Kevin Klatt, PhD, RD

I saw earlier today that  Steven Novella, MD, over at Neurlogica blog  covered some controversy surrounding Golden Rice and it reminded me I had some thoughts to throw down about the GR issue. Dr Novella's post was in response to some of the claims made in a comment written on his post about a recent Nature Biotechnology paper on crop biofortification .  This is an area I've seen a lot of commentary on, no doubt because Golden Rice is a transgenic crop. Dr Novella makes some good commentary in his post and I suggest reading it ( here ) before the rest of this post - it will contain some additional thoughts to Dr Novella's. Dr Novella did a great job fielding the opposition to Golden Rice, which is something I've always found rather odd - I guess if you're vehemently opposed to a technology that represents a diverse array of methods (there's not one way to genetically engineer a plant) and innumerable potential outcomes (plants can be engineered for any number ...

A recent study published in the open-access journal, African Journal of Biotechnology, entitled " Addressing the issue of horizontal gene transfer from a diet containing genetically modified components into rat tissues " has been making the rounds on social media and throughout the anti-GMO community. Before we break down the study, it's important to note that it follows up on a 2013 study by Spisak, et al, in PloS One (1), that caused some controversy, because it's results suggested that whole plant genes crosse from the digestive tract into the human blood stream. These findings were immediately jumped upon by the typical anti- GMO media (Natural News, Collective Evolution, etc etc  here ,  here ,  here ,  here ) where the story incited fear that trans-genes in plants could be floating around in our blood stream. The actual study wasn't specific to GMOs; actually, GMOs are only briefly mentioned. The findings were controversial because the idea that whole g...