Skepticism over potential benefits of GMO wheat

My colleague (and chief wheat breeder) at Oklahoma State University was recently interviewed by Ag Journal, and he expressed reservations about GMO wheat.  

A few snippets:

“Among consumers, there are a lot of myths and fallacies being spread, but I think they are also being spread on the science side,” said Brett Carver, chief wheat breeder at Oklahoma State University. “There’ve been some promises made about GM wheat that I don’t think are true or are being overstated.”

His main complaint is the way wheat has been portrayed as lagging behind other crops with the blame often placed on a lack of genetic modification. Carver is currently helping to edit a technical book that follows advancements in 16 major field crops and says studies show wheat is more than holding its own.

Carver contends changing climate trends in the last 25 years have benefited corn and beans more than GM seed development has. Most of the yield gains breeders have achieved are the result of taking advantage of a longer growing season and the ability to plant earlier in the spring, he said

The wheat "lagging behind" argument is one that appeared in my co-authored New York Times editorial on the subject.  To be sure this is a complicated issue and there are many factors at play including climate, government policies (particularly ethanol policies), drought, falling cattle inventory, interest rates, and technological advancement (including biotechnology), just to name a few.  Carver is right that the trend is not due solely (or perhaps even mainly) to biotechnology.  But, might it be one small part of the picture?

One should probably be careful about comparing yield of apples and oranges (or wheat and corn).  So, let's move away from discussions about yield, and look at farmer planting decisions. What do farmers decide to do with their land. The data are pretty clear that acreage allocations have moved against wheat over the past decade.  Here, for example, is USDA-NASS data on the number of acres planted to wheat since the mid 1990s (when GE corn and soy came on the market).

To look at it a bit differently, here is the % of planted acres in Oklahoma allocated to wheat over the past 10 years (this is the wheat % out of other major crops that include canola, corn, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat).

Some of this change is due to government policies.  Some may be due to climate change.  Some may be due to changes relative prices.  Some may be do falling cattle numbers (a lot of the wheat in OK is planted to feed stocker cattle).  But, some may also be due to differences in seed technologies available and benefits they provide beyond yield.  As the story indicates:

the most common application of GM technology so far — herbicide resistance — “protects rather than increases” yields, Carver noted

I agree, it is more than just about yield.  Convenience, risk reduction, and time saved also factor into planting decisions, and I suspect producers are willing to pay something for yield protection.   

Ultimately, I don't think "competitive disadvantage" of wheat (to the extent one exists) is the key reason to think about GMO wheat.  After all, if a farmer doesn't allocate their ground to wheat, they're likely to allocate it to a different crop (in recent years in Oklahoma that has been Canola - GMO and non-GMO).  What we care about are not crops but farmers and consumers.

Carver discusses a lot of interesting developments in wheat breeding and genetics that are worth pursing (do see the whole article).   Many of these are likely to bring about farmer and consumer benefits.  

Carver's chief complaint with biotechnology (aside from over-sold benefits) seems to be the following:

it represents “the most expensive tool in the toolbox.”

“I do want to be able to use the technology, but I want to use it responsibly,” Carver said. “What that means is, if I use it, I’m going to use it as a last resort. Why? Because of cost and because of public opposition.”

One of the huge costs is that related to regulatory burden associated with creating and commercializing seeds made with GM technologies relative to other breeding technologies.  That sounds to me like good motivation to work on attempts to bring down the regulatory costs associated with genetic engineering.  It also suggests a need to work on public opposition with scientific communication on the health and environmental aspects of genetic engineering.  It also makes me wonder if activist pressures might eventually bring molecular breeding techniques under a similar regulatory umbrella that now drives up the cost of commercializing GM.

Ultimately, Carver may be right.  New molecular breeding technologies and other advancements may circumvent the need for "GMOs" - at least as they're currently defined by the public and by regulators - and these advancements may indeed be less costly and invite less public scorn.  I'm certainly proud to work at a University with scientists like Carver working on those issues. 

In the end, however, I find it hard to see why we would want to block farmers' access to biotechnology.  If a company (or University) can create and commercialize a GMO wheat (and I suspect that day isn't far off, as there are many in development), farmers will have the choice to decide for themselves whether the promise has been oversold.  Clearly, the vast majority of corn, soybean, and cotton farmers believe enough in the merits of GMOs to pay a premium for them.  Maybe wheat farmers will have a different experience, and GMO wheat will fail the market test.  We'll never know until one is introduced.    

GMO bans and labels

It appears that voters in Jackson county Oregon have passed a ballot measure that would ban GMOs in the county.  

Much of the discussion by supporters of the ban leading up to the vote focused on GMOs "contaminating" organic crops.  But, that really doesn't make any sense because organic is a labeling scheme based on process not outcomes.  Just because an organic-labeled food was found to have synthetic pesticide residue or (heaven forbid!) trace elements of GMOs, that doesn't make it non-organic as long as the producers followed organic rules and procedures.  

I suspect the outcome will embolden supporters of mandatory GMO labeling laws and will speed the efforts of GMO advocates seeking some kind of over-riding national labeling law (which is unlikely to require mandatory GMO labels).  

At the same time, there seems to be growing acceptance and acknowledgements of the benefits and safety of biotechnology by the mainstream media and by prominent food writers.  Mark Bittman's recent writing is one prominent example.    

In that vein, I noticed this recent piece in Slate by the food writer and historian, James McWilliams on GMO labels.  You'll see a quote from me about some of the pseudo science that's sometimes used to promote such labels, but McWilliams mainly focuses on the potential costs of such labels:

It’s certainly possible that food will be reorganized into three general tiers—GMO, non-GMO, and organic—with non-GMO food moving toward the more expensive organic option while GMOs, which will be seen as less desirable, drop in price.

However it happens, a cost-free label is a happy thought. But until the label becomes the law, and until consumers are set free to cast their votes in the aisles of the marketplace, we’ll have little more to go on than tea leaves. And until they are genetically modified to be more accurate, I’d prepare to pay more for food.

How has medical spending changed and why

Last week, I gave a plenary address to the annual meeting of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists on the topic of obesity and the government's role in addressing the issue.  

In my talk, I showed the following graph illustrating the change in spending on medical care expressed as a percentage of GDP from 1960 to 2012 (I created the graph using data from here)

People often use this sort of data to try to illustrate the adverse consequences of obesity and other dietary-related diseases that have risen over time.  That is part of the story.  But, it is also a complicated story, and a lot has changed over time.  

One partial explanation for the change is that Medicaid and Medicare didn't exist in 1960; some of the spending by these programs in 2012 would have occurred anyway but some probably wouldn't have (i.e., some people would have delayed or foregone treatments if they weren't covered by these programs), so that's part of the story.  But, it can't be a huge part, as these two program make up less than half of total spending in 2012.

Another reason we likely spend more of our GDP on medical care today than we did in 1960 is that we are today richer.  Health care is a normal good, meaning that we buy more of it when we become wealthier.  Here, for example, is a recent cross-sectional comparison of how countries that differ in terms of per-capital GDP spend money on health care.

Clearly, the US is an outlier.  But, don't let that distract from the main message of the graph.  Richer countries spend more on health care.  It is almost a perfectly linear trend except for the US and Luxembourg.  

So, let's do a little thought experiment.  In real terms, per-capital GDP in the US in 1960 was around $15,000, whereas today it is around $45,000.  Look at the graph above,  Countries that make around $15,000 in per-capita GDP spend about $1,000/person/year on heath care.  Countries that make around $45,000 in per-capita GDP spend about $5,000/person/year on heath care.  Extrapolating from these data would suggest that we're spending $4,000 more per person on medical care in the US today than we did in the 1960s simply because we're richer today than in 1960.  

If I take 2012 cross-sectional WHO data (173 countries) from here and here, I find the following relationship from a simple linear regression: (spending on medical care as a % of GDP) = 6.47 + 0.033*(GDP per capita in thousands of $).  P-values for both coefficients are well below 0.01.  As previously stated, US GDP per capita has gone up by about $30,000 since 1960.  This means, we would expect the % of our GDP spent on health care to be 30*0.033=0.99 percentage points higher simply as result of income changes.

One final thought experiment.  We are a lot older today than in the 1960s.  For example, 35.9% of the population was under the age of 18 in 1960.  Today that figure is only 24%.  Older people spend more on health care than younger people.  Thus, we'd expect more spending on medical care today than in 1960 because we have more older people today.

Thus, I thought I'd do a crude-age adjusted calculation of medical spending as a % of GDP.    

I pulled data on per-capita spending by age category from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Office of the Actuary, National Health Statistics Group and data from the Census Bureau on distribution of age in 2010 and 1960.

Here is the data and my calculations.

The last two columns construct a counter-factual.  The second to last column multiplies the 1960 age distribution by the total population in 2010; it imagines a world as populated as our current one but with ages distributed like 1960.  The last column calculates expected spending on health care with this 1960 age distribution by multiplying per-capita spending by the counter-factual age distribution.

The data suggest we actually spent $2,192 billion on medical spending in 2010.  However, if our nation had been younger, like it was in 1960, we would have only spent $1,922 billion.  Thus, we're spending 14% more in total on health care in 2010 than in 1960 because we are today an older population (of course we're also spending more because there are more of us).  If I express these figures as a percentage of 2010 US GDP, I find that current medical spending (as determined from this particular set of data) is 14.7% of GDP.  However, if we had the 1960 age distribution, medical spending would only be 12.8% of 2010 GDP.

In summary, increasing medical expenditures might indeed be a cause for alarm.  But, that rise is also partially explained by the fact that we are today richer and living longer.  I'd say that's a good thing.

Assorted links

Author of study suggesting sensitivity to gluten now has new research showing no ill effects

Baylen Linnekin writing at Reason.com on the documentary Fed UP, and the idea that we should have taxes on sugar-containing foods and drinks:

But why should government screw Americans twice? Why tax us to give a needless handout to farmers who raise crops that are turned into sweeteners and then tax us a second time as punishment for buying the products that contain those sweeteners? Where's the logic in that?

When comparing rates of obesity over time, this research shows you need to do more than just "age adjustment" but rather adjust for a host of demographic characteristics:

We find that changes in demographics are partly responsible for the changes in the population distribution of BMI and are capable of explaining about 8.6% of the increase in the combined rate of overweight and obesity among women and about 7.2% of the increase among men

This WSJ post on the liberal-conservative index associated with eating establishments was interesting.  Although there is a need to control for geography before drawing firm conclusions, I found it interesting that Chipotle had one of the highest conservative-liberal gaps.  Might tell us a little something about the target audience of those Chipotle videos.

Urban greengrocers are back

The new dietary wisdom

Carbs are out.  Fats are in.  

We seem to be bombarded by messages these days warning of the evils of carbs, particularly sugar.  The recently released documentary, Fed Up, produced by Katie Couric presents one conspiratorial, over-wrought perspective on the issue.

In their indictment of farm policies, somehow the makers of Fed Up, failed to look at some of the best economic research on the topic, which shows that sugar import quotas, among other policies, make US sugar prices 2-3 times higher than the world price.  Moreover, ethanol policies have driven up the price of corn and have made high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) more expensive as well.  Here, for example, is USDA data on the price of HFCS over the past 14 years.  As you can see, prices have more than doubled since 2005.

Of course, that's just one example.  This week in the Sunday Review edition of the New York Times ran an editorial by David Ludwig and Mark Friedman, which a argued that over-eating is actually making us hungrier.  They seem to place the blame mainly on carbs, writing:

By this way of thinking, the increasing amount and processing of carbohydrates in the American diet has increased insulin levels, put fat cells into storage overdrive and elicited obesity-promoting biological responses in a large number of people. Like an infection that raises the body temperature set point, high consumption of refined carbohydrates — chips, crackers, cakes, soft drinks, sugary breakfast cereals and even white rice and bread — has increased body weights throughout the population.

One reason we consume so many refined carbohydrates today is because they have been added to processed foods in place of fats — which have been the main target of calorie reduction efforts since the 1970s. 

Last week, the Wall Street Journal also ran an editorial on the issue by Nina Teicholz, who has a recently released book, The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet.  In the editorial, she argues that past nutritional guidelines that emphasized carbs and demonized fat were a major cause of the rise in obesity, writing:

Seeing the U.S. population grow sicker and fatter while adhering to official dietary guidelines has put nutrition authorities in an awkward position. Recently, the response of many researchers has been to blame "Big Food" for bombarding Americans with sugar-laden products. No doubt these are bad for us, but it is also fair to say that the food industry has simply been responding to the dietary guidelines issued by the AHA and USDA, which have encouraged high-carbohydrate diets and until quite recently said next to nothing about the need to limit sugar.

Indeed, up until 1999, the AHA was still advising Americans to reach for "soft drinks," and in 2001, the group was still recommending snacks of "gum-drops" and "hard candies made primarily with sugar" to avoid fatty foods.

Teicholz does a good job describing how previous dietary guidelines were based on tenuous scientific evidence and largely represented group think and a desire to "do something."  

Here's my question: How can we be so sure we now know more?  It seems to me this history lesson would cause us to be much more cautious about what we know about nutritional science and about the ability of public policy to beneficially affect food choice, weight, and health.  Yet, the aforementioned writings, and others, often contain as much hubris as ever.  It is unhealthy to eat too many carbs (or too much fat for that matter), but do we really know enough to design policies that will have intended effects?  I'm skeptical.

One reason is that writings by medical doctors and nutritionists on carbs often narrowly focused and miss larger "macro" issues.  Here, for example, is USDA data on per capita sugar consumption.  I've added in the recent trend lines, which show a strong downward trend in consumption over the past decade.

I suspect some of the downward trend is due to increased public awareness of the dangers of over-consumption of sugars, but also because of market conditions and aforementioned government policies.   

Another factor that many of these writers seem to overlook is that we grow a lot of carb-producing grains not just because of nutritional guidelines but because of economic forces.  The reality is that, by far, the most cost efficient producers of calories and protein are crops like corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice.  Historically, the challenge has been (and it remains a current challenge in many parts of the world), producing enough food and calories to keep pace with a growing population.  Moreover, if you're concerned about environmental issues, you also want to get as many calories and nutrients using the least amount of land and other resources, and that's precisely why economic forces lead farmers choose to grow so much corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice (not to mention these can be stored and will not spoil and waste soon after harvest).  I'm not saying we shouldn't re-think how much of these types of grains we eat, often in processed food, but I think it is useful to have some perspective on why these crops are so prevalent on our farms and in our diet.

I'll conclude with this passage I recently read from Sara Hara, a nutritionist who was dismayed by what she saw in Fed Up.   

An important note for those who are earnestly trying to sort through the abundance of the information and misinformation about "good foods" and "bad foods" in search of the truth: know the source of the information being promoted and the difference between a real nutrition expert and a self-proclaimed "expert". Most medical doctors are well trained in medicine, but have less than a semester of nutrition education in the entirety of their training (there are a few rare exceptions). Medical doctors are smart, but are not typically experts in nutrition. Investigative journalists are also a talented lot, but rarely have formal education in nutrition.Registered Dietitians/Nutritionists (RD or RDN) have at least a 4 year degree in nutrition (many have an additional 2 year master's degree), have completed a clinical nutrition internship, and maintain continuing education requirements to retain their credential. THESE are the nutrition experts... along with researchers and other professionals who have advanced degrees in Nutrition. I was struck by the fact that the new film Fed Up has a list of "experts" that includes medical doctors, a psychologist, politicians and journalists...all very intelligent and respected professionals, but none with extensive training in nutrition. There are no RDN's among their "experts"... and for good reason. Most true nutrition experts do not agree with the propaganda being promoted by this film. The RDN experts know that the issue is multi-faceted and cannot be reasonably blamed on a single factor. Nutrition needs to be viewed in context of lifestyle habits, genetics, personal preferences, and so much more. Sensationalism sells... but healthy living and common sense are what will fix our nation's failing health.