What are the benefits and concerns regarding genetically modified foods?
Benefits: developing food products with adequate nutritional profiles, globalized production, regulation of food safety, potential to program plant cells to increase production of rare natural products or modify nutritional content to meet specific population needs, potential to produce active proteins from human milk in mammals, potential to eliminate allergens and reduce the need for chemical protectants in agriculture.
Concerns: potential health risks for consumers, transfer of antibiotic resistance to human pathogens through genetically modified animal products, potential transfer of allergenic proteins from one food to another through genetic engineering, potential for herbicide tolerance genes to be easily transferred through cross-pollination, use of antibiotic resistance genes as markers for gene transfer.