You Are What You Eat: Genetically Modified Foods Include “Information”

Smart Publications ^ | January 14, 2012 | John Morgenthaler

[opentalk]

Vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in our foods, we expect. But information?

According to recent research from China’s Nanjing University, when people eat rice, tiny sequences of microRNA from the plant-based food can survive the body’s digestive process and end up absorbed in human tissue where — and here’s the reason why we need to know about this study — plant microRNA may actually affect how our cells behave and function. In the study, Exogenous plant MIR168a specifically targets mammalian LDLRAP1: evidence of cross-kingdom regulation by microRNA, published in the Journal Cell Research, the genetic material from rice showed up in human liver cells where it appeared to influence cells’ uptake of cholesterol from the blood.

First discovered only a decade ago, microRNA is a short, single-stranded RNA molecule that plays a pivotal role in how genes express themselves. For example, as Maverick of Medicine Ray Kurzweil explains, short RNA fragments produced by the human body do things like, “tell the heart cells that only the certain genes which should be expressed in a heart cell are expressed.” The Chinese study is ground breaking because it shows that plant microRNA introduced through diet may have a similar influence over human DNA

....Don’t expect the GMO food industry itself to begin looking for answers to these questions anytime soon. As food writer Ari LeVaux observes, the Monsanto website currently states that, "There is no need to test the safety of DNA introduced into GM crops. DNA (and resulting RNA) is present in almost all foods. DNA is non-toxic and the presence of DNA, in and of itself, presents no hazard.” They have no more incentive to look for bad news about GMO foods than the cigarette companies had to look for negative health effects of smoking cigarettes

[muawiyah]

I think the news we have in the lead article is so new that Monsanto has not caught up to it. Remember, we have all sorts of religious people still sorting out the whys and wherefores of genes and genetics, and being troubled by the concept of evolution, and here comes epigenetics which makes it all possibly too complex for human comprehension, and now we have microRNA doing a trick or two with plants we eat turning into little tuning forks in our innards telling our gizzards how to operate.

You betcha!

Did you know the Microsoft Office Suite I am using still does not have a spell check for EPIGENETICS, nor for microRNA or even "betcha".

Things are happening fast ~