method itself.
 

Jubal:
Thanks for feedback. I've been trying to hold myself back with going much into depth of it, it's all diffcult to understand, people usually gets repelled by a jargon they don't know. Very few people finds these informations useful. This level of popularity versus plain  "technicalness" is, what mostly divides popular (and sometimes laughable) New Age-ish stuff from really advanced informations. Not always, for example, Osho is very popular, but advanced, and Scientology is very technical, but as far I know, close to a nonsense.

Jubal wrote:

You gone on and on about things, in now a couple of different threads, and to sum it up, your stance on most things appears to be:

a: Science doesn't know everything, therefore any claim is as good as another. (If that's true, then I assert my dominion over you by the dark powers of nincompoop and order you to paypal $50,000 to RRS)


Science isn't accustomed to work with everything, I mean specially the scientific community, not the method itself. There are some revolutionary scientists, but they're not popularily known. No random claim is as good as another, only this, which is backupped by something, for example, in my cases, by lifetime experiences, and not only of my lifetime. Some of my claims are a solid part of my consciousness, like you can't shut off one of your senses (except of sight), I can't ignore one of my own senses (touch), which appears to be a bit extended. I know it's natural, anyone can experience the same thing, by a simple exercise, I just have a bit more practice.

Jubal wrote:
b: I did X and got Y effects  (with no controls)  therefore it must be correct both that X caused Y (not proven nor controlled for) and will again (not tested).
Of course, scientific method is so useful, that everyone around uses it automatically. Interpersonal confirmation, critical thinking, methodics, all is there, I'm just presenting the many times confirmed results, it saves a time. People practice things, tries everything, watches results, and passes the subject to another people, for them to try it, and then discuss what they all discovered. Phenomenons, with which I come to contact with, can't be easily locked into any lab, the only sensoric tool sensitive enough is mostly a human consciousness and body, and yet, there is a lot of useful work, which sets the standards and wides a horizons beyond most of you here would hardly believe. And that is right anyway, you shouldn't, before you see it on your own eyes or touch. I'm just following the evidence whereever it leads.

Jubal wrote:
c: "They" are all trying to keep us regular folks in the dark because of (list whatever interests apply to your current conspiracy theory)
Keep folks in dark? C'mon, it's less or more automatic. Just see how a knowledge and finances are divided in our society, masses of uneducated and/or starving people, much smaller middle class and on the top...well, upper 10,000. It is natural, that between groups of people differing in knowledge or power there is a huge difference in their numbers.

Jubal wrote:
The problem with conspiracy theorists and believers in crackpot medicine is that to believe in either one, you have to believe that "The MAN" not only has some evil plan of destruction for you, but that all the thousands of people who are "in" on the deal will remain silent, or easily discredited.
Well, world is big, and interesting things happens out there, and not even far away. Who can put two and two together, is getting close to a conspirative thinking. I'm getting a suspicion, that "conspiracy" is a basically a therm for a specific method of work, nothing more, nothing less.

Jubal wrote:
If I discovered that some weed growing in my backyard could cure psoriasis, for example, My grandchildren's grandchildren would be assured a future of vast wealth. But ONLY if I was able to prove its efficacy, in a lab, in tests repeatable by others. Because once it was proved, every dermatologist in the world would be passing out the stuff like candy and I'd get a cut form every pill.

The idea that I'd have some magical mystery cure to something as awful (and I have it so I can attest that its beyond suck) as psoriasis and NOT have it tested 15 ways to Sunday by any university I could get to take it on, is ludicrous. It wouldn't even be in MY OWN interests not to get it studied.

Similarly, if I could come up with a cure for serious fatal diseases, or even a reliable cure for some of the worst symptoms of those diseases, the dollar signs go up according to the severity and commonality of the illness.


As it is in a world of market, this business is already pretty much occupied, it's one of greatest world's industries. (I mean medicament industry) I have reasons to believe, that economical mechanism of market had long ago taken over the original purpose, to keep people healthy. Effects are significant, for example, if you have problems with heart, you'll get pills for it, but these pills will also damage your liver. So you go to get pills for liver, and these another pills will be too much for your waste removing system, so it will start to stay in body, like in joints and their cartilages, causing arthritis. So you get pills for arthritis....
I don't have anything against surgery or other important parts of medicinal science, but if I remember, there's a charge in Haag court for human rights against the medicament industry, for keeping modern society on the edge of illness and raking their money for half-efficient medicines.
If you want to succeed in inventing a medicine, you must make sure the new medicine will not be too cheap and too efficient. We pay our doctors and medicinal companies only, when we are sick, so there is only one way how to keep us paying. A happy person doesn't need a priest, a healthy person doesn't need a doctor.
There is no guilty for this system on any person or group of people, it's divided on less or more small pieces on all people involved, that most of them easily can live with it without even realizing it. However, very good sign is, what medicines a doctor would give to own children, compared to those, which he prescribes to other patients.

Jubal wrote:
You have to do intellectual backflips to make these kinds of theories even KIND OF make sense, and that should always be your first clue to stop and look at your thought processes.

My Dad, God bless him (and no apologies for the verbage) always said the only thing he'd ever have as a bumper sticker was: "Question everything, especially if you're certain it's true."

I've not always taken that advice, and have found to my sorrow nearly every time, that I probably should have.


Yes, my thought process looks twisted like a paragraph, because I have here to publically skip everything, which is too boring, hard to describe, personal, subjective (unpresentable to others in an electronic form), or just said in specific jargon, which people tends to understand literally, because they already know some the words from other times and sources.
Some things are necessarily "dumbed down", but people here tends to be very intelligent, so they less or more don't like it.
I have quite a liking in so-called "conspiracy theories", which I would call rather practices. I have seen and experienced small bits of it in practice, thanks God only that just in a tiny scale, but what I know for sure, corresponds with more extensive view of "conspiracies". So for example, if I read a big, extremely disturbing article about a sabotage of a cancer research, I know there have been some causes around with a doctor, who cured a cases of cancer by devitalization, was very succesful and the method was awfully cheap and non-invasive. He was sued for some his patients who died, but that's absurd, because they all were practically dead men and women, gone through extensive and unsuccesful chemo and radiotherapy, destined to soon death anyway. It's a wonder he cured at least some of them. If I'd ever have a cancer, I'd probably go and search for him.
So, this is how I see things, I can't explain every part of my thought process, but I think it's quite well backupped. But thanks for care anyway, I will try to pay attention, if my thought process is really coherent and I will see. This site is really very useful, with providing me the thought tools necessary for logical self-analysis, before it was rather intuitive and subjective.

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