I've been noticing that many of the folks that dislike GMOs are also suffering from from very real health problems, some of which include food allergies or other digestive disorders. Other people suffer from autoimmune disorders.
I also notice that searching for GMO related terms like "Roundup" lead to pages on holistic health that attempt to link GMOs to health problems of all sorts, including cancer and autism. The reverse is also true - that is you search for information on a variety of illnesses, you will quickly find articles blaming your illness on GMOs and Roundup. The problem is that these sites generally overlap with the Glenn Beck conspiracy theory crowd in terms of pushing apocalyptic theories, colloidal silver, Geiger counters, and the usual CT paraphenalia.
But sometimes science dismisses "old wives tales" that later turn out to be at least partly true. For instance, many people have long believed that food allergies can cause mood disorders and behavior problems, especially in children. And in the last decade, scientists have started to establish a connection between autoimmunity and a variety of mood disorders. There have been survey-based studies with over 10,000 subjects that seem to indicate a statistically significant number of mood disorders may be linked to autoimmunity.
Is there also a link between allergies and mood disorders, as many health food advocates believe? I don't think there is firm proof of allergies causing mood disorders. But the immune system is extremely complex, it interacts with the environment, and the immune system can trigger mood disorders. But i don't think that mood disorders been linked to specific allergies.
On the other hand we have long known that chronic diseases such as arthritis and cancer can be caused by infections (HPV and cervical cancer is familiar example). In the last few years, infectious diseases and even parasites have been shown to trigger allergies, autoimmune diseases, and even mental illness.
Genetics can only account for a fraction of our risk of disease and the rest seems to be the environment. It is very seductive to think that there must be some specific toxins in our environment that is killing us, especially when we can rationalize that belief with CT. But decades of searching has largely failed to identify the mysterious super-toxins, even though they should be the easiest compounds to detect. It's sort of like saying "Here's four objects - which one of them is on fire?" Our testing is subtle enough to determine that all food, even the organic stuff, is chock full of natural carcinogens and toxins. But we can't find the mysterious disease-causing super-toxins, possibly because they don't exist. Maybe these diseases are the result of viruses, bacteria, and even parasites.
Furthermore, there is a school of thought that our hypersensitivity to the environment is the result of being too clean. It's possible that our body misses the tolerance it develops to dirt, and that our immune system evolved to be partly depressed by chronic infections and parasitic worms. So maybe our real problem is the lack of toxins and immunosupressants. Although that's a disturbing thought, it's a compelling hypothesis that deserves further investigation.
Anyway, here's a survey for everyone that opposes GMOs. It is anonymous because most of you are anonymous to begin with, and the survey form is anonymous to anyone not monitoring the server traffic (as far as I know). Many of you have already discussed various health problems online, and this is more anonymous than information many of you have already shared since it is not linked to a comment and screen name.
Please read the questions carefully because we have some of those annoying "Some of the above..." answers at the bottom.