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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."
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?
Not in the United States, that's for damn sure. ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
In which country are Africans starving?
Sudan, Chad, Nigeria, Zimbabwe...should I go on or were you just being a smartass?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
GMO Food is to Liberals as Global Warming is to Conservatives.
Really? What's the positive argument for global warming?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Poor people are fat because they dont eat properly.
More beach time, fresh oceanfront property to sell and develop, Government grants to try and fix global warming! Every disaster is a business opportunity! What's not to love?
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Most females are super bananas, too.
GMO Food is to Liberals as Global Warming is to Conservatives.
I'm a Liberal, and I accept GMO food. But I'm also a Slashdotter, so what I can't accept is patented GMO food.
(T>t && O(n)--) == sqrt(666)
How many liberals faking scientific literacy making that argument do you see on slashdot? Global warming denialism is more endemic to American conservatives than any of the commonly cited stereotypes about liberals.
That's not to say we deny the existence or alignment of the idiots, but we do know they're idiots.
No, becasue the only food they can afford is salt laden fatty food.
Remember most pore people work full time jobs and still are at the poverty line. So no time, and not money, and limited education.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Poor people are fact because they CANT eat properly. I suggest you look at the price of real unprocessed meat and veggies as well as hole grain breads.
Poor people buy the $1.25 garbage white bread instead of the $3.00 a loaf whole grain.
They buy Ramen, that is utter crap for nutrition.
They buy prepackaged garbage because it's cheaper, a LOT cheaper.
They buy the lowest grade of meat, typically hamburger in a tube that is 50% fat, hooves and tripe.
Veggies are expensive, $1.00 iceberg lettuce that is complete crap instead of the $4.00 Romaine lettuce.
DOUBLE the poor persons food budget and they can start to eat better. Also put a big ass tax on Fast food places that sell utter crap like McDonalds and Taco Bell. They prey on the poor with their $1.00 menu.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Also put a big ass tax on Fast food places that sell utter crap like McDonalds and Taco Bell. They prey on the poor with their $1.00 menu.
*eye roll*
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
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.
Poor people are fact because they CANT eat properly.
Hogwash. Sure, you can cherry pick healthy items that are expensive, but there are also plenty of healthy foods that are cheap: carrots, oatmeal, peanut butter, eggs, etc. You don't need endive and romaine lettuce to be healthy. "Society" is not forcing people to consume soda and french fries. Soda is cheaper than fruit juice, but tap water is even cheaper. There are plenty of food options that are both healthy and affordable.
Poor people are fat because they dont eat properly.
Actually, it's because they don't have much choice in what to eat...
Consider that you only have $10 to feed your family, and just came off-shift at your minimum-wage job.
You can either buy:
- a McMeal on the way home from work (they have some sort of deal going now where you can get 4 burgers, some fries, and 4 soft drinks for $9.99)
- a couple of Pepperoni Little Caesars' pizzas, again on the way home from work
- burn $5 or so in gas to get proper food at the nearest decent grocery store 10 miles away, and spend an extra $8 doing that
- spend $15 at inflated prices for nutritious food (though it's slightly old) at the nearest bodega/grocer/phone-card/payday-loan store,
- buy two heads of organic free-range vegan-gods-approved broccoli for $8 at the nearest Whole Payche... err, "Foods" roughly 15 miles away (burning $5-6 in gas)
- Wait until Thursday, where you can drive 20 miles to the Farmers' Market in the ritzy part of town and spend $25 for that same family meal.
Thing is, most poor neighborhoods usually don't have decent grocery stores. Why? Because most grocers don't like losing shedloads of money due to food-stamp/EBT fraud, shoplifting, robberies, etc. This means what groceries do make it there are either non-fresh, at highly inflated prices (to offset the aforementioned losses), preserved-all-to-hell in cans or boxes, or at a very limited selection. Or, you can save on cooking and grab some fast food, like most folks do, and as a bonus the kids don't bitch and moan as much about eating it.
It's a set-up for obesity.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Mod his ass up ^^^
As someone who grew up poor, I can tell you first-hand that pricing and neighborhood conditions conspire nicely to prevent you from eating anything that isn't processed to within an inch of its existence, or isn't basically crap food.
I think the only exception I've seen is the heavily Latino neighborhoods, where, against most odds, the local Mexican grocers and meat markets actually do provide decent and fairly nutritious foods ("fresh" is still a trial to get, but at least it's better than the local Mickey D's.)
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You're giving ramen a bad name when it really doesn't deserve it. By ITSELF, ramen is crap for nutrition because like most Asian noodles it's made of wheat flour and water and very little else. What very few people outside of Japan understand is that ramen is not like spaghetti - the noodles are not the entire meal, though they are a focus of the meal. Eating the noodles by themselves is like eating slices of bread by themselves.
The point of ramen is that as a food that contains very little besides wheat flour and water, it can go with nearly anything. There are entire restaurants in Japan dedicated to ramen, using it as a base and adding other things to provide nutrition - beef, chicken, pork, vegetables, fish, shrimp. I've seen ramen as a pizza topping, pizza as a ramen topping (see slowbeef's original Let's Play of SNATCHER and the people on SA who tried making "Neo Kobe Pizza"), pizza made of ramen, and pretty much any other combination of Italian-Japanese hybrid cuisine you can think of (though I have yet to see someone attempt a spaghetti-ramen fusion with meatballs and sauce).
So no, ramen is actually a decent option on a budget if you know what you're doing with it.
Seven minutes, and we've gone from "Hey, miraculous biomedical development possible" to "Fuck hippies."
I mean, have hippies even started protesting this? I realize that straw man arguments about "Africans should just go to whole foods" is sometimes all one can contribute, and sometimes mods don't want to read more than two posts down before dumping their points, but fucking hell, come on slashdot.
And it IS a fucking strawman argument. We all know (or should know) that no bit of technology is completely benign. By focusing on the most idiotic of criticisms, that might make us feel smart and also make us feel better about the technology, but we're drowning out actual concerns. Look at golden rice which did the beta carotene thing first. Yes yes, greenpeace blah blah blah, ignore that little section. There are concerns about whether it will affect the fertility of the soil. Perhaps that's not a concern with bananas, I don't know, maybe some agriculturally-leaning slashdotter could pipe in after the obligatory "fuck GMO protesting hippies."
Loss of biodiversity, and establishing an entrenched monoculture of food is a bigger concern with GMO. Bananas were decimated by disease before. It would really suck if everyone was planting this one strain of super bananas, and they became a necessary staple for vitamin A in parts of the world and we consider the problem solved and don't bother trying to improve nutrition in other ways. Then the Panama disease came and killed them all in the way it has done before, and suddenly we're left with a sudden serious shortage of vitamin A foods. If you're wondering, that causes blindness, impaired immune function, cancer, and birth defects.
See? It's entirely possible for people to have more concerns than "OMG, scary frankenfoods!" I'm not a hippie. I don't have a solution though. I mean, do they have whole foods there? Because if they did have a whole foods, that would probably be a better solution than potentially creating this. (kidding)
Bottom line, ignore the lunatic fringes in any controversey. It's fun to point and laugh at idiots, but you'll usually ignore the more reasonable people who might be on that side of the argument, those reasonable people might be right, in which case, you'd take second place in the idiot contest.
The fact you just pulled that statistic out of your butt speaks volumes more about you than it does any hypothetical "liberals". You look like a knee-jerk muppet conjuring stereotypes of your self-perceived enemies out of thin air in order to berate them in order to appease your own faltering self-image. Weird.
Food like many things tends to follow the "2 out of 3" rule:
Healthy, Tastes Good, Cheap
You can pick two. For the poor the "Cheap" option is already mandated, so essentially it comes down to Healthy or Tastes Good. Unfortunately most tend to go with better tasting food over the healthier food.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
No, becasue the only food they can afford is salt laden fatty food.
Remember most pore people work full time jobs and still are at the poverty line. So no time, and not money, and limited education.
Bullshit. Have you seen how cheap dried beans and rice are? There's a complete protein right there. Add in some relatively cheap fruits and veggies like apples, lettuce, and carrots and you have a far healthier and far cheaper diet than McDonalds and packaged pre-prepared foods.
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?
For one, I never said Monsanto has ever sued anyone over cross-pollination; that said, don't be fooled by Mansanto's own claim that they don't take legal action against farmers. They specifically state they've never sued over "trace amounts" and state that the courts have acknowledged that they've never once sued, or threatened to sue, an organic farm. This is a far cry from claiming it's never happened, which they simply can't do, because it has. And they won.
They have also sued, and continue to sue, for seed-reuse. That is, buying more seed than you'll use this year and using the excess next year, or harvesting and using seed produced by Mansanto-seeded crop. I can't fault them for suing farmers who harvest and replant after signing an agreement stating that they will not do this, but then I ask, how do they determine whether the seed was stores or harvested? Simply put, they can't, and the result is suing people for storing seed.
Remember, if it happens just once, you can no longer say it doesn't happen. It's doubly-bad for one's reputation to not only do something others will disapprove of, but then to slyly attempt to convince them that it never happened in the first place. Mansanto has done just this, and the fact that they're full of shit is a matter of public record, so yes, I'm going to call them out on it.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
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.
Well, growing up I was a victim of it. As a child I survived on poached deer and small game and the occasional splurge at KFC on Fridays. I still like squirrel but KFC is gross to me now.
But if you don't want to take my word for it, ask some of these places:
http://www.foodbanknyc.org/
http://www.chicagosfoodbank.or...
https://www.lafoodbank.org/
http://www.austinfoodbank.org/
Every city over 30k people in this country has a food bank.
You think these organizations do all this work for the hell of it?
I grow and can large amounts of produce myself to donate.
It shouldn't be possible to starve in this country, but it happens every day.