Two main things:

1. Genetically modified (GMO) foods can cause non-food compounds to get synthesized in the food that our bodies have never seen before, which can trigger autoimmune issues. I consider this the lower risk.

2. GMO foods are designed specifically to allow more use of pesticides and herbicides. These get incorporated into the food and can stay around after washing, especially in processed food. Pesticides are low-level neurotoxin and disrupt gut nerves, while herbicides disrupt gut flora. Loosely, what happens is that the body is sensitive to most plant husks, since they are designed to keep bugs out that feed on them. GMO copies that defense mechanism, often amplifying it hugely, resulting in amplified food sensitivities. I consider this the higher risk, so high in fact that the consequences of it can be life-altering.

Edit: These effects combined turn ordinary food into inflammatory food

My impression is quite the opposite - GMO insect-resistant plants enable using much less pesticides (the savings from reduced frequency and quantity of pesticides being the economic reason for choosing such crops) than non-modified equivalents.

GMO roundup resistance allows us to use a bunch of herbicide without killing the food crop. This seems to indicate that we’d be using a lot more roundup on those crops than otherwise.

Glyphosate is also used to desiccate grain crops. I rather doubt the residue is removed before it reaches one’s table.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_desiccation

This article [0] points towards the reality being somewhere in the middle - more herbicides but less insecticides.

> GMOs have been changing the way that pesticides are used in agriculture. Herbicide-tolerant genetically modified (GM) crops have led to an increase in herbicide usage while insecticide-producing GM crops have led to a decrease in insecticides.

[0] https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2015/gmos-and-pesticides/

> insecticide-producing GM

A decrease in usage, yes. But is it a decrease in what ends upon the plant is what I'd be curious about.

Not OP. In many cases, the genetic modifications are either performed to either let the plant produce (more) lectins that kill insects, or make the plant immune to certain herbicides like glyphosate. The human gut and microbiome might be able to deal with lectins they have evolved to deal with, and in “normal” quantities. But those additional GMO lectins are suspected to be hard on the intestinal barrier. If that barrier is compromised, autoimmunity might be the result, as OP indicated.

This is exactly the problem. The idea of GMOs is fine, but if it's increasing the load of gut damaging chemicals in the food supply that is not good. And the truth is we simply don't know, so it's crazy to just assume that these GMO foods are gut safe. These days it seems everyone I know has some kind of gut issue (myself included), so I think we should be cautious with GMOs.

Also why would GMO be bad? The criticism comes mostly from people that also believe in osteopathic / homeopathic medicine in my social circle.

I find it a terrific chance for humanity to engineer plants in such a way that they are more robust against disease and bad weather (with CRISPR/CAS and such methods).

Here is my criticism of GMO foods; or at least, the reason I'm wary of them. I don't believe in any "woo" at all.

Why would the massive corporations that have driven the food in our supermarkets ever cheaper, ever thinner in nutrients, ever higher in fat and sweeteners and fillers, ever more laden with pesticides and antibiotics, ever more processed—why would they use a technology like GMO crops for good? Why wouldn't they just splice pesticide and sugar genes into them directly and juice the yield even harder so that the soil is stripped and ruined even faster? I think they will be used to boost profits, not make our food more nutritious, or even cheaper in any way except per calorie.

I understand there are potentially benefits, e.g. growing crops resistant to pests so that spray pesticides can be reduced. I just have no faith whatsoever that these kinds of considered actions will be taken, based on the last 100 years of technology. It's just going to be wheat and corn, wheat and corn, wheat and corn until caloric yields approach insolation and the soil is as gray and lifeless as the moon.

The risks from unknown unknowns are even worse with genetic engineering in crops, due to the inevitability of hypothetical "harmful to humans genes" propagating from one population to others by pollination.

The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms) https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/pp2.pdf

Currently there doesn't appear to be any evidence that GMO is bad for your health and most GMO is just transplanting genes from other edible organisms.

Hopefully regulators aren't going to allow insertion of engineered genes producing novel molecules without going through actual medical grade trials for those molecules. Or it may torpedo the entire industry.

Abscense of proof is not proof of abscense.

Determining cause and effect in the interaction of complicated systems is no easy task.

In every case of GMO food I have encountered, the compounds are not novel. Rather, they're an adaptation or resistance found in one species and transferred to another.

Currently there doesn't appear to be any evidence...

And if we're wrong, how do you remove GMO organisms afterwards?

I don’t think GMO is necessarily bad, but while companies are working on ways to make plants more robust, I doubt they’re taking the long term effects on human health into account.

In theory, there are lots of fine things we could do with GMOs. In practice, basically the only common use of GMOs is to allow indiscriminate use of pesticides and herbicides. This is purely about profit for chemical companies, without regard for environmental impact. I don't care to eat more pesticides and herbicides, either.

Anti - GMO crowd is definetly very similar to anti vaxxers and other science deniers spreading dangerous propaganda while eating oranges and bananas.

Nature produces both edible products, inedible products, and toxic or partially edible (tomatoes, potatoes, etc.) products. AFAIK, there is almost no risk in transferring genes from one edible non-toxic product to another edible non-toxic product. For all other gene transfers, testing is required.

"AFAIK, there is almost no risk in transferring genes from one edible non-toxic product to another edible non-toxic product. "

And where is your knowledge coming from?

I am certainly not a biologist, but as far as I know, there are quite some plants that are edible in the breed we eat - but a different wild form is toxic (carrots for example). How are you sure, the wrong (dormant) genes do not get transfered and activated, without testing?

Or even with the same plant, potatoes. The root is good for us, but the flower is toxic.

In other words, you always have to do extensive testing, when you play around with genes.

Genes are not computer modules you just swap around and turn on and off. It is way more complicated.

“science deniers”

Like, say, Galileo?

Are you implying oranges and bananas were made with modern GMO methods?

I agree that the anti gmo/vaxx etc. crowd is quite irrational in many regards, but I can see a difference between traditional breeding plants - and directly editing DNA.

I don't but we've been doing generical modification by trying to put two random things plants together since dawn of times.

Yes - and this is also what happens in nature all the time. Only slower and random.

And surprise: many plants are poisenous. And even with the slow method of natural breeding, poisenous traits can creep back in. The potential and speed of GMO methods is just way higher. For good and also bad results. So it is not the same.

Right, and GMOs are much more targeted engineering. It's the same bs of "we don't know the future side effects in 30 years" scaremongering of anti vaxxers.

Just like with vaccines having plenty of resistant food so people don't starve far overvalue whatever little side effects you might get.

"GMOs are much more targeted engineering."

It is, but with a technology, that is not fully understood.

Or is it fully known for example, why cloned animals live far shorter, than the original? Not as far, as I am aware.

Also, GMO is mainly criticized for its combination with pesticides. The people who believe it damages their souls, are not many.

Don't forget the 5G radiation...

I bet you two are the type who smugly told everyone off for believing the "completely disproven" lab leak theory for a year, before never mentioning it again.

If you remove 5g it’s actually a common technique to bombard seeds with radiation and look for useful mutations

I'm not into osteopathy or homeopathy but my concerned about GMO are because I don't trust that the scientist really know what they are doing, or can fully understand the impact any changes they might make, not only on humans, but on the environment at large. Nor do I trust our government to be able to police and regulate the industry. Nor do I trust big farma to put health before profits.

I think humans always genetically "engineered" plants by selection process. Our current cultivated plants are the result of thousands of years of breeding.

Who knows what accidental genetic damage from breeding will cause problems in humans?

Harmful crop breeds would have been selected against over the course of many generations, right? Now we're doing it on a larger scale, so the risks and rewards are greater. What is our knowledge of the risks and rewards? Are the rewards aligned with general human wellbeing, or just a profit motive? I don't know.

As someone else with immune system reactions to food, it doesn't seem a great idea to modify food even more than we have done already.

That's not a good argument at all. What 'modification' do you think is a risk and how would it cause the concerns your worried about?

I must have missed the announcement that we had worked out exactly what causes food allergies and intolerance and have promised not to do anything that could trigger them when doing GM.

You miss a lot with a thought process like that.

Please post a URL to the announcement that I missed.

One of the modifications some GMO plants have is to produce more/more effective lectins to make them more resilient against insects. Given research on lectins shows many of them are harmful to human health, it seems like a valid concern.

To put the question back what benefit does it provide aside from cost?

As just one example, if you live in an area where it is difficult to get dietary Vitamin A, you might enjoy the benefits of not going blind due to Vitamin A deficiency by eating Golden Rice[0].

Have you ever eaten a SweeTango apple? It is one of dozens of varieties that have been created in the last hundred years using genetic engineering via cross breeding[1]. Do you know why commercial tomatoes are so bland? Genetic engineering via selective breeding[2].

The fact of the matter is that all of the crops and livestock that we cultivate today are genetically engineered. The main distinction now is that we are technologically advanced enough to introduce beneficial modifications deliberately, rather than relying on random mutations and gene recombinations that occur in nature at random over hundreds or thousands of generations.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_rice

[1] https://mnhardy.umn.edu/varieties/fruit/apples/all-apple-var...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato#Modern_commercial_varie...

The vitamin A argument boils down to cost.

Genetic engineering goes way beyond the possibility space of selective breeding, which we have thousands of years of experience with.

When it comes to diet, science is difficult enough as it is. Introducing such novelties only makes it harder.

> The vitamin A argument boils down to cost.

It boils down to cost in the same way that you and I not owning a private jet boils down to cost—which is to say, as nice as it would be, there are probably not enough resources on the planet to feed everyone a balanced diet without these continued advances in food production, as the current conventional farming practices are not long-term sustainable, and they are already required to actually feed everybody on the planet today.

> Genetic engineering goes way beyond the possibility space of selective breeding, which we have thousands of years of experience with.

And inside that possibility space are things like extremely high-yield crops that end hunger forever. Grains like Golden Rice that solve nutritional deficiencies caused by incomplete diets. Nuts that are modified so they don’t trigger life-threatening anaphylaxis. Crops that absorb and sequester CO2 more efficiently. Delicious new hybrids that don’t even exist right now. Foods genetically modified to be low in FODMAPs so people who have gut problems aren’t so restricted in what they can eat.

All the problems that exist now with diets have hypothetical solutions in genetically engineering crops to create more of the nutrients that we need to be healthy, and to eliminate the bad stuff that makes us sick, down to the point of being able to provide ideal nutrition for a specific person’s body. However, we’re unlikely to get there if people’s imaginations are always focused on the potential negatives instead of balancing those risks with the obvious potential and need for this sort of technology to be developed.

A liveable Earth? Look up "nine planetary boundaries". The "biogeochemical boundary" especially pertains to the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, both necessary to plants. Nitrogen- and phosphorus-supplying fertilizer is energy intensive to produce and toxic in wide-area run-off. Some crops live in a symbiotic relationship with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, so scientists are actively researching ways of engineering that abiility into other crops -- which would greatly reduce the need for producing fixed nitrogen for fertilizer, which, in turn, would greatly reduce the need for the high fossil-fuel-consuming method of generating fixed nitrogen for fertilizer, thus helping out on the global warming front. It's not all about cost.