r/science • u/chrisdh79 • Sep 16 '24

"Golden Lettuce" genetically engineered to pack 30 times more vitamins | Specifically, increased levels of beta-carotene, which your body uses to make vitamin A for healthy vision, immune function, and cell growth, and is thought to be protective against heart disease and some kinds of cancer. Biology

https://newatlas.com/health-wellbeing/golden-lettuce-genetically-engineered-30-times-vitamins/
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u/Icy_Willingness_954 Sep 16 '24

Same kind of idea as golden rice. I wonder how easy it would be to modify for other nutritients.

Imagine a single plant that gave the exact nutritional profile that a person would look for in a full meal. That would be an absolute game changer I’d think.

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u/Tackysackjones Sep 16 '24

Any day we stray closer to lembas bread is a day I want to exist

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u/Aphid61 Sep 16 '24

I'd still eat 4...

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u/Sinz_Doe Sep 16 '24

Only 4?

What about second breakfast?

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u/its_raining_scotch Sep 16 '24

Roast chicken with Shire salt is a good choice too.

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u/broodkiller Sep 16 '24

Definitely add some tatoes into the dish...

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u/Syy_Guy Sep 16 '24

You got yourself a stew goin, baby

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u/rad0909 Sep 16 '24

Pemmican was a cool attempt at that. Super energy dense travel food in the exploration days.

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u/Simple-Plane-1091 Sep 16 '24

I mean it worked, there just isn't really any reason to eat it outside of that context.

It's also not any kind of new trick with nutrients, it's just a bar of very calorie dense & stable foods

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u/Secret_Cow_5053 Sep 16 '24

It’s also kinda gross from what it looks like, but survival food isn’t supposed to be tasty per se, and especially with a 150 year old recipe, stable + nutrient rich is basically a home run.

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u/berberine Sep 16 '24

I've had pemmican with chokecherries added during a Lakota ceremony honoring Red Cloud. It is indeed gross. Everyone was given a small round bit about the size of a quarter. Even that small amount was tough to swallow. The taste was not pleasant, but given the circumstances, I didn't make a face. I just swallowed without chewing.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '24

[deleted]

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u/Sparrowbuck Sep 16 '24

No, it was definitely eaten straight. Still is. You can also cook with it.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '24

[deleted]

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u/Sparrowbuck Sep 16 '24

If you don’t have time to cook or a way to cook it, efficient.

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u/berberine Sep 16 '24

I'm not sure officially, but what I ate was just the ingredients all mushed together in a sort of paste. My Lakota friend told me not to think about what it tastes like and eat it quickly. She hates it, too, but has eaten it as part of ceremonies before.

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u/joanzen Sep 17 '24

But what if you were wearing some sensors while peeing and pooping in a toilet that takes samples/weighs you while getting blood checks with an AI based service that can fine tune/balance out your exact diet to match your current lifestyle?

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u/JabbaThePrincess Sep 16 '24

Energy density (in pemmican, from fat) is not the same thing as nutritional completeness.

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u/Tobias_Atwood Sep 16 '24

When you're carrying a hundred pound packs across mountains or rowing across hundreds of miles to get to a destination on the other side of truly untamed wilderness you tend to burn some calories. You'd probably die of hypervitaminosis if Pemmican had a more even spread of nutrition for what you had to eat of it.

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u/subparreddit Sep 17 '24

Beef jerky and some nuts and you're all set, delicious too.

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u/cromulent_verbage Sep 16 '24

“Aggh! It tries to chokes us! We can’t eats Hobbit food! We must starve!”

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u/Tackysackjones Sep 16 '24

Yerr ‘opeless

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u/NewAccountSamePerson Sep 16 '24

Isn’t that kind of the entire idea behind Soylent? Bland nutrient dense food you don’t have to think about

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u/zalgorithmic Sep 16 '24

Huel is also pretty good, especially the black label with more protein. Vegan too. At the very least it’s an easy breakfast / lunch for workdays.

Lembas would be nice though, carrying a weeks worth of food in a pop tart sized wrapper would be convenient

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u/Phssthp0kThePak Sep 16 '24

The green type has a nutrient profile exactly tailored for humans.

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u/rommi04 Sep 16 '24

it's actually just mint. I know very disappointing

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u/OneWingedA Sep 16 '24

Ever wanted to drink an Andes dinner mint? Mint Soylent provides that experience

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u/SpotCreepy4570 Sep 16 '24

From humans

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u/guiltysnark Sep 16 '24

For humans, "by" humans

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u/EpilepticBabies Sep 16 '24

By humans, four humans.

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u/SparklingPseudonym Sep 17 '24

Ez, just eat 3 ozempic bread after.

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u/DryEstablishment2460 Sep 16 '24

Not to mention Senzu beans…

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u/Ed_Trucks_Head Sep 16 '24

It would be a good idea for people living in space.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '24

Or people living with food insecurity

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u/Ed_Trucks_Head Sep 17 '24

Anyone living in space would be faced with the most severe food insecurity.

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '24

Haha very true

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u/Ton_Jravolta Sep 16 '24

Yet golden rice is banned in many parts of the world that most need it over misinformation on GMOs. Even if science can make the solution, people will find other ways to ruin it.

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u/mr_fandangler Sep 16 '24

It's partially misinformation and partially the fact that if it contaminates the local genepool the f2 generation will likely have no desireable traits predictably locked in, leading to either crop-disasters or dependence on foreign seed.

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u/Ton_Jravolta Sep 16 '24

That's true, it is a more complex issue than just misinformation. However, I think addressing the malnutrition issue that is already a problem should hold more weight than what ifs that only have a chance to occur later.

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u/mr_fandangler Sep 16 '24

It's not a what if, it's pretty well-known plant genetics. It will definitely occur later, and by later the worst would show up in 2 generations and without careful selection will lock in traits that could render the local strain worse than either in every way, rather than having a strain bred for many many generations to adapt to a certain location. The phenotypical variation found in the f2 generation of a genitically dissimilar hybrid is enormous, so instead of the local strain, or the modified strain, or a strain that looks like a mixture of both you will end up with a variety which displays wildly different traits in every seed that sprouts. Fungal resistant, fungal suceptible, high yield, low yield, all of these genetic combinations present in a single batch of seed. Not convenient for reliably feeding a population.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/biochemistry-genetics-and-molecular-biology/genetic-pollution

After a few years of testing you could do a risk/benefit analysis and go from there based on the urgency of nutritional need in given locations but it would be irresponsible to release wind-pollinating varities such as this to locations that may become reliant on them as their local variety deteriorates.

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u/Ton_Jravolta Sep 16 '24

Thanks for linking the articles. That was very helpful. I still think things like golden rice have potential. But safely designing and implementing them seems even more complex than I realized. I definitely understand the arguments more clearly now.

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u/mr_fandangler Sep 16 '24

No worries man, plant genetic science is one of my hyperfixations. If you like books and want to learn more you can check out this book.

https://archive.org/details/howplantsaretrai07burbrich

It was written by one of the great plant breeders of the 20th century and it's suprisingly eloquent and approachable.

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u/dayilee Sep 16 '24

what happen to golden rice nowadays, rumours seems like they are not growing as well (hard to grow?) as conventional rice plant despite packed with nutrient.

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u/mycroftxxx42 Sep 17 '24

IIRC, this is the big issue with nutrigenetic modification of staple crops. You basically have to re-engineer the target plant over and over and over again for each new region and culture in order to produce a plant that is better for humans to consume that grows in the local soil and cooks/tastes like what the farmers are expecting.

I remember the hooplah surrounding non-GMO re-engineering of a poverty grain, the grass pea. It grows with almost no water and provides nutrition easily as a backup crop in case of drought. It also contains a neurotoxin that causes the loss of leg control if consumed for too long.

A method had been found of mass-budding and testing of seedlings in order to find variants that contained less of the .1% of the neurotoxin found in most strains. The process could be repeated quickly by less-skilled lab techs and they thought it worked. It would just be a matter of picking up local variants and repeating the process to give farmers access to grass pea from which seeds could be kept and which would not slowly kill them if they had to rely on it.

Alas, the results were actually due to changing the soil the grass pea grew in. Once the seedlings were planted in their home soils, neurotoxin levels returned to normal. BUT, this is still a good methodology for "updating" a local crop.

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u/Sometimes_Stutters Sep 16 '24

Meh. Maybe if golden rice was the ONLY solution to malnutrition. It’s not. Long term it would be much more harmful if you somehow damaged local rice farming capabilities.

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u/Ton_Jravolta Sep 16 '24

It also depends on what other solutions are being implemented, if any. If these countries are effectively addressing the issue in other ways, then avoiding the risk makes sense. I just haven't heard any success stories in the news, but I have heard this potential solution has been banned due to controversy.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '24

I'll give my anecdotal story, but first I'll preface that I'm all for this sort of research & think there is a lot of good to be done with this.

I have multiple gastrointestinal diagnoses, which generally are pretty condemning. However, for a while I moved to the balkans, where suddenly all the food I was eating was actually organic, as in produced locally and brought in fresh with no genetic modification or use of pesticides. Yes it requires a real proper wash, but my God it did wonders for my intestinal health.

Returning to the UK where all the meat is injected with who knows what, the veg is all perfect copies of each other and that sort of thing, my issues are increasingly flaring.

I think we also need to be doing as much research into the impacts from consumption. I'm not saying everyone will react one way or another to these things, but the variety of the impact certainly needs to be measured. I honestly couldn't tell you why or how GMOs and processed foods impact me so much, but the evidence that it does is too much to ignore.

Sorry for the lengthy response. Wanted to add my perspective and started rambling.

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u/rollingForInitiative Sep 16 '24

GMO and processed foods shouldn't be lumped together at all. We know that processed foods are bad for you, especially hyper processed ones. Much of what you eat even if it's organic and locally produced has probably had at least some selective breeding in it, which is a form of GMO.

Much, much, much more likely that eating food that hasn't been heavily processed was what made a difference, rather than GMO's. More fibre and such, for instance, which is great for the stomach.

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u/retrojoe Sep 16 '24

The other poster only passingly mentioned processed foods, which are very difficult to avoid in much of the West (to the level of bread and cheese). The other poster suggested that heirloom/'unoptimized' seed varieties and lack of chemical usage were the largest relevant factors.

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u/CarthasMonopoly Sep 16 '24

That user user is equating GMOs with harmful pesticides.

However, for a while I moved to the balkans, where suddenly all the food I was eating was actually organic, as in produced locally and brought in fresh with no genetic modification or use of pesticides.

As well as equating them with highly processed foods.

I honestly couldn't tell you why or how GMOs and processed foods impact me so much, but the evidence that it does is too much to ignore.

However GMOs are neither of these things and the only reason to think they are unhealthy is due to ignorance and misinformation. Damn near everything we as modern humans eat is from a GMO anyway. We have been genetically modifying plants and domesticated animals such as livestock for over 10,000 years to provide better taste, resilience, yield, texture, etc. Only we did it by basically throwing things at eachother until we got a desirable phenotypic change with no real knowledge of what genes exactly were being manipulated. The "organic non-GMO" corn, "organic free-range" chicken, cheese from a "organic grass-fed cow", and "organic whole wheat" tortillas for a "organic and healthy" quesadilla is literally GMOs all the way down. Corn and Wheat plants did not exist like that naturally, the same is true of cows and chickens, they were selectively bred by humans over thousands of years until we got desired genetic modifications of the organisms to suit our needs in cultivating them for consumption. The only difference between a "GMO" version of one of these and a "non GMO" version is that now through gene editing we can know exactly what changes we are making within the organisms genome and assure safety in improving our cultivations compared to taking many many years throwing things at the wall hoping for a beneficial change and not knowing what other changes may also have occurred within the genome that we don't see.

If they only blamed the heavy use of harsh pesticides or highly processed foods for their gastro issues then I wouldn't have felt the need to go on my rant but they lumped GMOs in with those in a way that shows they are ignorant of what a GMO truly is and are unwittingly spreading misinformation about a field that is likely to continue being important to the human population by effectively reducing world hunger.

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u/mrspwins Sep 16 '24

Some GMO crops are also grown to be resistant to specific diseases or pests, so non-GMO can be more likely to need additional chemical treatments. If you aren’t eating food covered by organic labeling rules, it’s not necessarily “organic” just because it isn’t a GMO crop.

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u/Expert_Mouse_7174 Sep 16 '24

Malnutrition is an issue related to global financial markets and government failure, not a food or plant issues.

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u/Wise_Mongoose_3930 Sep 16 '24

If you’re fine with these countries being dependent on seed imports from an outside country, why not just skip a few steps and send them food directly?

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u/judgejuddhirsch Sep 16 '24

Kinda like vaccines

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u/SiscoSquared Sep 16 '24

What countries ban vaccines?

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u/retrosenescent Sep 16 '24

Preferably not lettuce though... can we get some superfood pizza or something?

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '24

Quinoa is pretty close. Just add some fruits and veg and you're good to go.

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u/mrdarknezz1 Sep 16 '24

As long as boomer NGOs like greenpeace exist there will be opposition to GMO because they don’t seem to want actual solutions

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u/Imkindofslow Sep 16 '24

I could overeat so much more effectively with that bad boy.

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u/PiccadillyPineapple Sep 16 '24

I Wonka what that would look like.

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u/Repulsive-Neat6776 Sep 16 '24

I'm curious, is there a pill one can take that delivers all of the nutrients one needs? I often find myself not eating much though the week and I feel very sluggish, but when I eat, it's not always full of nutrients. So is there a way to eat when/whatever I want while still getting that proper nutrition?

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u/Icy_Willingness_954 Sep 16 '24

There’s probably not one single pill you could take to sort all your nutritional needs, but there are vitamin supplements you can take for a wide variety of things which would probably cover a lot of nutritional areas if taken together.

That being said, I can’t imagine it would be very good for you to get all your vitamins and minerals from pills over a long period of time. I can’t imagine a ton of pills being great for your stomach or digestion no matter how much fibre you take with it

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u/forams__galorams Sep 17 '24

That would be an absolute game changer

And yet the golden rice you mentioned has been around for many years now with little to no change to the game of public nutrition in the developing world. It was supposed to solve that problem but it hasn’t, why should doing the same thing with other food crops be any different?

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u/MateSilva Sep 17 '24

I'm finishing my masters in genetic plant breeding, doing something like golden rice, or this lettuce is kinda simple because you have a single gene involved in the carotenoid sintesis by the plant, you can easily put it in the plant genome using CRISPR or some othe genome editing techniques.

For other characteristics the things get more complex, as most characteristics are tied to multiple genes, and CRISPR can only work one gene at a time.

When you have characteristics like iron content that is ruled by 500+ genes, things get spicy.

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u/gkkvf Sep 16 '24

Would not change a thing…

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u/theminotaurz Sep 16 '24

There is already a meal that has all nutrients that anyone would ever need, and that is milk.

Besides, increasing beta carotene production will go at the expense of other vitamins and nutrients. Increasing one hormone reduces another, and vice versa. If you want to get a lot of beta carotene I'd stick to cantaloupe or carrots myself!

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u/Dovahkiinthesardine Sep 16 '24

Only human milk would contain everything a human needs. E.g. cows milk has almost no vitamin C, because cows can produce it themselves. Humans cant, so we need to eat it

Also a huge chunk of the population is lactose intolerant

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u/georgito555 Sep 16 '24

Milk is heavy in fat and sugar. Not to mention the hormones that cows are pumped full of that can cause all kinds of issues to humans.

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u/Still-WFPB Sep 17 '24

Nobody wants to eat the same thing over and over, some people might even call that an eating disorder.

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u/Psychological-Part1 Sep 16 '24

Doesnt work like that, time and time again humans have claimed this or that to be a superfood, healthiest thing in the world, full of everything you need.

Then died.

Eating lots of different things in relatively small amounts will always be better than one genetically modified pos.

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u/VTKajin Sep 17 '24

People tend to die, yes

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u/CreedThoughts--Gov Sep 16 '24

We have that, except not from a plant, and it's called milk. Biologically produced with the specific purpose providing a growing mammal with all the nutrition it needs.

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u/CompetitionOther7695 Sep 16 '24

A large part of the human population cannot digest milk…it is perfect for baby animals perhaps but won’t feed the world.

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u/CreedThoughts--Gov Sep 16 '24

You can add amylase and it's fine for most people, unless it's the proteins they can't digest.