Advantages and disadvantages about genetically modified food

Genetically modified foods occupy an almost worldwide market now. So-called Genetically modified foods is through genetic engineering techniques to transfer one or more genes to a specific organism, and to effectively convey the appropriate product. The controversy about genetically modified food raised by scientists and government officials has become more and more intensive, resulting from the shortage of that food safe evidence from truly unbiased researches. The huge benefits and potential risks ask genetically modified food to be treated more scrupulously and objectively. Here I will attempt to formulate the major advantage and disadvantage of genetically modified foods that have been learned.

Undiscovered risks on human health are concerned as a significant disadvantage of genetically modified foods. The major concern is allergy. According to studies required by American Food and Drug Administration, genetically modified soybeans contain more allergen content.However, it is difficult to estimate the allergenicity of genetically modified foods because of nonexistent proper animal models for testing. Moreover, another concern is the toxicity of genetically modified food. Árpád Pusztai, a famous Hungarian-born biochemist and nutritionist and nutritionist, in his article” Genetically Modified Foods: Are they a Risk to Human/Animal Health?”,claimed that rats’ digestive ability was decreased after eating genetically modified tomatoes for a few week and some of them died. Yet the design of these experiments was flawed because of too many uncontrollable conditions, such as individual feed intakes.Overall, scientists ensure that eating genetically modified food is not unsafe for human health.

One essential advantage of genetically modified food is solving the world’s food crisis. An increasing population results in increased demand for food, which leads to serious consideration to genetically modified foods. Larger outputs can be provided by genetically modified food. This is because of the special ability to tolerate extreme growing environment such as cold, drought or high salinity. For example, plants with an antifreeze gene transferred from cold water fish can withstand cold temperatures(Type II fish antifreeze protein accumulation in transgenic tobacco does not confer frost resistance,Transgenic Research).