Corn..is it safe to eat GMO corn?

(Thanks to a few shares, I now have 76 views by June 3 of this entry)
Corn and soybeans are the main products grown with GE (genetically engineered) seeds. If you are afraid of GE/GMO crops, you could just stop eating corn. Soybean product may end up in some processed foods, but it is a lesser amount. Possibly Chinese food, if that is your daily meal. Golden rice is a modified rice, read the package. White rice is not.

Both soybean oil and corn oil end up in a lot of food products. I would judge them to be the least harmful, potentially, as they contain very little protein, starch etc. from the corn. I doubt corn oil from GMO corn and non-GMO corn could be easily identified as different. The amount of pesticide or herbicide in the oil is defined by the FDA but is generally low. If you insist on "organic" corn oil, it is available by a simpler pressing process. The industrial process of the big giants is very much a man made process and is aimed at getting all the components out of the corn. Industrial corn oil has additives to prevent it from going rancid (air oxidized).

Wheat has never been sold as a GE product, mainly because Canada want to export its wheat to Europe.

You still want to eat corn, you say. Well, your restaurant is unlikely to serve non-gmo tortillas and corn chips. You have those in the food aisles of most stores in the health food section.

But you want to know more details? I can direct you to two books. One is in its 4th edition soon. It argues that the GMO foods may be unsafe. In particular Bt toxin in the food, a protein, is a possible food allergen to some.

GMO Myths book

Another book is a rather militant attack on Monsanto. It clearly outlines the somewhat roundabout process by which food safety is established. And it is a different task. Foods are processes in the same way that drugs are, but the FDA job is often to ban processes or recall contaminated lots after the fact.
Marie Monique Robin book on Monsanto:
https://www.amazon.com/World-According-Monsanto-Marie-Monique-Robin/dp/1595587098/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1527886214&sr=1-1&keywords=Monsanto

 Monsanto itself prefers review articles which state invariably that "the weight of the evidence is that GM corn is safe." But they do have long lists of articles to follow up on. The NSA just published a book about 680 pages long, free a s pdf. It promotes GE foods without a shame. "Science is our solution." These sort of team efforts never allow for rebuttals.


I tracked down just using google scholar an article on Roundup, which is used to grow the GMO corn in high yield. In my opinion it is toxic, and does end up somewhere in the environment. Most of it decomposes, unlike herbicides of the old days. Here we find that Roundup, as does its active ingredient, affects the mammalian aromatase enzyme:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257596/

Aromatase is an enzyme in the chain that leads to synthesis of estrogen.

The sweeping generalizations of the review articles never point out such obvious effects. Here I would say that the farmer spraying Roundup is more in danger than we are.

While we are on the topic of Roundup, many books and articles mention that "chemical" farming relies on "petrochemicals." This is wrong. The chemical industry is vast, and the majority of chemicals (in numbers, not tons) are not made from oil derived starting materials. They may use heptane or toluene to run chemistry as the solvent, but here is the synthesis of glyphosate (main ingredient of Roundup):

The phosphorus derivative is inorganic, derived from phosphoric acid, the second piece is formaldehyde. Look it up in Wikipedia for fun. The third piece is glycine, the most common amino acid. It is an industrial chemical, though the amino acid supplement comes from protein as a food item. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycine#Production

Glyphosate has now been found at 100 PPB or more in oat based snacks. See https://www.ewg.org/childrenshealth/glyphosateincereal/#.W3WqTeNOmEe

But back to corn. Sometimes you just need your corn and you think, what can one bag of popcorn hurt? There we also note that some of these food effects may not be seen for decades, as diet and health are very difficult things to study. Healthy subjects do not volunteer to eat GMO food under controlled studies for ten years.

But you are in luck. Pop corn is not yet GMO:

My objections to GMO crops are that the farmer is sort of forced into them. The seeds are expensive and the treatments then guarantee a crop, unless you are unable to water the crop. Nothing else would ruin it. But we have survived for hundreds of years on a variety of crops. Monoculture in general is not a good way to go. In fact it could even be a trap, where all the "engineering" fails in a short time and nature catches up with our tricks.