Many large livestock such as chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep, etc. are used for GMO food safety evaluation. According to the purpose of research, select suitable large poultry, such as pigs, whose kinship is very close to people, and the size of organs is also close to that of humans, which is very suitable for research on nutritional metabolism and other aspects; Cows, sheep, etc. are used to study the effect of genetically modified foods on the yield composition of milk produced by animals; Egg-laying animals such as chickens and quail are used to study the effects of genetically modified foods on the eggs produced by animals. In studies evaluating the effects of genetically modified foods on meat quality, chickens are also often used as experimental animals. Some scholars have studied the value of a certain genetically modified microorganism in the body, and chose chickens as experimental animals because the body temperature of chickens is closest to the optimal growth temperature of the microorganism.
Feeding cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and quail with Bt corn did not make significant differences in animal growth rate, digestibility, and meat quality characteristics. Similarly, when chickens are fed with Bt soybeans, there is no significant difference in chicken weight, chicken yield, etc.
The use of animal experiments to evaluate the effects of GM foods on human health is as limited as other health-related studies, and the direct application of the results obtained by feeding animals to humans is undoubtedly inaccurate, because there are unpredictable internal differences between humans and animals in metabolic physiological processes and lifestyles. The results of the study sometimes conflict under different experimental conditions; In particular, the quality characteristics of GMO products change with plants in different regions or different food processing methods, and there are also individual differences and growth efficiency differences in experimental animals themselves, which may also make the experimental results different. For example, some studies have studied oral feeding of glyphosate in mice, some studies have reported only a slight effect on the liver, while others have reported that it changes enzyme activity. Experiments with rats were conducted to study the possible allergic reactions caused by feeding glyphosate-tolerant soybeans, and no adverse reactions occurred, while some studies showed that glyphosate-tolerant soybeans had the same allergenic structure as traditional parent soybeans, and induced similar reactions in mice. This requires multiple repeated experiments and statistical analysis of the experimental results before reaching a conclusion, so that the experimental results tend to be objective.
GM food is not safe after all, on the one hand, it needs to be verified by experiments, on the other hand, it also needs to organize relevant scientists at the national level to conduct scientific experiments, and the data obtained by itself is the most reliable. After all, science also has national boundaries, especially when it comes to the survival of nations.
In the next issue, we will continue to explore the safety of GMOs in depth
Source: CNKI.