I'm not sure what you're trying to say here... It sounded like you were a proponent of GM foods but here you say that they are toxic. Double negative, am I missing something? Language barrier? I'm third generation Canadian and feel I have a good grasp on the English language and it sounds like you may have a degree so this statement could require some clarification.
If you are saying that GM foods are not toxic, I hope that is true and that it remains true for decades to come. As Phil eluded to with the doctors prescribing cigarettes; sometimes listening to the establishment isn't the best medicine.
It was a typo on my part and not meant to have some kind of double meaning. I'm educated, but sometimes I don't produce the best grammer on the forums
I am a professor at a university in Canada and teach ecotoxicology to 4th students. You can find my professional website in my profile if you want to look me up.
Anyhow, I do not like the prospect of GM foods because of the politics related to them, i.e. multinational corporations putting the screws to the little farmers by developing plants that have high yields but don't self propagate thus forcing reliance on a company by the farmer for their seeds. Part of the GM suite of genes involves pesticide resistance. This allows the farmers to nuke their field prior to planting and basically only their plants are capable of surviving and germinating with the pesticide application.
The new pesticides of today used in Canada do not last very long in the soil, so by the time the plant is harvested there is little to no detectable pesticide residues remaining. There will always be some residues, but the state of science today on pesticide applications/human health is far better than it was 20 or 30 years ago.
Of course, the same company sells both the GM-pesticide resistant seeds and the pesticide that the seed is resistant to so they have a monopoly on the $$. They push their product and demand long-term contractual agreements with individual farmers, i.e. 10 year deals ect. where the farmer has to buy a set amount of seed no matter how well their crops do. Sometimes the seeds don't do as well as the fancy brochures promise, but like a bad cell phone plan, it is the farmer who eats the losses not the seed manufacturer.
There are lots of fears and anxieties raised about GM-foods that have more to do with Sci Fi than reality. GM refers to modifying the genome using molecular methods. Usually this involves using a partially inactivated virus to insert a desirable gene into a host embroyic cell e.g. the seed to be grown. In many ways this is a speeding up of evolution (mutation frequencies) and selection for desirable attributes. In normal cross breeding programs, 10,000's plants are grown and screened for desirable attributes. These plants are then allowed to fertilize a new set of plants. The difference with GM methods is that a desirable gene from one species can be lifted and inserted into a new species in the laboratory. This ability to steel a gene from one donor species and insert it into another species opens up a whole ball game for the selective/cross breeding programs. However, scientist still can't invent new genes, they have to find one in an existing animal.
I suppose this can bring up all kinds of scary thoughts, but for the most part there are limits on what can be done. There are some unique things that scientists have been working on. One example that a guest scientist I knew from Australia was working on was a suicide gene for aquaculture salmon. Basically this gene required a certain nutrient, a specific type of amino acid, be added to the fish's food in order for that fish to survive. The purpose of the gene was to prevent escapee's from the fish pens from breeding outside and becoming an invading species. I.e. the escapees without the benefit of the provisioned fish farm food (an antidote to the suicide gene if you like) would die. That probably sounds scary.
Some major fears are based on the fact that there is a very small potential for cross species gene transmission to occur outside of the control of biochemical labs. The evidence for this is still rather weak, but there have been curiosities observed where some non-crop like weeds growing near GM foods were able to incorporate the pesticide resistance gene. Whether this is a form of independent evolution of a similar pesticide resistance in the weed or in fact some kind of accidental viral incorporation of the GM modified gene into a different species remains to be worked out. Thus far, these examples are generally limited to gene flow between somewhat related species.
Now the fears usually translate into something of the effect: 'if I eat GM foods, there is a freak chance that I'll get the modified genes'. This is simply not going to happen by our known understanding of cross-species gene transfer mechanisms. When you consume food, you destroy the genetic structure of whatever it is you ate as part of the digestion process in your gut tract. You only assimilate nucleic acids which are the building blocks of DNA but your intestine cannot take up whole chunks of DNA or intact genes. So you are not going to get a GM-gene by eating GM foods. However, if you have an active imagination and know about things like the suicide gene and ignore the fact that you can't receive the modified gene by eating a GM-plant product it can all sound scary.
Now as to the toxicity of canola. As mentioned in Snopes, this is based on wild type rapeseed oil having a high content of erucic acids which contributes to health issues. One of the goals of prior selective breeding programs was to develop rapeseed varieties that produced very little erucic acids and this is the achievement of modern day canola. In this case the amount of erucic acid produced by modern formulations is not much different than what can be found in other types vegetable oils and it is considered safe in terms of health testing protocols. Since all of this was worked out in the 70's, the process of producing low erucic acid plants would have occurred by the normal selection and cross breeding approach and unlikely involved GM techniques as they weren't really around in those times. In other words the same process that humans have been using for 50,000 years to refine crops. Very likely, the newer GM modified plants are ones which have the pesticide resistance gene incorporated into them that allow the farmers to maximize their yields and nothing to do with erucic acid.
So in the end the toxicity issue of rapeseed is not related to the fact that most canola is GM. However, the popular phobia of GM foods being bad is easily confused with the whole rapseed to canola selection to remove toxic ericic acids. I hope this is more understandable than my previous message.
You may ultimately decide that the small amount of erucic acid still present in the oil is still unsafe and be dammed the FDA and their guidelines. This will prompt you to switch to another type of vegetable oil. Then, sooner or layer you will discover something else that is bad with that substitute. It just so happens that plants produce toxins because it is part of their evolutionary defense mechanisms against being eaten. That is just a the natural process of plant/animal warefare and again nothing to do with GM.
herbicide resistant
But, that's a topic for a different discussion.