I really think the easiest solution to the whole GM debate is this:
labels. Make it compulsory for the GM content in a product to appear on a label on every food. After all Mr Steve Madden and some others are 100% sure GM is safe - so put it on the label. This way the public has the informed choice to buy or not to buy. Mr Madden do you have a list of foods containing GM? Please post it if you do, as labelling may take some time to implement (the GM companies seem a wee bit reluctant in this area) and then we, the public, can make our choice. Put your money where your mouth is sir - let's see how much GM food is actually bought by the public, knowingly. I for one would gladly print your list and pass it around. I assume you do know exactly what foods do contain GM? You are convinced you are eating it by bucketload with impunity. So how about it?

Don't panic Dot. In Australia, there is legislation ensuring that GM products containing more than 1% GM product are indeed labelled. You can find them at the supermarket if you wish. In North America hundreds of millions of people have been eating GM food for a decade. Surely if significant health problems had turned up it would have been obvious by now. That is whatever problems caused by GM would be at much greater levels in North America than in Europe where very little GM food is available. In addition to people, thousands of millions of animals in North America, Japan, China, South America, Europe and Australia have been fed diets high in GM foods. If there were significant problems, how come nobody has noticed anything after a decade? And don't tell me that nobody is looking. This product is being scrutinized more closely than any other food product in history.

Yo Steve Madden - labelling people morons isn't going to help, and it isn't going to contribute to a constructive debate.

The point made by 'is it really safe' really relates to what kind of awareness we have of the effects of GM food - and he/she is right in saying that we can't really judge long term effects this soon.

One item that is coming to light is that young women are undergoing puberty and menstruation earlier than ever before - some have pointed to a rise in hormones used in certain foods to promote growth.

Is this the case? we don't know. But something is happening, and we don't have the answer. So before you go calling people morons, you may want to acknowledge that we don't know everything, and neither do you.

Thank you TurnRightThenLeft. That is exactly what I am trying to point out. We do not know the full impact of what GM is doing. We are starting to see different problems with health and we do not have any way of knowing if that is linked.

For example, there has been a doubling of asthma sufferers in the last 10 years. Is this from GM? How would we know as there are no controlling influences and reporting happening.

I want someone I can trust to do the health testing. I don't want a so called independent testing done and yet when you backtrack these so called independent and self funding institutions, you find, lo and behold that they have funds through Monsanto or some of the big players in the GM field. I have found that anyone that shows some report that GM is bad is quickly and thoroughly beaten down by the Companies and sacked or bullied out of the scientific field. Why is that? Billions of dollars have been spent on this research and they want to contaminate the world with their product in the name of the $.

If you don't believe me, check out the website of Monsanto and deep down in their site you will find that they have put money aside for legal reasons to pay for any costs associated with health issues and have warned their shareholders about it and how much they have put aside and how much they intend to.

You might also add that there has been an increase in the average life expectancy in the past 10 years. You might like to also blame that on GM foods. You could pretty simply look at the broad epidemiology of such conditions and ask whether they are more prevelent in Canada where a lot of GM food products are consumed or in Europe where much less is consumed. Guess what? They occur in both places.

What are the causes? One theory of earlier puberty in females suggests it is due to better nutrition. Lack of nutritional stress allows development to proceed earlier. One theory of the increase in asthma is the result of too clean a lifestyle. Children need to be exposed to some microbes so their bodies understand the difference between self and non-self. Asthma is largely a disease of affluent Western societies.

And of course anybody who doesn't agree with you must have been paid off by Monsanto.

I will quote from Bruce Lipton pHD who knows more about genetics than me. "We want to believe that genetic engineers are the new medical magicians who can cure diseases and while they're at it create more Einsteins and Mozarts as well. But the metaphor does not equate with scientific truth. Nijhout summarizes the truth: "When a gene product is needed, a signal from its environment, not an emergent proterty of the gene itself, activates expression of that gene". In other words, when it comes to genetic control, "It's the environment, stupid".

What I am saying is that we have about 100,000 plus proteins (or linked amino acid molecules)and by changing just one of these, we will find that diseases will occur. If you are bombarding the DNA molecules within structures of what we eat and they transfer to our DNA structure, diseases will occur. There is no research done on these type of transferences. How do we know that the tampering of what we eat will not affect us in the long term? There are no long term experiments that have effectively shown us that GM is safe when you are tampering with the DNA and proteins of the human body. Where do you look and what are you looking for? If you don't look for a problem within the microscopic world you do not find a problem