Ke Xuen's Weblog

Genetically modified food is one of the most important and ongoing issue in the world currently. The question is: should we eat it? is it harmful?
Let's understand.
Genetically Modified (GM) Foods are made from organisms that have been given specific traits through genetic engineering, unlike similar food organisms developed through the conventional genetic modification of selective breeding (plant breeding and animal breeding) or mutation breeding. GM foods were first put on the market in the early 1990s. Typically, genetically modified foods are plant products: soybean, corn, canola, and cotton seed oil, but animal product s have been proposed. For example, in 2006 a pig engineered to produce omega-3 fatty acids through the expression of a roundworm gene was controversially proposed.
Genetically modifying begins with isolating the gene that we want on a particular organism. It is then inserted into the organism and the new gene will adapt quickly into the DNA of the organism.It is almost indistinguishable from the other genes.If a strawberry plant is given a gene from an alpine plant that is highly tolerant of the cold, it may improve the strawberry's resistance to frost, or if a pig receives some genes from a spinach genome which barely has any fat, it will most likely reduce the fat content of the meat.
Between 1997 and 2005, the total surface area of land cultivated with GMOs had increased by a factor of 50, from 17,000 km2 (4.2 million acres) to 900,000 km2 (222 million acres).

Although most GM crops are grown in North America, in recent years there has been rapid growth in the area sown in developing countries. For instance in 2005 the largest increase in crop area planted to GM crops (soybeans) was in Brazil (94,000 km2 in 2005 versus 50,000 km2 in 2004.)[15] There has also been rapid and continuing expansion of GM cotton varieties in India since 2002. (Cotton is a major source of vegetable cooking oil and animal feed.) It is predicted that in 2008/9 32,000 km2 of GM cotton will be harvested in India (up more than 100 percent from the previous season). Indian national average cotton yields of GM cotton were seven times lower in 2002, because the parental cotton plant used in the genetic engineered variant was not well suited to the climate of India and failed. The publicity given to transgenic trait Bt insect resistance has encouraged the adoption of better performing hybrid cotton varieties, and the Bt trait has substantially reduced losses to insect predation. Though controversial and often disputed, economic and environmental benefits of GM cotton in India to the individual farmer have been documented.
These modifying of genes have caused more diseases to be found and also more allergies have been produced to some people ( cotton ).
THis is sourced from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food.