Dalrymple discusses an article in the New England Journal of Medicine on prevention of childhood obesity:
The article is a typical example of what might be called risk factor medicine. A disease or disorder is found to be associated statistically with some independent variable which may or may not be causally related to that disease or disorder, so that doctors hope that by reducing the prevalence of the risk factor in some way they will also reduce the prevalence of the disease or disorder. Since many of the risk factors are behavioral rather than biological, and there is nothing as difficult to change as human behavior, doctors’ hopes are often frustrated.
In the light of the work done by Heritage 2004; Netherwood, et al, 2004, which showed that ingestion of genetically modified foods adversely affected the beneficial (naturally occurring) bacteria in the gut, it seems reasonable to wonder if the recent increase in obesity in the USA and Europe is attributable to consumption of GM foodstuffs.
Certainly, in the US virtually all corn and canola (maize and rape) is genetically modified, and these seem to form a significant proportion of the American diet as constituents of their food.