More Fun with Frankenfoods or Does that Make Us Cannibals?

My friend and adviser, Emilie Bush, sent along a provocative article titled, “Human Genes in Your Food” (Sky News 3/7/2007) with a challenge to “do something” with it. Well, Emilie, this one’s for you…

The Ventria Corporation is at it again. This California-based biotech company just got permission from the US Department of Agriculture to grow more than 3,000 acres of genetically modified (GM) rice in Kansas. Ventria’s rice is special because contains human genes. The company somehow managed to isolate and patent two proteins that occur naturally in human breast milk and splice them into rice. Then they did a research study in Peru that demonstrated that children suffering from diarrhea recovered more than a day sooner using their product than with conventional treatment. That’s important because diarrhea is the number one cause of death for small children, especially in poor countries, and shortening the course of the disease can mean the difference between recovery and death. Read more at http://ventria.com/

Health professionals observed many years ago that breast-fed babies recover from diarrhea faster than babies who drink formula. There are many possible reasons for this, such as:
Formula is sometimes mixed with dirty water (because that’s the only kind of water available).

1. Formula is sometimes mixed with dirty water (because that’s the only kind of water available).
2. Mother’s milk contains friendly antibodies that colonize the baby’s gut.
3. The mother’s body acts as a “filter” so that even though Mom has to drink dirty water, her baby gets clean milk.
4. Mother’s milk contains proteins that are easily digested, making the baby healthier and better able to fight off disease.

In short, nobody knows any single reason that breast-fed babies are healthier. It could be one or more of many reasons. Moms who breastfeed are healthier, too. It seems pretty obvious that the answer to childhood diarrhea has more to do with making a cleaner, safer environment and encouraging Moms to breastfeed. But why do that when there is money to be made from their misery?

Ventria wants to add its human protein genes to baby formula, protein bars, yogurts and beverages. Company spokesmen claim that rice is the perfect crop for growing human genes because the genes only turn up in the grain, as opposed to the stem, leaves and roots and rice is self-pollinating, lessening the chance of “genetic drift”—once a novel gene enters the gene pool, it can change the course of evolution. This has happened with other species, including GM cotton and soybeans.

The company has been trying to get a large-scale crop going for several years, and has met a lot of resistance in the process. First, they tried to grow it in their home state of California. but their bid was denied. So they moved to smaller states with weaker economies. Ventria now has a 75-acre test farm going in North Carolina, not a big rice-growing state. Then they tried to plant a 450-acre field in Missouri in conjunction with land grant university that is seeking ways to make money from a new bio-tech center.

Unfortunately for Ventria, the biggest rice purchaser in the US -- Anheuser-Busch -- is located in St. Louis, Missouri. Just because beer is like mother’s milk to some people, it doesn’t mean they want mother’s milk protein in their beer. Anheuser-Busch made it clear that they would not buy any rice grown in Missouri if GM rice was grown anywhere in the state. Ouch. Missouri said “no, thanks” to Ventria.

Which leads me back to my original question. If you eat rice that contains human protein, does that make you a cannibal? It’s a juicy anthropological question. Cannibals take cannibalism seriously. They eat people because they’ve run out of other food sources or for ritual purposes, such as eating one’s vanquished enemy to take his strength. Either way, it’s a complicated procedure, fraught with real or perceived danger. Cannibals that have taken to eating their own as a regular source of protein have sometimes suffered for it, as diseased human meat is not a healthy food choice.

Cows and chickens, normally vegetarian creatures, have been forced into cannibalism through feed that contains ground-up cows or chickens. Personally, I think it’s monstrous that anyone even thought up such a thing, but it’s a widespread practice – and detrimental to the health of cows, chickens and humans.

So what are the implications of splicing human genes into crop plants? Does that make the plant sorta human? If it’s being grown as a medicine for babies because it mimics mother’s milk, then yes, the rice is sorta human. Ventria claims to be taking all kinds of steps to keep the human genes out of everyone else’s rice, but farmers are skeptical, because they’ve seen it happen before. One of the concerns in Kansas has to do with wild ducks, which feed on rice crops. How will Ventria’s rice affect the ducks? Ventria’s scientists did a study where they fed their rice to baby chicks. The chicks grew a little bigger and stronger than the control group. Will it make ducks bigger and more aggressive? Will the ducks spread the rice to other fields? Then what? Ventria claims it will keep the ducks away, but they are going to be growing rice on 3,000 acres – that’s a lot of acreage to control. In my experience, a great way to see wild life is to meander around on a big farm. Those big fields provide food, shelter, and water for all kinds of animals.

If people unwittingly eat GM rice, how will it affect them (us)? Maybe it will be easy to digest – wow! It could be the next Nexxium! -- but some drugs affect children and adults differently. Maybe it will cause diarrhea in adults. Then, of course, the “C” word, for cancer, is never far from our thoughts. Who knows?

I don’t know the answer, but it makes me nervous. I’d like to get a dialog going to learn other points of view. So, what do you think of Frankenrice? Of putting human genes in food crops? Any other related thoughts or opinions? Let me know.

The Absolute Truth About Dietary Fat

Are you confused about dietary fat? Who isn’t? To put your mind at ease, here is the absolute truth about dietary fat. The truth is that….

…there is NO ABSOLUTE TRUTH about dietary fat…

….. and that’s the absolute truth.

Here’s why. Nutrition is a comparatively new science. New discoveries are being made every day when it comes to both human and animal nutrition. The current controversy about trans fats is a perfect example.

Trans fats were invented in 1901 by a group of chemists at Proctor & Gamble who were trying to find a way to make artificial candle wax. But just as the product was ready for market, electrical lighting became available and in most homes candles were replaced by light bulbs. So the scientists looked for other applications and realized that the stuff just didn’t go bad. And, after all, it was made from cottonseed oil, which is edible, so, in 1911, Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco, a contraction of the term “crystallized cottonseed oil”. It wasn’t a big success at first, because consumers had no idea what to do with it until P&G published a cookbook in 1912, included free with every purchase of Crisco.

Even though Crisco became a staple on every housewife’s shelf, trans fats weren’t added to many foods until World War II, when butter was rationed. That’s when another product took hold in the American household – margarine. Now, margarine was actually invented in 1869 by a pharmacist/chemist in France, in response to a contest sponsored by Napoleon III to spur develop of new, cheaper sources of cooking fat. Hydrogenation had not yet been invented, so it was a whole different product than the margarine of today. It was beef tallow, mixed chemically with a little real butter or other oil to make a solid butter substitute. By the 1870s, it was being sold in the US, but there wasn’t a big market for it.

But with time came change. World Wars I and II, and the Great Depression, made food scarce and expensive. Margarine provided a cheap substitute. In the 1920’s, margarine manufacturers added Vitamins A and D to their product to make its nutritional profile appear equivalent to butter. In the 1930’s, margarine manufacturers, in response to taxation that had been forced by the dairy industry, switched from animal fat to hydrogenated vegetable oil, better known these days as trans fat. By World War II, consumers had started to accept margarine as the equivalent of butter in terms of taste and nutrition.

In the 1950s and 60s, food processors developed hundreds of new convenience foods that were loaded with trans fats. Studies had shown that bugs and mice wouldn’t eat them, mold wouldn’t grow on them, and they basically didn’t support life. That was considered a good thing. These were foods that just didn’t go bad!

From the 1950s on, heart disease soared as the consumption of trans fats increased, but nobody put it together. Instead, the exact opposite occurred. Medical researchers zeroed in on cholesterol. At first, they concentrated on total cholesterol. They found that people who ate margarine had lower total cholesterol than people who ate butter and lard. They also found that there was a higher death rate from heart disease among people who ate margarine, even though their total cholesterol was lower. The researchers chose to ignore the death rate and trumpet their findings on cholesterol. Doctors and nutritionists started telling the public that margarine and other so-called unsaturated fats were the healthier choice.

By the 1970s, there was a somewhat better understanding of the different types of cholesterol, especially HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol). Nutrition science found that saturated fats, like those found in meat, eggs, and dairy, raised LDL cholesterol. They also found that trans fats both raised LDL and lowered HDL. This is why trans fats are dangerous. They lower total cholesterol by lowering good cholesterol.

Ironically, the in the 1960s, a little company called MacDonald’s started franchising. They struck a deal with a small company that produced edible fat for the restaurant industry. This company was so small that it didn’t have its own hydrogenating equipment – they manufactured fat for frying the old fashioned way, with beef tallow and oil. This is what gave MacDonald’s French fries their distinctive, and wildly popular, flavor. And it is what made MacDonald’s a target in the 1970s, when nutrition activists targeted them for frying French fries in saturated, animal fat. MacDonald’s responding by switching to the fats that scientists were telling the populace were healthy, even though there was already plenty of evidence that hydrogenated oils, now better known as trans fats, were dangerous.

Within a few years, there was a turnaround in the scientific view on trans fat. In the early 1980s, Harvard’s School of public Health started issuing warnings about trans fats. That was about 25 years ago, and action is just being taken today. In the meantime, medical researchers estimate that there have been about 30,000 deaths per year as a result of trans fat-caused heart disease. Over a 50-year period, that totals 1.5 million deaths. A link has also been found between trans fats and hypothyroid.

MacDonald’s is reformulating its cooking oil to remove the trans fats. Frito-Lay went trans fat free a couple of years ago. Kraft, one of the biggest trans fat offenders, is reformulating all of its products. And even Oreos and other Nabisco products are being reformulated.

But what are nutritionists saying? According to USA Today (February 23, 2007), nutritionists who work for the food processing industry are claiming that the new emphasis on trans fats is only a distraction from the real issues – that Americans simply eat too much food, too much junk food, and don’t focus on a healthful diet, including fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. After all, they point out that trans fats only account for about 3% of total fat consumption, while saturated fats account for 12%. But nutritionists who work for consumer advocate groups are calling for trans fats to be outlawed. Dr. Walter Willett, head of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard School of Public Health calls trans fat “a metabolic poison that has no place in human diets (that) should be eliminated as quickly as possible.”

So the controversy continues. The point is that the link between dietary fat and human health is simply not understood. Scientists and nutritionists have an unfortunate way of stating their findings as if those findings were fact. Scientists are natural skeptics, and we should be, too.


For more informational controversy, check out these links:

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/rvw_spring06/rvwspr06_transfats.html

http://www.cspinet.org/new/transpr.html

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/transfats.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,57486,00.html

http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~dms/qatrans2.html

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/03/07/transfat/index.html