Doug Van Hoewyk is an associate professor at Coastal Carolina University, where he researches stress tolerance in plants.

The push to define natural food has involved lawsuits about many different aspects of what's in our food, including high-fructose corn syrup, additives, chemicals and G.M.O.'s. But these issues are not equal, and categorizing G.M.O.'s in particular as unnatural would wrongly suggest that they are unhealthy.

All crop varieties are genetically altered compared to the wild plants from which they have been bred.

Nearly every respected scientific association — including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Medical Association and American Society of Plant Biologists — has attested to the safety of G.M.O. crops for one simple reason: scientific evidence indicates that the consumption of genetically modified crops is not harmful or nutritionally inferior.

But Kix, the “kid-tested, mother approved” cereal, was specifically challenged for calling their product "all natural" because it contains G.M.O.'s. If G.M.O.'s aren't natural, then what food is? Is corn natural, even though it isn’t found in the wild or even resembles teosinte, the plant from which it was domesticated?

Consider how confusing it would be to label a box of organic cereal: "Contains oats and wheat that may have been genetically altered by exposure to mutagens." The statement certainly suggests that this organic food product might be dangerous or unnatural. However, thousands of organic crop varieties — including the organic Rio Red grapefruit — have been created as a result of exposing seeds to gamma rays or the chemical ethyl methanesulfonate. This process, known as mutagenesis, is not excluded from organic criteria and it can create novel genetic changes that lead to enhanced crop varieties with better taste, increased yield and improved stress resistance.

But even nonmutagenized crop varieties are genetically altered compared with the wild plants from which they have been bred. This doesn’t make our domesticated crops dangerous or unnatural.

Although the word "natural" on labels has little meaning, I do think that the term should exclude foods with additives such as artificial coloring, sweeteners or preservatives. But lumping G.M.O.'s in with unhealthy foods should be avoided. If the "natural" label on foods cannot apply to G.M.O.'s, it would have to exclude nearly all foods, considering how they have changed from the undomesticated plants from which they derive. Most of those truly wild and “natural” plants aren’t even available at farmer's markets, let alone grocery stores.



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