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"Super Bananas" May Save Millions of Lives In Africa
schwit1 (797399) writes "A super-enriched genetically engineered banana will soon go through its first human trial, which will test its effect on vitamin A levels, Australian researchers said Monday. The project plans to have the special banana varieties — enriched with alpha and beta carotene which the body converts to vitamin A — growing in Uganda by 2020. The bananas are now being sent to the United States, and it is expected that the six-week trial measuring how well they lift vitamin A levels in humans will begin soon."
GENETICALLY ENGINEERED???? That's the boogeyman under the bed!! We must grow organic and all be vegans. If the poor Africans are starving, they just need to go to their local Whole Foods and buy some food.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Isn't the banana population under serious threat because of monoculture? I remember the current banana cultivar - the Cavendish - is under threat because of lack of disease resistance because of monoculture. The previous well used cultivar, the Gros Michel, was replaced because it lost to a disease threat - also due to monoculture. The article didn't mention anything about plant disease resistance.
But who owns the patents? Or is this one a freebie?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Why the fuck the TFS quotes a source from Phys.org, when you can straight to QUT and get THEIR press release Super bananas – world first human trial (which has a lot more detail)
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
One of the problems with banananas is that food crop bananas are clones, and so as a monoculture the crops are prone to complete loss by disease.
Unrelated, but mentioned in the article, everything that is not dark green or orange that you add vitamin A to will take on an orange hue. That is not a surprise. Also not a problem.
More music, fewer hits
File this under donotwant. Unlike most vitamins, A is not water soluble and can build up to toxic levels in the body. Of special importance to Africans is that it also makes the body more susceptible to sun burns.
Beta carotene is only one of hundreds of carotenoids. We know that there are other carotenoids with important properties for human health e,g, lutein, lycopene, astaxanthin.
Better to think of beta carotene as a marker in foods rather than a be-all, end-all carotenoid. Also balance with other oil soluble and anti-oxidant nutrients can be important.
Yeah, growing vitamin pills is so much easier than growing bananas.
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Hamburger meat: $3.72 / pound
Bananas: 59Â / pound
Apples: $1.30 / pound
Romaine lettuce: $2.72 / pound
Ice cream: $5
People who go for instant gratification cut school, walk out on the job when they get mad, and eat Oreos. People who think though the long-term effects of their decisions work their way through college, bite their tongue and discuss problems when calm, eat fruits and vegetables, and exercise - even though they don't WANT to do those things I.the moment, they think long term.
Short-term thinking results in a person being poor and unhealthy. Long term thinking tends to lead to financial success and a healthy lifestyle. I have done, and still do, some of both. I worked late last night, and I'm headed in to my high-paying job, where I'll work hard at serving the needs of the organization. First, I'm going to finish smoking this cigarette. I know each of those choices will probably effect me five years from now.
So the "super" in these bananas is extra Vitamin A (alpha and beta carotene). But in general this solves nothing because those people who are Vitamin A deficient probably can't afford the bananas and/or don't have the resources to grow them... if they did they could just as easily grow (for example) Papayas which grow in the same conditions as Bananas and have more than enough beta carotene without any GM tricks. The problem is that both Bananas and Papayas need very fertile soil (or lots of fertilizer) and plenty of water to grow.
The problem of Vitamin A dificiency may be real enough, but to really solve it you have to first look at the root of the problem. Why are people Vitamin A deficient? Were they always or is there something new happening? In Uganda for example I suspect that it's because people used to get their beta carotene from unprocessed red palm oil which they used to extract themselves and used for all their cooking, and now they are using processed cooking oils which are cheap enough that they just don't bother extracting their own oil anymore but which have all the beta carotene removed! So the problem was created by modern consumer society in the first place! The best solution here is just a bit of education, because the unprocessed red palm oil is probably still available and inexpensive and people have just gotten out the habit of using it. Just tell them to go back to frying their non-GM bananas in red palm oil instead of processed oil and they'll stop being Vitamin A deficient in no time.
In general, people who eat traditional diets are rarely deficient in such important nutrients as Vitamin A unless they simply don't have enough to eat overall. But people are losing their traditional diets due to the relentless onslought of consumerism... for those populations the cheapest and most effective solution to Vitamin A deficiency is education and making sure traditional sources of beta carotine continue to be available. For those who are deficient because of extreme poverty the super bananas (or the golden rice, another frankenfood ultra-solution) solve nothing unless you give them away, in which case you can give away non-GM sources of beta carotene just as easily.
It's free. 30 years down the road no one can claim a patent on it. Just let food grow naturally, stop this super this super that crap.
did you forget to take your meds?
against a man armed with a banana?
Nearly 200 posts and nobody has asked the most important question!
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
You look like a knee-jerk muppet conjuring stereotypes ...
Ha! I parsed that as "muppet-conjuring." I had a fleeting image of the Count as a muppet necromancer. One, two, three, four! Four muppet zombies! ah ah ah ah.
Probably most if not all current GMO food crops do not damage human health.
However, in the abstract, you are engineering (almost arbitrarily modifying) organisms capable of spontaneous reproduction and proliferation, so the level of precautionary principle needed is commensurate with "would it be ok if this escaped into the wild and took over ecosystem niches from more naturally evolved or incrementally bred crops / organisms? Do we have an accurate model of what would happen in that case? Have we tested enough to verify that model? And every case of a different manipulation or in a different organism is different so requires repetition of extensive testing."
The types of risks there run the gamut from destruction of wild varieties and species by competition from the GMO. Substantial alteration of ecosystem by shifting the balance of successful and unsuccessful organisms. Proliferation of and reliance on a GMO monoculture which is then subject to rapid destruction from a single pathogen. etc. etc. Ecological system effects in other words. Very hard to test for.
Again, it will probably be all be fine, until one day when it won't. When something unanticipated will happen and, well, the genie is out of the bottle and doesn't fit back in.
At a minimum, GMO food should be labelled as such, and let people decide for themselves and vote with their pocketbook.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm sorry but that is a lame excuse. You don't need a rice cooker or slow cooker. You need a couple of sauce pans, water, heat, and the ability to read instructions.
what moron thinks you need a special appliance to cook anything? AC on slashdot, apparently. With just cast iron pot and you can cook meat, rice, bake cakes, etc.
I know it is hard to believe, but all the things you take for granted are not automatic birthrights to everybody. a pot
a working stove
a working sink
a working fridge
cultural desire to eat "healthy"
accessible groceries
time and energy to cook
working knowledge of cooking food or the ability and knowledge to look up how to do it
a safe place to cook
room in your budget to screw up cooking a few times without going hungry
assumption that you can even afford to have a "budget" at all
an educational background that includes knowing WHAT things are more nutritious than others.
It is cheap as hell for someone who already front-loaded the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars worth of real expenses that go into cooking a healthy meal.
I can cook a meal for my family for 5 bucks, but I interact with my $200,000 house (in a safe neighborhood with grocery stores), my $900 fridge, my $30,000 car, $1,000 worth of cookware, and 6 hours of non-work non-sleep time between when I get off work and when I need to work again. Have I done it with less? Sure, I lived at poverty levels when I had my first apartment and was in school. But I already had years of privilege at that point, which taught me how to do the things I knew how to do.
Meanwhile, in third-world countries, poor people still cook meals. Even isolated jungle tribes can cook a meal. I guess no one taught them it's easier to be a victim and make excuses.