Showing posts with label Carrots. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carrots. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Try them, try them and you may, I say

Green cloned eggs and ham....
Meat and milk from cloned animals is generally safe to eat, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has declared.

[snip]

The FDA does not expect to see a lot of products from cloned animals being sold, because of cost. It says clones would be used mainly for breeding.
The agency released almost identical draft conclusions in December 2006. Since then, new scientific information has strengthened its central view.

"After reviewing additional data and the public comments in the intervening year since the release of our draft documents on cloning, we conclude that meat and milk from cattle, swine, and goat clones are as safe as the food we eat every day," said Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

The finding also confirms the conclusions of an investigation released in 2002 by the US National Academy of Sciences. The FDA will not require food from cloned animals to be labelled as such.




Less variety, less ability to withstand mutant viruses, more danger of losing large herds, more danger of losing our sources of meat. And if there is a problem found with cloning, how will it be reined in and controlled?

One response is to eat less meat, consume more vegetables. But even that may have problems....
Scientists in the US say they have created a genetically-engineered carrot that provides extra calcium.

They hope that adding the vegetable to a normal diet could help ward off conditions such as brittle bone disease and osteoporosis.

Someone eating the new carrot absorbs 41% more calcium than if they ate the old, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study suggests.

The calcium-charged vegetable still needs to go through many safety trials.

"These carrots were grown in carefully monitored and controlled environments," said Professor Kendal Hirschi, part of the team at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas.
Just wait until the Terminator Gene gets released into the wild...

Update: Uh... about those calcium carrots:

Auckland, New Zealand (AHN) - A study revealed that prescribed calcium supplements taken by older women actually increase the possibility of the patients suffering from heart problems and stroke.

Researchers from New Zealand's University of Auckland observed medical data of 1,500 women, with the focus being their bone density. The volunteers were divided into two groups, one group being given a daily dose of calcium supplement, and the other, placebo pills. The scientists then monitored the health of the women twice a year, for a span of five years.

The experiment yielded results that showed 60 individuals from the group given the calcium supplements to have experienced heart attacks, strokes, or even sudden death, reported the AFP. The total number of events for the group was 76.

Of the group given the placebo pill, 50 women experienced the said conditions, with the number of instances adding up to 54.

I swear... we'll just end up eating dirt and leaves. It'll be safer.

Update 1/17: Carl of Simply Left Behind:
Let's take a current example from the food processing industry as an example: growth hormones.

First off, Congress, if growth hormones are bad for ballplayers, why are they OK for cows, chickens and pigs? After all, I don't eat Barry Bonds...stuff like this has a half life. It's not necessarily metabolized completely in the animal itself.

Second, for years, hormones like rBGH have been pumped into milk-producing cows to raise their estrogen levels, thus producing more milk. Well, guess what? That wasn't particularly safe!
And a whole new industry cropped up that claims their milk is "rBGH free". I can imagine that within ten years, a whole new market will have cropped up about "born natural" animals.

See, here's the thing: I'm not against cloning. I'm not even against cloning for meat or milk. What I am against is ignorance and deliberate deceptions, which is what the FDA seems to be mapping out here: first, introduce a potentially dangerous and deadly process and product to the market, let it run its retail course and then assess the results, like LSD given to hundreds of government employees, because you don't want to scare people off before the results are in.

You guys are supposed to be protecting us.
Exactly. And they're not.