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Re:Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes by colechristensen on Sunday February 24, 2019 @11:24PM (#19242906)
This isn't true.

Roundup-ready GMOs led to replacement of many more toxic herbicides with glyphosphate. BT GMOs led to much less usage of insecticides on crops.

Re:Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes by viraptor on Monday February 25, 2019 @12:07AM (#19243135)
Which has its own problems unfortunately, given that it's basically everywhere now (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896971...) and it damages DNA (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22331240/). So basically everything's terrible and we're all going to die...
Re:Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes by colechristensen on Monday February 25, 2019 @01:35AM (#19243517)
The problem being that the signal to noise ratio is very low as to whether or not there are harmful effects. Normal exposure to glyphosphate in people is very low and at those levels you are exposed to many different substances even in wholly natural food.

Compounded with that is there are very few people doing research without an agenda.

You also have to realize that "organic" in the US doesn't mean treatment-free crops. There are a large number of substances approved to treat crops for pests and weeds and still be counted as organic with the rationale that those treatments are less synthetic. There is absolutely no guarantee that this means they have fewer negative effects.

Re:Paul Graham on the Transition to Meat Substitutes by viraptor on Monday February 25, 2019 @03:58AM (#19244122)
Yeah, I get these are small proportions. I'm definitely not recommending "organic" produce/meat. I meant that whatever we try to do at this point seems to be "let's use a little bit of this carcinogen which is spreading everywhere in tiny amounts so we don't have to use more of a different toxic substance". It feels depressing that these are our choices.