I poured out my hot sauce

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine came by my work desk, saw my hot sauce sitting there and pointed to something on the label that made me pour my hot sauce out.

OK, I know it’s random for me to start talking about hot sauce like this, so I’ll give you a little backstory.

Some time ago, I endorsed hot sauce on my YouTube channel as the optimal condiment for anybody to use on their food. In contrast to other condiments that might contain undesirable ingredients such as sugar and preservatives, hot sauce is usually very simply made. The best ones contain not much more than peppers and water. It really doesn’t get much simpler than that.

On top of that, hot sauce helps good foods taste even better, if you don’t mind a little kick.

Needless to say, I like hot sauce, but when my friend pointed out something on the label, it was enough for me to throw my bottle away. What did the label say?

“Partially produced with genetic engineering.”

You may or may not be aware, but there has been a big health debate on the issue of the genetic engineering of foods. Advocates tout benefits such as lower cost of food for consumers, and for farmers, higher yields and plants that are less susceptible to pests and unfavorable growing conditions. Those who are skeptical express concern that genetically engineering foods might be tantamount to playing with fire, and that there hasn’t been enough long-term testing of GMOs to determine whether they could cause future health problems.

So what is genetically engineered food anyway? When a food is genetically engineered, that means that the DNA of the food has been artificially altered for the purpose of increasing disease/pathogen resistance, to increase the amount of nutrients or to make the food more desirable. Scientists and engineers take the seed of a plant into a laboratory and add or subtract certain genes from the DNA, depending on what the desired result for the plant is. After field testing, which basically involves growing the foods in a controlled environment, the seeds are developed in larger quantities and are sold to farmers, who grow the foods and send them to our grocery stores.

I am personally not a big fan of the concept of artificially changing the DNA of foods out of concern that we may not understand the magnitude of such changes to the literal building blocks of an organism. I think of computer programming, where a programmer writes code that causes a program or a device to behave in certain ways. If one were to make an erroneous change to a computer program, you could find yourself with a device more vulnerable to hacking, or even something that crashes and doesn’t work at all. How would this look if the code we’re talking about was the DNA of a food? And what effect would this have on us who ingest the food? With the constant introduction of new GMOs to the market, it is questionable whether enough long-term testing has been done at this point.

But again, this is my personal stance, and it is the reason I poured out my genetically modified hot sauce. You may decide that whether or not a food is a GMO doesn’t matter to you, but whatever way you choose, the good thing is that foods are beginning to be labeled as such so that you and I can decide for ourselves. If nothing else from this column, look at your labels and be aware that some vegetables and fruits, and many processed foods, are genetically modified. For more on this topic, check out my Your Health At The Crossroads podcast, available on iTunes.

This story was originally published July 13, 2017 at 12:56 PM with the headline "I poured out my hot sauce."