Anything the government does will be the worst for the end consumer, and benefit practical monopolies like Comcast. It's like trusting the FDA to regulate Monsanto for the good of the people. The FDA = Monsanto. Literally, they ARE the same PEOPLE. So it is with any "net neutrality" falsely so called.

For example: http://consumerist.com/2014/08/12/comcast-spending-110k-on-award-dinner-for-current-fcc-commissioner-doesnt-understand-why-anyone-thinks-thats-a-probl
em/

Very little in science is black and white. Big upvote for NDT's follow up though. Here is an extremely thorough rundown of many of the issues at hand written by an unbiased reporter: http://grist.org/series/panic-free-gmos/

In article #2 he writes about FDA safety testing of GMO's, which, while "voluntary" are always performed. According to an FDA policy analyst he interviews, "(I) frankly cannot really envision any circumstances under which anybody placing a ‘bioengineered’ food on the market would have the temerity NOT to consult with (the FDA).”

In the next article, he writes about the perception that GMO's are the product of for-profit corporations and meets with plant scientists at UC Davis; a nonprofit, publicly funded university.

If you don't have time to read the entire series, then at the very least read his final article. His conclusions are well-tempered and thoughful.

Neils thoughts on the viral video

*** August 3, 2014 -- Anatomy of a GMO Commentary ****
Ten days ago, this brief clip of me was posted by somebody.

It contains my brief [2min 20sec] response to a question posed by a French journalist, after a talk I gave on the Universe. He found me at the post-talk book signing table. (Notice the half-dozen ready & willing pens.) The clip went mildly viral (rising through a half million right now) with people weighing in on whether they agree with me or not.

Some comments...

1) The journalist posted the question in French. I don't speak French, so I have no memory of how I figured out that was asking me about GMOs. Actually I do know some French words like Bordeaux, and Bourgogne, and Champagne, etc.

2) Everything I said is factual. So there's nothing to disagree with other than whether you should actually "chill out" as I requested of the viewer in my last two words of the clip.

3) Had I given a full talk on this subject, or if GMOs were the subject of a sit-down interview, then I would have raised many nuanced points, regarding labeling, patenting, agribusiness, monopolies, etc. I've noticed that almost all objections to my comments center on these other issues.

4) I offer my views on these nuanced issues here, if anybody is interested:
a- Patented Food Strains: In a free market capitalist society, which we have all "bought" into here in America, if somebody invents something that has market value, they ought to be able to make as much money as they can selling it, provided they do not infringe the rights of others. I see no reason why food should not be included in this concept.
b- Labeling: Since practically all food has been genetically altered from nature, if you wanted labeling I suppose you could demand it, but then it should be for all such foods. Perhaps there could be two different designations: GMO-Agriculture GMO-Laboratory.
c- Non-perennial Seed Strains: It's surely legal to sell someone seeds that cannot reproduce themselves, requiring that the farmer buy seed stocks every year from the supplier. But when sold to developing country -- one struggling to become self-sufficient -- the practice is surely immoral. Corporations, even when they work within the law, should not be held immune from moral judgement on these matters.
d- Monopolies are generally bad things in a free market. To the extent that the production of GMOs are a monopoly, the government should do all it can to spread the baseline of this industry. (My favorite monopoly joke ever, told by Stephen Wright: "I think it's wrong that the game Monopoly is sold by only one company")
e- Safety: Of course new foods should be tested for health risks, regardless of their origin. That's the job of the Food and Drug Administration (in the USA). Actually, humans have been testing food, even without the FDA ,since the dawn of agriculture. Whenever a berry or other ingested plant killed you, you knew not to serve it to you family.
f- Silk Worms: I partly mangled my comments on this. Put simply, commercial Silk Worms have been genetically modified by centuries of silk trade, such that they cannot survive in the wild. Silk Worms currently exist only to serve the textile industry. Just as Milk Cows are bred with the sole purpose of providing milk to humans. There are no herds of wild Milk Cows terrorizing the countryside.

5) If your objection to GMOs is the morality of selling non-prerennial seed stocks, then focus on that. If your objection to GMOs is the monopolistic conduct of agribusiness, then focus on that. But to paint the entire concept of GMO with these particular issues is to blind yourself to the underlying truth of what humans have been doing -- and will continue to do -- to nature so that it best serves our survival. That's what all organisms do when they can, or would do, if they could. Those that didn't, have gone extinct extinct.

In life, be cautious of how broad is the brush with which you paint the views of those you don't agree with.

Respectfully Submitted
-NDTyson

My own biggest issue with GMO's is that the people in the FDA who approved them, are in almost all cases employed by the same companies that created them. In some cases, they are the exact same people. In other words, those who have a financial interest in selling them cannot be trusted to be honest. They've proven that too many times.

There's also the fact that this approach does not lead to a sustainable system. Increased resistance to roundup only causes ever-greater use of roundup, which leads to more roundup resistant weeds, which starts the whole cycle over again. This has already been demonstrated over the last decade, but is consistently ignored by GMO proponents.

No, if something is tested and works then that is no longer "alternative medicine", it is simply "medicine". The classic example is aspirin, which is derived from the bark of a willow tree. It was then tested and has now been accepted as medicine.

Just because the FDA accepts woo for political purposes, doesn't make it science.

As for FDA approval of St Johns Wort, there is some dispute about the bias of these studies, as it is unexplained why it works so much better in Germany http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD000448.pub3/full#CD000448-sec1-0005.

But for the sake of argument, let's assume there's plenty of evidence to support it. Again the answer is to streamline the approval process, not just let any muppet with some potpourri market it as a miracle cure.

I would much rather people pay 10 times the cost for medicine that actually works, and even better, doesn't kill people.

Of course, if you lived in a country with a sane healthcare system, you wouldn't actually worry about this, because in most of the world, it's considered poor form to let your citizens die from treatable diseases ,just because they can't pay for it.

Again, it's really simple, either you understand and accept the scientific method or you don't. Healthcare is complex and requires a lot of work to determine if something actually works. That costs money. It's unfortunate, but the results don't lie.

There are plenty of studies and tests done on alt med. What makes something alt med instead of medicine is not if it is efficacious (as you falsely believe) but if it is part of the prevailing medical tradition. This is the definition used by the FDA, the NHS, the WHO, and every other major health organization in the world. So if you don't like the definition of alt med, take it up with them.

We have plenty of studies on the efficacy of St. John's Wort. It is already 'approved'. End of story. Your 'simple answer' would require some company to pony up millions to billions of dollars to get it to pass FDA approval, when it is not patentable and so they would not be able to recover the extreme costs. Your 'simple answer' would mean simply removing all of these supplements from store shelves and forcing people into taking meds that are ten times as expensive with the same efficacy.

@ShakaUVM

By that logic, what would make sense is a lower standard of oversight, not none. Scientific studies are not a realistic source of guidance unless you are an expert in the field. Regulatory agencies such as the FDA, should and do exist for the purpose of informing the average consumer. If they are not working they need to be fixed, not circumvented.

If both Zoloft and Wort have discernible and scientifically significant benefits against depression, then medical decisions shouldn't be made by a seemingly arbitrary price classification into pharmaceuticals or alternative supplements.

The problem is, as with any multi billion dollar industry, existing players entrench the status quo. I have no doubt that to some extent existing pharmaceuticals companies benefit from the high barriers to entry the FDA has imposed in being able to deter competition from new starts.

Similarly, they would fight tooth and nail any new and uncertain supplement oversight because of the potential impact on their existing lines of revenue. But purely relying on merit, these are all terrible justifications.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'nutritional, supplement, magic, pill, weight, loss, senate, hearing, FDA, june 22' to 'nutritional supplement, magic pill, weight loss, senate hearing, FDA, june 22' - edited by xxovercastxx

John Oliver is wrong.

Yes, some supplements (say, the milk thistle found in Rockstar Energy Drink) are just snake oil. But other supplements have clinical effects, such as St. John's Wort (http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/st-johns-wort) for minor depression and, arguably, glucosamine and chondroitin (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinical_trials_on_glucosamine_and_chondroitin)

Here's the thing though - if the FDA regulates supplements in the same way they do drugs, the price of supplements would go through the roof. It costs 1.3 BILLION DOLLARS to get a new drug approved by the FDA. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2014/01/24/shocking-secrets-of-fda-clinical-trials-revealed/)

So the supplements market provides a very useful alternative, something that John Oliver simply doesn't understand. You can either pay ten bucks for a 300 pack of St. John's Wort, or you can pay ten times that amount for the FDA approved antidepressant, Zoloft.

The sad truth is that the FDA really does overregulate the drug market, which is one of the major reasons health care is so fucking expensive in this country. John Oliver lives in magical fairly land where regulating supplements would come with no cost, but in reality regulating it would just close down the only inexpensive drug system we have in the world.

Scientific studies do exist for supplements (I read through the studies while my wife was at UCSF Pharmacy School taking their mandatory alt med class), and if you do your research, you can distinguish the snake oil from the supplements that have real effects.

Retailer strong-arming: So what? Movie studios do this to theaters all the time. So what if Best Buy only sells Apple -- in essence becomes an Apple store -- like all the other exclusive Apple stores? There will still be many willing and able competitors who will employ their entrepreneurial savvy by seeing the market need in selling non-apple tablets and make good money fulfilling that need that Best Buy may have (stupidly) stopped serving.

I repeat: Natural monopolies don't exist. And if they come about, they end up very short-lived because the world is full of competitors and competitor-wannabe's who will rush to fill any perceived market needs.

Misinformation: You find your trusted sources. The government is not one of them, I assure you. I, for example, trust way more the "Non-GMO Project" or the "Berkeley Ecology Center" far more than I would trust any (former-lobbyist/government kleptocrat) FDA-crony. Both of these (and many other) non-governmental organizations would still exist without government and in fact would be able to do more without government limiting what they can study or not about the products they inspect.

Patents: No, nothing good will ever come out of patents. If you want I will point you to countless articles I've read which show this to be the case.

New Technology: You're discounting reverse engineering? Why? If what you claim was so, then innovators would not even bother to patent, because then they could keep the technology "secret" forever. Clearly this isn't so. But, they get patents because they know of reverse engineering and other ways that the technology would be copied if they don't get a patent. In fact, right now, they can keep it "secret" by not getting patent. For example, Coca Cola does not have a patent on its secret formula for that very reason. Look it up.

The marginal utility of R&D: This is the standard old argument for patents. But you can find creative ways to make the inventions pay off. Did the music industry disappear because of piracy? No, it is making record profits, actually! Some companies would not be as mega wealthy, perhaps. Bill Gates would still be mega rich, but maybe not as rich as he is now. But, here you are complaining about extreme "inequality" while supporting the very structures which generate it.

Ignorance may be bliss -- but thankfully, we don't all have to be as ignorant as the least informed among us.

You can tackle it any which way you want to. It's really not my problem. For some reason those "multimillion dollar campaigns" don't have any effect on me.. like at all! But maybe they have a profound power of you... Because, of course there is a relationship between "incentives" and some people's health, incentives to buy and eat not-so-healthy food because it's cheap, or on every corner, or tastes "good" or the FDA or the AMA tells you that it's okay or even good for you, or whatever other "incentive" you're referring to here.. And yes, regulations or bans are about the worst possible way to tackle any of this.


EDIT: Nothing "incentivizes" the kind of unhealthy shit that passes for "food" like the billions of dollars in government subsidies given to say, corn syrup (which makes people sick, fat, and unhealthy in so many ways). And yet, it's heavily subsidized and therefore found in all kinds of "food-like substances." It'd be great to stop the subsidy of junk "non-food" through billions of "taxpayer" dollars. But good luck getting anywhere with that..
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/16/government-subsidies-junk-food_n_3600046.html

I used 23andMe for analysis of my saliva. The DNA is mine, what I choose to do with the information is my choice alone. Same as palm reading and seeing a psychic (if that's what you're into), or peeing into a cup - I can act on the information or not, my choice. If the FDA is so worried about and more importantly has time and money to spend engaging this company on the possible health effects of users who act on the information, I'd say their priorities are fucked up or at least their motivation is unclear.

Point of contrast - here's another product that can possibly cause harm, but were's the cease and desist for this one? I can go down to the corner store and buy a known to be addictive product, with labels that indicate "Smoking Kills", but the tobacco companies are still free to sell it and go about their business. The accuracy of the tests conducted on addiction, health effects etc. related to tobacco are still in debate. You know "We're still working on it". We choose whether we want to use this product, even though it doesn't only put the users life at risk (presumably) but also those around the user (presumably), same as we choose what do with 23andMe reports. However, I'd wager the known risks and costs associated with allowing tobacco use to continue is orders of magnitude higher than it ever will be for the 400,000 or so customers that have used 23andMe to sequence a portion of our genome. Why don't we work on the hard & obvious problem first?

Tempest in a tea cup.

ps. I wonder what the ulterior motive is? Perhaps the FDA is in cahoots with Monsanto in planning copyright on specific genetic sequences for humans, as they do now for crops. Hmmm... they could call it the Soylent Green experiment.

Your video, 23andMe, FDA and DNA health profiling, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

The FDA is pure evil. They are in bed with Monsanto. Both should cease to exist completely as soon as possible.

There's my opinion.

I'm sure I'm going to elicit the ire from the sift for saying this but, for all of Beck's usual nuttiness, I actually think he's correct in this instance: we actually do not need an FDA to tell us what "organic" does or does not mean. At this point, the FDA has co-opted the label "organic" such that it doesn't mean anything anymore. In fact, the FDA now prohibits the use of the term "organic" unless it meets their lobby-prone restrictions (thereby driving up the costs). Even the (private!) Berkeley Ecology Center* (which keeps track of these kinds of issues and whose Farmer's Market Manager is actually a good friend of mine) agrees that the government-owned "organic" labeling system means little to nothing anymore.

So, as Beck is suggesting here, having private institutions that you trust can (and in many instances already do) provide you with the information that you'd want/need to get organic food at affordable prices.

For example, the Non-GMO Project (again, a Private organization) that lists and labels GMO-free foods are doing a great job, much better than the FDA care to or even could.

*The Berkeley Ecology Center are a private (!) "ecological think tank" and do not actively publish, but they will give you as much documentation as you'd like, if you request them, of any references, legislation, regulations, etc. and where to find them. If you need documentation, check out their public archive found here.
I'd say that their existence alone helps support Beck's argument here. The Ecology Center can tell you anything you'd want to know from the FDA (and much more that the FDA -- or even the EPA -- wouldn't want you to know) or they can tell you where to go to find out. They don't yet have the resources to conduct studies on their own, so at this point they are more like an "environmental 411" to point you in the right direction to do your own research.

In my opinion, having thousands of these centers throughout the country can do a much better job of tracking these issues than the centralized agencies could ever do.