Safety Assessment of Foods Produced Using Recombinant DNA Techniques

The introduction of genetically modified crops has raised concerns regarding safety issues over the insertion of foreign genes into plant genomes using recombinant DNA technology. Since 1991 in Japan, 29 foods and 6 food additives have been evaluated, based on the "Guideline for Safety Assessment", before these foods were marketed. The MHW, however, decided that safety assessment of such foods and food additives should be legally imposed. because soon such foods and food additives are expected to circulate globally and a new system for assessing safety of such foods and food additives at a pre-market stage is necessary, in order to avoid the distribution of any genetically modified foods that have had no safety assessment. The MHW published relevant announcements to amend existing regulations on 1 May 2000. "Standards for safety assessment of seed plant" is established based on a concept of substantial equivalence, and applicable to the products which are regarded as equivalent to the existing products used as foods and food additives. The characterization of the food products entails consideration of the molecular characterization. phenotypic and compositional characteristics, key nutrients and toxicants, and toxicity and allergenicity of the introduced proteins, and if there are indications of unintended effects of the modification, whether further safety testing (animal studies etc.) is needed should be considered. Safety and wholesomeness studies with whole foods should be care fully designed in order to avoid nutritional imbalances causing artifacts and uninterpretable results as was the case of Dr. Pusztaiis report. A case study of genetically modified soybeans (glyphosate-tolerant soybeans) on the immune system of rats and mice is shown. Chemical compositions were also compared with those of the non-GM soybeans. The studies failed to detect any differences in immuno-toxic activity.muno-toxic activity.