Genetically Engineered ‘Super Carrot’ higher in press release fluff and poor journalism than your average carrot
January 17, 2008 by seedstory
I edited this down today. A little less vitriolic as my blood pressure calmed. Also…look for it on “Grist - environmental news and commentary” - which I have joined as a contributor thanks to an invite from Tom Philpott, their food editor. I will cross post there when appropriate.
The best way to read this post is to begin with a recent press release from Texas A&M on their new Super Carrot
Second, read WIRED Magazine journalist Alexis Madrigal’s coverage of the story. Alexis praises the next generation of biotech crops. Alexis writes that, “A carrot that increases what’s known as the bioavailability of calcium could have a major impact in the marketplace.” Really???
You are correct Alexis, it could have a major impact on a totally uninformed marketplace. But not much of an impact on nutrition.
But it is likely to have an impact on genetic contamination, wasted public research dollars, and increased corporate profits.
If you had read the press release and considered the math around just how much more calcium are we getting from this new carrot, and at what costs you might have seen that this NEWS FLASH is no news at all. This is a great example of industry FLUFF. Promoting a new break through that on the surface has lots of flash and pizazz - but with scrutiny becomes a big “So?”.
The biotech industry is going to keep pushing a media blitz to get us to swallow their breakthroughs and keep their stock prices up. Unfortunately, many researchers at our public universities are their willing partners in misinformation.
Don’t believe me? Let’s look at the math:
The article states: “If you eat a serving of the modified carrot, you’d absorb 41 percent more calcium than from a regular carrot,” said Dr. Jay Morris, lead author on the paper.
The article later adds: “The daily requirement for calcium is 1,000 milligrams, and a 100 gram serving of these carrots provides only 60 milligrams, about 42 percent of which is absorbable,” he noted.
I emailed Morris and he provided this statistical summary directly from the study: “total calcium absorption per 100 g of carrots was 41% +/- 2% higher in sCAX1 carrots compared with control carrots (26.50 vs. 15.34 mg of Ca per 100 g) (P < 0.001).”
So, per carrot, there is an additional 10.66 mg of available calcium. Not bad, a statistically significant increase per carrot. BUT - is it significant in our overall dietary intake of calcium? Not even close.
As the article says, the daily RDA is 1000 milligrams. A 100 gram serving of “normal: carrots (3.5 ounces - about 1 fresh carrots, or a half dozen of those little baby carrots) gives us 15.34 mg, 1.5% of the RDA. The SUPERCARROT? It gives us about 2.6% of our daily needs.
Wow, so if we ate a bag full of these carrots a day we’d be well on our way to stopping osteoporosis!!!! Morris points this out in thre press release, “A person could not eat enough of them to get the daily requirement.” So there is no story about biotech saving us from malnutrition, but the “SuperCarrot” headlines all over the media could easily be construed as such.
If you go to the USDA web site and look for info on RDA, you’ll find tables giving bioavailable calcium content of a wide array of foods. Here.
Carrots aren’t too high on the list. Umm…and…well…a 100gram bowl of Kellogs Corn Flakes gives us 3x the total RDA….so…not to promote Kellogs, but why are we worrying about our carrots having more calcium?
Fine, lets breed for better nutritional value in all of our crops…but…let’s assess the cost, the risk. And for those of us in media (ahem, WIRED - are you media or advertising?), let’s try not to promote what is a nominal - nay - marginal - nay - totally meaningless in true impact on our daily diet as a breakthrough in biotech that will save us from osteoporosis. Instead, as media, let’s ask questions. How much are taxpayers coughing up for this research (which will get leased over to a private seed company, sold to farmers as incredibly high priced seed, and put out in fields to share its magic pollen)? What is the environmental risk? How do these carrots perform in the field against stress, and how do they taste? Is there a less expensive way to deal with poor nutrition?
Sorry to disappoint anyone - if you don’t want to get old and rickety you’re going to have to keep eating your cornflakes, or eating some cheese, or one of a thousand things with more impact than these carrots.
By the way, the organism that the gene comes from to give us this nutritional breakthrough?….Arabidopsis thaliana. In the Brassica family, a cress. Maybe we should eat more Brassicas - Kale is pretty darn high in calcium. Nah - let’s stick them brassica genes somewhere exciting - down where the sun don’t shine (where carrots grow).
I’m not even going to touch the impact of the environment in which you grow the food on its overall nutritional quality - I’ll save that for the publication of Carlo Liefert’s research.
Thanks for bringing this up to where the sun shines, Matthew.
I second everything that you are breathing fire about, but particularly to the uncritical praise from the hi-tech set. After actually reading the paper, as you must have done, several big issues jumped out at me that must have flown past a Wired reporter.
Starting at the top of the paper, “Nutritional impacts of elevated calcium transport in carrots,” we see that this is a paper about the impact of GM-tech on food and human health. We also see that it comes from the Vegetable and Fruit Improvement Center at Texas A&M. Riddle me this–Is this Center the result of Monsanto largess? Many new “crop improvement facilities” at our land grant universities come directly from the biotech industry (eg. a new biotech crop science building at WSU in Pullman, WA), and one can only assume that such investments expect affirmative results.
Directly under the the names of the researchers we find the names of the editors of the paper, who are associated with the Plant Science Center, St. Louis, MO. Is it just a coincidence that this the home address for the Monsanto corperation, Matthew?
The abstract begins with a discussion of calcium deficiencies “worldwide” that results from “Nutritional recommendations (that) emphesize ingestion of plant-based diets rather than…animal products. However, this plant based diet could limit the intake of essential nutrients such as calcium.” The abstract donates the first third of it’s space to justifying the use of novel technology for the prevention of osteoporosis caused by a lack of calcium in carrots…Never is it mentioned that carrots and other members of the Carrot Family of vegetables are not particularly good sources of this mineral. Nor that the Cabbage Family would be the appropriate source for getting ample calcium in the vegetable diet–which is what people commonly do in the real world. Kale, cabbage, broccoli, Chinese cabbage, turnips, radish, or leaves of any wild or domestic member of this crop family would easily supply more calcium AND more vitamin A and C, than any carrot–transgenic or natural. This seems easy to overlook amid all the science jabber.
In the body of the paper we learn that these crops are being grown in hydroponic solution, not in soil, which at first passes as a simply scientific means to control the availability of calcium isotopes in the test carrots. There is a passing reference in the Results section to the fact that the test carrots did not absorb extra heavy metals, but the significance of this observation cannot be found until we get to the very last paragraphs in the Discussion section. Here we learn that the genetic transformation that allows the absorption of extra calcium by the carrot (”overexpression” of sCAX1 transporter gene) ALSO ALLOWS THE ENHANCED ABSOPTION OF HEAVY METAL IONS, INCLUDING CADMIUM, COPPER, MANGANESE, IRON, AND ZINC…
The reason that the test carrots had a “2-fold increase in Ca++ and no increase in the content of other minerals” (cadmium, copper, iron, manganese, and zinc) as noted in the Results, is because these minerals were not included in the hydroponic solution! That is some result! The researchers note that the ionic radius of cadmiun is “almost identical” to that of calcium, “…so we used cadmium-free hydroponic solutions to avoid any adverse metal accumulation in the carrots.”
The concentrations of other metals in the solution is not mentioned, but we are left to assume that these were present at some level (because all except cadmium are essential trace nutrients), but likely were not available to the test crops in overabundance, as was the calcium. In other words, if these transgenic carrots were grown in real agricultural soils, we may find that they absorb toxic levels of whatever heavy metals or normal trace nutrients are available in those soils.
In the final paragraph of Discussion, we are informed that the real significance of this work is the finding that “overexpression of a gene found in all plants”–the CAX-transporter gene–could lead us into a new era of enhanced nutrition founded on plant-based diets.
Could be a hard sell to the vegetarians I know.
My Final Comment:
The cruciferous vegetables (which are related to Arabidopsis, the experimental source of the CAX1-gene used to transform the “super-carrot”), especially Brassica juncea, are well-known bioaccumulators of heavy metals. Brassica juncea is used in bioremediation as a lead absorber for heavily tainted soils. Using this genetic trait to create “overexpression” of large metal ion transport systems in a wide array of crops my have unintended consequences for agriculture and nutrition in the real world where soils vary widely in their native concentrations of potentially toxic metals. It just may be that ‘modulated expression’ of such transport systems in crops–as opposed to “overexpression” of these absorptive mechanisms–is nature’s way of keeping both plants and animals healthy in real life.
We are evolved to eat many things to be healthy…not just “super-carrots” and “golden rice.”
–Frank Morton
Wild Garden Seed
[...] 28, 2008 by seedstory Frank Morton posted this comment on the SuperCarrot piece. His additions to the story need to be front and [...]