[Thor]

By the way, the latest anti GMO nonsense being propagated is about pig feed causing harms to pigs, not coincidentally 2 of the authors of this study are well known anti GMOers and one of the scientist in our FB group on debunking anti GMOers had this to say in response to the first reading of the study.

Firstly the article:
http://sustainablepulse.com/2013/06/.../#.UbdPGJywUsY

Study details

The research was conducted by collaborating investigators from two continents and published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Organic Systems. The feeding study lasted more than five months, the normal commercial lifespan for a pig, and was conducted in the US. The pigs were slaughtered at the usual slaughter age of over 5 months, after eating the diets for their entire commercial lifespan.

168 newly-weaned pigs in a commercial piggery were fed either a typical diet incorporating GM soy and corn, or else (in the control group) an equivalent non-GM diet. The pigs were reared under identical housing and feeding conditions. They were slaughtered over 5 months later, at the usual slaughter age, after eating the diets for their entire commercial lifespan. They were then autopsied by qualified veterinarians who worked “blind” – they were not informed which pigs were fed on the GM diet and which were from the control group.

The GMO feed mix was a commonly used mix. The GM and non-GM diets contained the same amount of soy and corn, except that the GM diet contained a mixture of three GM genes and their protein products, while the control (non-GM) diet had equivalent non-GM ingredients. Of the three GM proteins in the GM diet, one made a crop resistant to being sprayed with the herbicide Roundup, while two were insecticides.

And here is the science and reason coming to whoop the butt of this "study"..

Karl Haro von Mogel, Here is the direct link to the paper:
http://www.organic-systems.org/journal/81/8106.pdf

I browsed through the paper, and I have a couple comments to make so far. My experience in animal toxicology is limited, so I can't comment very much on the methods they used for the feeding study. The authors make it very clear that they are not testing isolines, indeed they are testing variable mixtures of different varieties that were just bought from farmers. The weird thing is that they say that they bought the grain from farmers who grew it, yet, they stated that the varieties were all mixed together. What farmer mixes varieties in the field? If you are going to do a feeding experiment, you would want single varieties, and if you wanted them mixed together, you would want to know which ones were mixed, and how much. They state that they knew the varieties, but not the amounts, and relied on genetic testing to verify that they were there. So given that there is absolutely no precision involved in planning the diets, this fact is completely overlooked in the discussion and conclusion, even though it is a major limitation.

There was an analysis done on the feed, but only for mycotoxins, but not for other components.

I would also like to point out that the second author, Howard Vlieger, is the source of the now infamous GMO-corn-has-formaldehyde claims debunked by Kevin Folta here:
http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2013/04/f...kes-alarm.html
http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2013/05/v...corn-data.html
http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2013/05/p...-mouth-is.html
http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2013/05/c...r-vlieger.html

So we know that bogus claims have been made about the nutritional composition of genetically engineered corn. But what if this supposed nutritional analysis was done on the food used in this published experiment? It seems rather odd that Vlieger was not willing to state the methods used to do that experiment, while he was involved with this one. I wouldn't be surprised if they were the same corn. If they were the same, and the timeframe is right, what would it mean about their experiment?

Vlieger has also made the claim that animals choose not to eat GMO feed, and that his pigs were sickened by eating it, but got better when they stopped. This paper appears to be an attempt to turn that anecdote into a study.

One thing I would like to point out is that this is also an obscure, web-only journal that has existed for less than 4 years, and focuses on organic systems (hence the name). Why would it make any sense to publish a study like this in an organic farming systems journal? It's like publishing on the effectiveness of cover crops for weed control in an obscure medical journal - the topic does not fit, and they may not have the expertise to properly review a paper on this topic.

There are many studies published on pigs in the GENERA list that we have on biofortified.org, although we're having an issue with the domain name transfer, you can find the list on this page: http://50.62.76.192/genera/studies-for-genera/ The big ones in the list were not mentioned in Carman et al. If no one but this group can seem to find these elusive effects, then it is not independently repeatable. The problems that they report are not found in these other papers.
see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23031560

If you go to page 47 of the paper, there's all kinds of interesting data, which makes it seem that they are trying to spin their own results. They make a big deal out of the statistical significance of severe stomach inflammation, and then also highlight two pigs with uteruses with fluid in them. However, the uterus data has a p-value of about 50%, meaning it is very much non-significant. If a student's paper I graded claimed anything about non-significant differences I would mark off points. That's bad interpretation of science. Next, there are parameters where the non-GE-fed pigs did worse than the GE-fed pigs, but these differences are not statistically significant, either. But they are more statistically significant than the uterine fluid data. So they are selectively highlighting non-significant results and over-interpreting them.

Finally, they make the claim that the authors declare no competing financial interest. This is a blatant falsehood, as Vlieger's Verity Farms markets itself as non-GMO, and on top of that Carman is hired to write anti-GMO reports by organizations like the Safe Food Foundation. Maybe they mean no financial interest that competes with their conclusion?

It is a good question how the animals could potentially have more stomach inflammation, yet, have no differences in overall health, organ weight, etc. If my stomach was inflamed, I bet I would be eating less?

Also later on in the discussion he notices something hilarious:

I just found out that HALF of the pigs had PNEUMONIA! Both groups were sick, equally between groups.

Karl Haro von Mogel, Yes the journal it was published in is not only a bad fit, but an obscure unknown journal that is not even indexed by the major databases.

They actually don't know exactly how much of each variety was fed to them - they just scooped up a bunch of random GMOs and then different non-GMOs and tested for the presence of the genes to say they think it is roughly X amount of each. It's a really badly designed feeding plan. If any individual GMO was actually causing an effect, you couldn't know which one it was. The proper way to do this is doses of known GMO foods compared to their genetically similar isolines.

Please note Karl wanted it to be known, this is by no means his official critique but his first impressions after initial study of it.

And an excellent blog post about this study from our very own cowgirl in Alberta:

http://doccamiryan.wordpress.com/201...es-its-rounds/

From ‘I smell a rat‘ to ‘when pigs fly’, bad science has been making the rounds of late. The multi-authored article “A long-term toxicology study on pigs fed a combined genetically modified (GM) soy and GM maize diet” reports that pigs fed a diet of only genetically modified grain show a markedly higher incidence of stomach inflammation than pigs that ate conventional feed.
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Credibility: This was the first time I had ever heard of The Journal of Organic Systems. As Mark Lynas observes (in GMO pigs study: more junk science), “The journal does not appear in PubMed, suggesting it is not taken very seriously in the scientific community.” In the world of science, publishing a good, sound piece of science in a good journal is an indicator of quality and credibility. I mean, think about it… if this study was a ground-breaking piece of ‘all that,’ wouldn’t it have been published by Nature or Science? At the very least, the paper would have been picked up by a journal within the study’s subject area.

Bias: You only need glance at the acknowledgement list at the end of the paper to see that it is a ‘who’s who’ of the anti-GMO world. This kind of makes the statement “The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest” pretty much ‘moot.’ One author – Howard Vlieger - is the President of Verity Farms, Iowa, an organization that markets itself as non-GM. Judy Carman (lead author) is widely known as a long-time anti-biotech campaigner. She even has a website called ‘GMOJudyCarman‘ (launched in late May – timely, no?)

Oh and also FYI: