Posted on 02/04/2012 4:00:27 PM PST by opentalk
Vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients in our foods, we expect. But information?
According to recent research from Chinas Nanjing University, when people eat rice, tiny sequences of microRNA from the plant-based food can survive the bodys digestive process and end up absorbed in human tissue where and heres 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
....Dont 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
(Excerpt) Read more at smart-publications.com ...
pong
Ping
“Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Smith. You have a healthy baby with all his fingers and toes, and a prehensile tail.”
Well wouldn’t we be absorbing micro-DNA from non GM food too? In fact genetically engineered crops could be designed to make the foods safer.
So if I eat the brains and liver of a person, say someone I beat in a fight, I get that person’s smarts and strength? Same concept but with rice.
Personally, I think that would be pretty cool, except for the tailoring bills.
/johnny
The good news?
Some experts speculate that the ability of plant microRNA to affect human cellular behavior might be a way to partially explain the effectiveness of herbal medicine. Beyond vitamin, minerals, and other components of herbs, might it be possible that genetic information in the plant comes preprogrammed to tell certain cells how to initiate healing? In the Nanjing University study, for example, researchers noted that rice microRNA consistently ended up in human liver cells where it interacted with cell DNA to change how cells used cholesterol.
...Dr. Garry Gordon, another pioneer interviewed in Mavericks of Medicine, thinks discoveries about microRNA may someday lead to diets and food choices that can target risk for specific diseases. We can make foods that will actually lower your risk of ever getting Alzheimer's even if both your mother and fathers side had the disease...Knowledge is the gene testing, and we can modulate genes by getting appropriate natural products like RNA foods.
But the not good news?
According to the article in The Atlantic entitled, "The Very Real Danger of Genetically Modified Foods", the study may inadvertently reveal a pathway by which genetically modified (GM or GMO) foods influence human health. In other words, if we eat corn that has genetic information telling it to act as its own pesticide, how will this plants microRNA behave in the human body? What about other examples of frankenfoods: vegetables with scorpion genes; tomatoes with flounder genes; and potatoes with jellyfish genes that glow when they need to be watered? What kind of microRNA do these GMO foods contain and how will these affect our genes?
i ma not a wuss.
"Tastes like chicken. Pretty much..."
Reminds me of the study of flat worms and electric shocks.
Platyhelminthese (its been 50 years not sure of the spelling:) were subjected to light and then an electric shock. After a period of time the worms braced for a shock whenever the light came on. The worms were then ground up and fed to other flat worms which had not been subjected to the light/shock routine. When the light came on, they braced for a shock. Cool huh:) Remember that next time you eat flat worms.
We are screwing with the primordial forces of nature with all the arrogance of a god (small g). We do not know what we do not know. No good will come of this.
The Chinese research provides the first in vivo example of ingested plant miRNA surviving digestion and influencing human cell function in this way.
Should the research survive scientific scrutiny -- a serious hurdle -- it could prove a game changer in many fields. It would mean that we're eating not just vitamins, protein, and fuel, but gene regulators as well.
They may have been designed by God, but man has modified them an endless number of times over the past thousands of years.
The last to paragraphs of this tripe from its vitamin commercial filled website:
“But where is the FDA in all this? Aren’t they watching out for our safety with respect to GMO foods? Well, in a word: no. They aren’t working for you or any of the other 99% of Americans. The FDA is working for Monsanto itself along with a collection of the other most wealthy corporations in the world. This is why I gave one of my recent blogs the title: Occupy FDA: Smart Publications Alternative Heath Solutions Threatened. I make the modest proposal that the FDA should be working for us the 99% or it should be immediately de-funded.
If more studies like this one come to light, its likely that perception about GMO food safety will also change. In the meantime, as we begin to understand just how complex the relationship between food and our health really is, keeping GMO foods out of our kitchens and gardens is more important than ever.”
How about this keep the government out of it all together. I am an adult and I can pick my own foods with out anyone’s help. Since we do not have anything in our food chain that is not genetically modified I am not concerned.
By the way have you read about how viruses invade our DNA?
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