More Food News

Last month I was blogging about food and mentioned a recent study about GMO corn being linked to liver and kidney failure in rats.

Well, I like nothing more than poking holes in things, especially my own thinking. I have continued to follow this story and have found more troubling information.

It seems that the study did not exactly prove the previous assertions. In fact, the study may have been tainted by one of its funding sources (Greenpeace). Following are quotes from Discover Magazine's article criticizing the study.

"On Wednesday, we covered the overreaction by a few important online sources to an International Journal of Biological Sciences article claiming to find “signs of toxicity” in three varieties of genetically modified (GM) corn produced by Monsanto. We posted some caveats that made us uneasy about the study, such as the funding sources, the unknown quality of the journal, and the fact that the toxicity claims rely on reinterpreting statistical data that Gilles-Eric Séralini and his coauthors themselves note is not as robust as it needs to be.

"1. Cherry-picking. “They were picking out about 20–30 significant measurements out of about 500 for one of the sets of data they analyzed,” Haro von Mogel tells DISCOVER.

"2. “False Discovery Rate.” The battle over these corn varieties has been cooking for years; Séralini and others published a paper in 2007 on the same issues, and after statistical criticisms like the ones just mentioned the authors came around with this new edition. One of the main shots scientists took at the previous paper, Haro von Mogel says, was that the team didn’t employ a “false discovery rate”—a stringent statistical method that controls for false positives.

"3. “Insignificant” results. As you can see in the study’s chart, there a significant effect shown in “Lar uni cell” (large unnucleated cell count) for female rats fed the GM corn as 11 percent of their diet. But for female rats fed three times as much GM corn, it’s not there. “Are they highlighting random variation or finding genuine effects?

"4. Lack of corroboration or explanation. The government organization Food Standards for Australia and New Zealand (which disputed Séralini’s 2007 paper [Microsoft Word file]), also disputes the recent study, in part because there is no other science corroborating the statistical data—data that was challenged in the previous points. Their response concludes by saying, “The authors do not offer any plausible scientific explanations for their hypothesis, nor do they consider the lack of concordance of the statistics with other investigative processes used in the studies such as pathology, histopathology and histochemistry…Reliance solely on statistics to determine treatment related effects in such studies is not indicative of a robust toxicological analysis. There is no corroborating evidence that would lead independently to the conclusion that there were effects of toxicological significance. FSANZ remains confident that the changes reported in these studies are neither sex- nor dose-related and are primarily due to chance alone.”

I don't care for Monsanto either but, wow, bad science in the service of anti-corporate interests. Who would'a thought?