This is really weird

[case]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/genetically-modified-soy_b_544575.html

[Sage]

I guess it's a bad day to be a hamster.

[Alpharius]

Wow, you americans are fucked. Hairy mouthed and sterile, nice combo ;)

In reality, this could turn out to be very serious.

[popeye]

Read the fine print: The paper was written by someone titled "Author and Founder of the Institute for Responsible Technology" so obviously his views aren't neutral.

The second thing to notice, is that these poor hamsters seem to have been fed with soy beans ONLY. Their reproductive problems and deaths were a result of a terrible malnutrition, not because the soy beans are harmful. And it looks like some of the comparisons are made against hamsters getting a normal diet (what do they mean by "control group"?)

So the bottom line is that genetically modified soy beans are slightly less nutritious, if that's all you have to eat. That is far less dramatic than the title claiming that food can make you sterile, impotent, dead or whatever.

[Giggle Monster]

Well, Popeye, the group who ate all non-GM soy, didn't have any nearly the amount of problems that the high GM group did. So that definitely says something. It's true that they're eating, proportionally, way more soy than the average person is going to, though, since it's all they're been fed. I suppose if you're vegan then you may be eating a lot of soy products, but no one eats all soy all the time.

The truth is that we don't know what genetically modified food does to us long term, if anything. They so some weird stuff; I think something most of us have probably heard of us is the use of scorpion DNA to make some fruits/vegetables resistant to pests. It's not proven to be unsafe but it's not proven to be safe either. This article doesn't provide enough evidence for me to boycott all GM foods, but it does back up the assertion that it's less healthy than other food.

[popeye]

We agree completely. As I said, GM soy was proven to be slightly less nutritious. That slight difference is important if you eat nothing else. There might a single vitamin missing, which any balanced diet would cover easily. That's why this experiment proves nothing, except that some people think it's completely sensible to keep hamsters at a deadly diet for a couple of years, just to create some propaganda.