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14 Year old debates GMO with Kevin O'Leary


CB007

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Not sure what I think of this, the debate and the topic itself. For me, I started eat a mostly organic/grain fed diet free of GMO and common allergens 6 months ago. My health has noticeably improved: I haven't been sick, I rarely cough or sneeze any more and outdoor allergies is a thing of the past.

As for the debate, the kid couldn't match the slickness of Kevin and even Amanda, didn't always have the best response to their stingers.

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What kevin said was so true. If she was a starving kid her tune would be changed right quick. Science is the only way we can proceed in many ways. The world does not have enough resources to match the growth rate of people. We need Science to bail us out once again. I would have asked that kid if she had a garden at home, is she growing her own GMO free food. If you want GMO free food grow it yourself.

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What kevin said was so true. If she was a starving kid her tune would be changed right quick. Science is the only way we can proceed in many ways. The world does not have enough resources to match the growth rate of people. We need Science to bail us out once again. I would have asked that kid if she had a garden at home, is she growing her own GMO free food. If you want GMO free food grow it yourself.

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I find the problem with the "Science feeds the hungry" argument is that science, in this case, comes with conditions imposed by monopolistic businesses wanting to, in Monsanto's case, own the planet's agricultural industry.

The fact that Amanda Lang mentioned 'all the corn at the store are GMO' should raise a big red flag. The kid, being a kid, didn't flip the argument around in her favour.

I also do not see GMO companies eliminating 3rd world hunger either. Science can save the world perhaps, but saving the world is not on Monsanto's agenda, contrary to Kevin O'Leary's position.

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We already live in the future so why not grow meat this way? Takes less time, much less energy for feed, water, pasture etc, much less waste product minus cows methane emissions (which are no joke). We industrialized the farms in North America a long time ago to match production to consumption and we need to keep advancing that for the entire world.

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What kevin said was so true. If she was a starving kid her tune would be changed right quick. Science is the only way we can proceed in many ways. The world does not have enough resources to match the growth rate of people. We need Science to bail us out once again. I would have asked that kid if she had a garden at home, is she growing her own GMO free food. If you want GMO free food grow it yourself.

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It's getting harder - a lot of seed you now buy is GMO...so some people may think they are eating GMO free vegetables, but in fact they aren't....

The issue isn't science - the issue is greed...GMO companies are no different than pharmaceutical companies - they only care about 1 thing - their bottom lines....

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What kevin said was so true. If she was a starving kid her tune would be changed right quick. Science is the only way we can proceed in many ways. The world does not have enough resources to match the growth rate of people. We need Science to bail us out once again. I would have asked that kid if she had a garden at home, is she growing her own GMO free food. If you want GMO free food grow it yourself.

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http://www.elle.com/...y-modified-corn

The office of allergist Paris Mansmann, MD, sits on a grassy slope overlooking the Royal River, a wide waterway that originates in inland Maine and winds down across farmland and under train tracks until it hits the coastal town of Yarmouth, where it sloshes into the Atlantic Ocean. When I first came to Mansmann in February 2011, the river was covered with ice, and bare trees stood silver sentry on its shores. I was 36. I’d been sick for three and a half years.

During that time, when I wasn’t working as a writer and theater director or being a wife and mother, I visited doctors and had tests. I told few friends or members of my extended family how ill I was, because I didn’t have any way to explain what was wrong. I had no diagnosis, just a collection of weird symptoms: tight, achy pain that radiated through my body and caused me to hobble around (my ankles, I’d joke to my husband, Dan, felt like they’d been “Kathy Batesed,” à la the movie Misery); burning rashes that splashed across my cheeks and around my mouth like pizza sauce; exhaustion; headaches; hands that froze into claws while I slept and hurt to uncurl in the morning; a constant head cold; nausea; and, on top of all that, severe insomnia—my body just could not, would not, turn off and rest. I visited every doctor who’d see me and tried everything they threw at me: antidepressants; painkillers; elimination diets (including a long eight months when I went without any of the major allergens, such as gluten, nuts, dairy, soy, and nightshades); herbal supplements; iodine pills; steroid shots; hormone treatments; Chinese teas; acupuncture; energy healing; a meditation class—you name it, I did it. Nothing worked. After I maxed out the available rheumatologists, endocrinologists, nutritionists, gastroenterologists, Lyme disease specialists, acupuncturists, and alternative-medicine practitioners in the Portland metropolitan area, I was sent to neurologists in Boston. All of my tests came back normal.

In late 2010, after a long and unhappy antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease, my newest GP (who’s still my doctor today), Chuck de Sieyes, MD, announced that he was referring me to Mansmann: “Because I have no idea what’s going on with you, and he’s one of the smartest guys around. And frankly, I’ve had it!”

Mansmann had moved to Yarmouth with his wife and kids to be close to his parents, who’d retired in Maine. A third-generation allergist, he worked in his father’s allergy clinic, at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, during high school. While in college at Saint Joseph’s University, also in Philadelphia, he helped his dad develop two asthma drugs. Later, he headed an allergy and immunology clinic at a West Virginia hospital for 10 years.

Mansmann has a helmet of thick, graying hair and an intensely serious air. After escorting me into an exam room, he sat down across from me and promptly pushed aside my thick medical file. He’d read through it all, he said, but he wanted to hear the story from me. He listened patiently, asking questions every so often: When did my rashes flare? Was the pain an ache in my muscles, or did it feel deeper? Was I worse after I slept or at the end of the day? He seemed, as we spoke, to have all the time in the world. Then, with no pyrotechnics, he offered his theory: “I think it’s possible you’ve developed a reaction to genetically modified corn.”

Genetically modified corn? Everyone’s heard of GMO corn, but I realized I didn’t know what it actually was. Mansmann explained that starting in the mid-1980s, the biotechnology giant Monsanto began to genetically alter corn to withstand its herbicide Roundup—the goal being to eradicate weeds but not crops—as well as to resist a pest called the corn borer. These small changes in the DNA of the corn are expressed by the plant as proteins. It’s those proteins, Mansmann believes, that can act as allergens, provoking a multisystemic disorder marked by the overproduction of a type of white blood cell called an eosinophil.

He swabbed inside my nose with a Q-tip, then placed the results under a microscope. “Take a look,” Mansmann said. “See all those pink cells? Those are eosinophils.” My nose, it seemed, was chock-full of them. When the immune system is working properly, eosinophils swarm certain invading substances, be they parasites or viruses, and work to eliminate them. Sometimes, however, an allergenic protein may prompt the immune system to release eosinophils. Then, it’s as if a faucet gets turned on but can’t be turned off—eosinophils just keep coming. Eventually they begin to leave the bloodstream and may infiltrate and damage the GI tract, esophagus, mucous membranes, lungs, the fascial system (the layer of connective tissue that surrounds the muscles, blood vessels, and nerves), and the skin—hence, the avalanche of symptoms. (Some allergists say that the best way to test for a true eosinophilic disorder is to look for the cells in the esophagus and GI tract with an endoscopy. But Mansmann thinks that once you have a preponderance of them in your nasal mucus, they’re likely to be elsewhere.)

Mansmann’s advice was to strip all corn, even that marked organic, from my diet. “It’s almost impossible to find a corn source in the United States that doesn’t have the [protein] in it,” he said. The U.S. government started approving GMO corn and soybeans for sale in the mid-1990s, and today, 88 percent of corn, and 93 percent of soybeans, are the transgenic varieties. Moreover, Mansmann and others contend that due to cross-pollination via winds, birds, and bees, there’s no such thing anymore as a GMO-free corn crop. He estimated that it would take from two to four months of living without corn for the eosinophils to cycle out of my body, and 
almost a year before I’d feel entirely like myself....(more)

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We need to stop development, and save more land for farming and raising animals. Sadly, all that seems to happen is more building development everywhere. Where is food supposed to be grown and raised?

And I agree with everyone else who commented on how much food we throw away in North America, it is truly disgusting.

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