Each entry on this list of common misconceptions is worded as a correction; the misconceptions themselves are implied rather than stated. These entries are concise summaries of the main subject articles, which can be consulted for more detail.
A common misconception is a viewpoint or factoid that is often accepted as true but which is actually false. They generally arise from conventional wisdom (such as old wives' tales), stereotypes, superstitions, fallacies, a misunderstanding of science, or the popularization of pseudoscience. Some common misconceptions are also considered to be urban legends, and they are often involved in moral panics.
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Aspartame is an artificial non-saccharide sweetener 200 times sweeter than sucrose and is commonly used as a sugar substitute in foods and beverages. It is a methyl ester of the aspartic acid/phenylalanine dipeptide with brand names NutraSweet, Equal, and Canderel. Aspartame was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1974, and then again in 1981, after approval was revoked in 1980.
Cadmium is a chemical element; it has symbol Cd and atomic number 48. This soft, silvery-white metal is chemically similar to the two other stable metals in group 12, zinc and mercury. Like zinc, it demonstrates oxidation state +2 in most of its compounds, and like mercury, it has a lower melting point than the transition metals in groups 3 through 11. Cadmium and its congeners in group 12 are often not considered transition metals, in that they do not have partly filled d or f electron shells in the elemental or common oxidation states. The average concentration of cadmium in Earth's crust is between 0.1 and 0.5 parts per million (ppm). It was discovered in 1817 simultaneously by Stromeyer and Hermann, both in Germany, as an impurity in zinc carbonate.
The cat, commonly referred to as the domestic cat or house cat, is a small domesticated carnivorous mammal. It is the only domesticed species in the family Felidae. Recent advances in archaeology and genetics have shown that the domestication of the cat occurred in the Near East around 7500 BC. It is commonly kept as a house pet and farm cat, but also ranges freely as a feral cat avoiding human contact. It is valued by humans for companionship and its ability to kill vermin. Its retractable claws are adapted to killing small prey like mice and rats. It has a strong, flexible body, quick reflexes, sharp teeth, and its night vision and sense of smell are well developed. It is a social species, but a solitary hunter and a crepuscular predator. Cat communication includes vocalizations like meowing, purring, trilling, hissing, growling, and grunting as well as cat body language. It can hear sounds too faint or too high in frequency for human ears, such as those made by small mammals. It also secretes and perceives pheromones.
Chocolate or cocoa is a food made from roasted and ground cacao seed kernels that is available as a liquid, solid, or paste, either on its own or as a flavoring agent in other foods. Cacao has been consumed in some form for at least 5,300 years starting with the Mayo-Chinchipe culture in what is present-day Ecuador. Later Mesoamerican civilizations also consumed chocolate beverages before being introduced to Europe in the 16th century.
The chimpanzee, also simply known as the chimp, is a species of great ape native to the forests and savannahs of tropical Africa. It has four confirmed subspecies and a fifth proposed one. When its close relative the bonobo was more commonly known as the pygmy chimpanzee, this species was often called the common chimpanzee or the robust chimpanzee. The chimpanzee and the bonobo are the only species in the genus Pan. Evidence from fossils and DNA sequencing shows that Pan is a sister taxon to the human lineage and is thus humans' closest living relative. The chimpanzee is covered in coarse black hair, but has a bare face, fingers, toes, palms of the hands, and soles of the feet. It is larger and more robust than the bonobo, weighing 40–70 kg (88–154 lb) for males and 27–50 kg (60–110 lb) for females and standing 150 cm.
Food is any substance consumed by an organism for nutritional support. Food is usually of plant, animal, or fungal origin and contains essential nutrients such as carbohydrates, fats, proteins, vitamins, or minerals. The substance is ingested by an organism and assimilated by the organism's cells to provide energy, maintain life, or stimulate growth. Different species of animals have different feeding behaviours that satisfy the needs of their metabolisms and have evolved to fill a specific ecological niche within specific geographical contexts.
Genetic engineering, also called genetic modification or genetic manipulation, is the modification and manipulation of an organism's genes using technology. It is a set of technologies used to change the genetic makeup of cells, including the transfer of genes within and across species boundaries to produce improved or novel organisms.
Orangutans are great apes native to the rainforests of Indonesia and Malaysia. They are now found only in parts of Borneo and Sumatra, but during the Pleistocene they ranged throughout Southeast Asia and South China. Classified in the genus Pongo, orangutans were originally considered to be one species. From 1996, they were divided into two species: the Bornean orangutan and the Sumatran orangutan. A third species, the Tapanuli orangutan, was identified definitively in 2017. The orangutans are the only surviving species of the subfamily Ponginae, which diverged genetically from the other hominids between 19.3 and 15.7 million years ago.
Primates are the members of a diverse order of mammals. They are divided into the strepsirrhines, which include the lemurs, galagos, and lorisids, and the haplorhines, which include the tarsiers and the simians. Primates arose 85–55 million years ago first from small terrestrial mammals, which adapted to living in the trees of tropical forests: many primate characteristics represent adaptations to life in this challenging environment, including large brains, visual acuity, color vision, a shoulder girdle allowing a large degree of movement in the shoulder joint, and dexterous hands. Primates range in size from Madame Berthe's mouse lemur, which weighs 30 g (1 oz), to the eastern gorilla, weighing over 200 kg (440 lb). There are 376–524 species of living primates, depending on which classification is used. New primate species continue to be discovered: over 25 species were described in the 2000s, 36 in the 2010s, and six in the 2020s.
Vitamin C is a water-soluble vitamin found in citrus and other fruits, berries and vegetables. It is also a generic prescription medication and in some countries is sold as a non-prescription dietary supplement. As a therapy, it is used to prevent and treat scurvy, a disease caused by vitamin C deficiency.
Mosquitoes, the Culicidae, are a family of small flies consisting of 3,600 species. The word mosquito is Spanish and Portuguese for little fly. Mosquitoes have a slender segmented body, one pair of wings, three pairs of long hair-like legs, and specialized, highly elongated, piercing-sucking mouthparts. All mosquitoes drink nectar from flowers; females of some species have in addition adapted to drink blood. Evolutionary biologists view mosquitoes as micropredators, small animals that parasitise larger ones by drinking their blood without immediately killing them. Medical parasitologists view mosquitoes instead as vectors of disease, carrying protozoan parasites or bacterial or viral pathogens from one host to another.
The G-spot, also called the Gräfenberg spot, is characterized as an erogenous area of the vagina that, when stimulated, may lead to strong sexual arousal, powerful orgasms and potential female ejaculation. It is typically reported to be located 5–8 cm (2–3 in) up the front (anterior) vaginal wall between the vaginal opening and the urethra and is a sensitive area that may be part of the female prostate.
Creatine is an organic compound with the nominal formula (H2N)(HN)CN(CH3)CH2CO2H. It exists in various tautomers in solutions. Creatine is found in vertebrates where it facilitates recycling of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), primarily in muscle and brain tissue. Recycling is achieved by converting adenosine diphosphate (ADP) back to ATP via donation of phosphate groups. Creatine also acts as a buffer.
B vitamins are a class of water-soluble vitamins that play important roles in cell metabolism and synthesis of red blood cells. They are a chemically diverse class of compounds; some contain sulfur and B12 contains cobalt. Dietary supplements containing all eight are referred to as a vitamin B complex. Individual B vitamins are referred to by B-number or by chemical name, such as B1 for thiamine, B2 for riboflavin, and B3 for niacin, while some are more commonly recognized by name than by number, such as pantothenic acid (B5), biotin (B7), and folate (B9).
Humans or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus Homo. They are great apes characterized by their hairlessness, bipedalism, and high intelligence. Humans have large brains, enabling more advanced cognitive skills that enable them to thrive and adapt in varied environments, develop highly complex tools, and form complex social structures and civilizations. Humans are highly social, with individual humans tending to belong to a multi-layered network of cooperating, distinct, or even competing social groups – from families and peer groups to corporations and political states. As such, social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, languages, and traditions, each of which bolsters human society. Humans are also highly curious: the desire to understand and influence phenomena has motivated humanity's development of science, technology, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other frameworks of knowledge; humans also study themselves through such domains as anthropology, social science, history, psychology, and medicine. As of April 2024, there are estimated to be more than 8 billion humans alive.
The dog is a domesticated descendant of the wolf. Also called the domestic dog, it is derived from extinct gray wolves, and the gray wolf is the dog's closest living relative. The dog was the first species to be domesticated by humans. Experts estimate that hunter-gatherers domesticated dogs more than 15,000 years ago, which was before the development of agriculture. Due to their long association with humans, dogs have expanded to a large number of domestic individuals and gained the ability to thrive on a starch-rich diet that would be inadequate for other canids.
Human overpopulation describes a concern that human populations may become too large to be sustained by their environment or resources in the long term. The topic is usually discussed in the context of world population, though it may concern individual nations, regions, and cities.
Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms in the biological kingdom Animalia. With few exceptions, animals consume organic material, breathe oxygen, have myocytes and are able to move, can reproduce sexually, and grow from a hollow sphere of cells, the blastula, during embryonic development. Animals form a clade, meaning that they arose from a single common ancestor.
Bats are flying mammals of the order Chiroptera. With their forelimbs adapted as wings, they are the only mammals capable of true and sustained flight. Bats are more agile in flight than most birds, flying with their very long spread-out digits covered with a thin membrane or patagium. The smallest bat, and arguably the smallest extant mammal, is Kitti's hog-nosed bat, which is 29–34 millimetres in length, 150 mm (6 in) across the wings and 2–2.6 g in mass. The largest bats are the flying foxes, with the giant golden-crowned flying fox reaching a weight of 1.6 kg and having a wingspan of 1.7 m.
Animal suicide is when an animal intentionally ends its own life through its actions. It implies a wide range of higher cognitive capacities that experts have been wary to ascribe to nonhuman animals such as a concept of self, death, and future intention. There is currently not enough empirical data on the subject for there to be a consensus among experts. For these reasons, the occurrence of animal suicide is controversial among academics.
AR" comes from the name of the gun's original manufacturer, ArmaLite, Inc. The letters stand for ArmaLite Rifle — and not for "assault rifle" or "automatic rifle.
A frequent misconception centers on what the term "AR-15" literally means.
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: CS1 maint: url-status (link)The real origin story wasn't as clean or concise, according to co-founder and former CEO Marc Randolph. He says Hastings began telling the tall Apollo 13 tale to give a sexy explanation for how Netflix worked. There was no late fee, no aha moment, just long commutes in Silicon Valley that the pair spent plotting their next venture around the time that Hastings's first business, Pure Software, merged with Atria, where Randolph worked, and sold to another company.
"People think the use-by date means either the product is going to die or you're going to die if you eat it... If the food looks rotten and smells bad, you should throw it away, but just because it's past the date on the package, it doesn't mean it's unsafe.
In college, when friends ridiculed her for preferring the cheaper knock-off Hydrox to the real thing, she did some research. Among her findings: Hydrox was created in 1908 by what would later become Sunshine Biscuits Inc. That was four years before the National Biscuit Co. (later called Nabisco) came up with the similar Oreo. Oreo was the knock-off. The Hydrox name came from combining the words hydrogen and oxygen, which Sunshine executives thought evoked purity. Others thought it sounded more like a laundry detergent.
People thought of Hydrox as the Oreo knockoff, but they were not. Hydrox were the original sandwich cookie.
North Americans weren't the first to grind peanuts—the Inca beat us to it by a few hundred years—but peanut butter reappeared in the modern world because of an American, the doctor, nutritionist and cereal pioneer John Harvey Kellogg, who filed a patent for a proto-peanut butter in 1895.
One of the oldest known published recipes for crisps is by William Kitchiner, an optician who doubled up as a Georgian-era celebrity chef. His book, A Cook's Oracle, published in 1817, was a big hit in the UK and a young America. Kitchiner's recipe – Potatoes fried in Slices or Shavings – calls for slivers of potato fried in "lard or dripping" and "served with a very little salt sprinkled over them".
George A. Romero's first zombie film Night of the Living Dead is credited with popularizing the zombie, though it never actually uses that word. The "ghouls" in the film are mindless flesh-eaters that have little in common with the Haitian zombie other than rising from the grave.
In the 1960s and 70s, filmmaker George Romero brought the zombie film into the mainstream with Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead. The first of these was technically about "ghouls." Romero didn't start calling them "zombies" until his second film. But his now-iconic films helped to erase enslaved people from zombie history.
"I never thought of my guys as zombies, when I made the first film," he said. "To me, zombies were still those boys in the Caribbean doing the wetwork for [Bela] Lugosi.
As we all know, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is usually cited as the first animated feature, but as most of us who read this site are no doubt aware, it wasn't. It was preceded by Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed, Ladislas Starevitch's The Tale of the Fox, and two features by the Argentinian animator Quirino Cristiani – all films which could scracely [sic] be more different from the Disney mode.
On the other hand, the movie was not widely successful, and appealed to a small portion of the population. It was strictly for a Buenos Aires audience: nobody in the provinces even saw it because it was not distributed there. And likewise, given the subject, it was not possible to export the film to other nations, not even to a close cousin similar to Uruguay.
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: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of February 2024 (link)But Mac pleads that they understand the slur's significance. 'Did you know that a faggot is a burning bundle of sticks on top of which they used to burn homosexuals?' he asks (erroneously, but with genuine pain).
All dictionaries now recognize "a Frankenstein" as any monstrous creation that threatens to destroy its creator.
Today this ubiquitous usage must be accepted as standard
For a long time, legend held that this was one of the world's great short stories, by one of the world's great short-story writers: Ernest Hemingway. There were different versions of the myth . . . None of it is true. And for those who think the internet is a cesspool of lies, it is an interesting experiment to google those six words today. The top items, including a Wikipedia entry on the myth, debunk it as the urban legend it is.
This piece bears an erroneous nickname since the story long associated with this nickname presumes the pianist is supposed to play the piece in one minute. The word "minute" means small or little waltz.
Flowers worn traditionally in jacket lapels at Austrian parliamentary openings got special attention Thursday when the Freedom Party of Austria's (FPÖ) 51 deputies — enlarged from 38 — sported edelweiss, the national flower featured in the 1965 hit movie "The Sound of Music."
Some Muslim women wear niqabs, which are often confused with the burka.
Predating Xbox 360 hysteria by years, several fans were mugged on their way home with their new prize, and the situation became so bad that it was brought before the Japanese Diet. Although tales of a law requiring Dragon Quest games only be released on the mornings of weekends or holidays are the stuff of urban legend, each new title is as highly anticipated as the launch of a new console.
Its Thursday release is unheard of for a Dragon Quest game, which are generally released over the weekend so people don't take work off in droves to play them.
Based on the contents of the papyri, Tallet believes that at least some workers in the time of Khufu were highly skilled and well rewarded for their labor, contradicting the popular notion that the Great Pyramid was built by masses of oppressed slaves.
Herodotus claimed that the Great Pyramid at Giza was built with the labour of 100,000 slaves working in three-monthly shifts, a charge that cannot be substantiated. Much of the non-skilled labour on the pyramids was undertaken by peasants working during the Inundation season when they could not farm their lands. In return for their services they were given rations of food, a welcome addition to the family diet.
"...popular associations of the eruption with a legend of Atlantis should be dismissed...nor is there good evidence to suggest that the eruption...brought about the collapse of Minoan Crete
Marinatos (1939) famously suggested that the eruption might even have caused the destruction of Minoan Crete (also Page 1970). Although this simple hypothesis has been negated by the findings of excavation and other research since the late 1960s... which demonstrate that the eruption occurred late in the Late Minoan IA ceramic period, whereas the destructions of the Cretan palaces and so on are some time subsequent (late in the following Late Minoan IB ceramic period)
The only other map or globe on which this specific phrase appears is what can arguably be called the egg's twin: the copper Hunt-Lenox Globe, dated around 1510 and housed by the Rare Book Division of the New York Public Library.
Fifty-five percent say it commemorates the signing of the Declaration of Independence (this is a common misconception, and close to being accurate; July 4th is actually the date in 1776 when the Continental Congress approved the Declaration, which was officially signed on August 2nd.) Another 32 percent give a more general answer, saying that July 4th celebrates Independence Day.
One such weapon is the ice pick — often associated with the 1940 murder of the Russian Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky: He was killed with an ice pick's cousin, an ice ax, while he was in exile in Mexico, by an assassin who, acting on the orders of Joseph Stalin, crept up behind Trotsky and slammed the ice ax into his skull.
"Skinhead" was a term originally used to describe a 1960s British working-class subculture that revolved around fashion and music and that would heavily inspire the punk rock scene. While it has harmless roots, the skinhead movement fell into polemic politics. Nowadays, it's popularly associated with neo-Nazis, despite having split demographics of far-right, far-left, and apolitical.
For example, Pruitt-Igoe is often cited as an AIA-award recipient, but the project never won any architectural awards.
Though it is commonly accorded the epithet 'award-winning,"' Pruitt-Igoe never won any kind of architectural prize. An earlier St. Louis housing project by the same team of architects, the John Cochran Garden Apartments, did win two architectural awards. At some point this prize seems to have been incorrectly attributed to Pruitt-Igoe
A pair of woman's eyelasses, a towel, a pair of shorts, packets of unopened Flavor-Aid lie scattered about waiting for the final cleanup that may one day return Jonestown to the tidy, if overcrowded, little community it once was.
An astronaut orbiting Earth in a spacecraft experiences a condition of weightlessness because both the spacecraft and the astronaut are in free fall.
Of course, dogs sweat. You would, too, if you had to wear a fur coat in hot weather. Dogs excrete moisture through the pads on their paws.
It is another folk tale that dogs do not sweat except through the tongue. This is an incorrect belief as dogs possess sweat glands all over the body.
SOME time ago we received from a correspondent an inquiry as to whether the very prevalent belief that a dog perspires through the tongue was a vulgar error or well founded. ...whether the dog exudes fluid from the tongue of the some kind as that exuded from the human skin. To this question the answer is, No. The skin of the dog is abundantly furnished with glands, having the characteristic disposition and structure of those which in man produce sweat, ... in other words, the dog does not sweat by the tongue.
Only American frogs are said to go "ribbit," and that's believed to be because early Hollywood producers used the ribbiting sound of the Pacific tree frog during night scenes.
Here's a bonus fact: you might notice that none of these species says, "ribbit." In fact, the "ribbit" call is unique to the Pacific tree frog, which lives along the Pacific coast, and, notably, in Hollywood, California, where the largest volume of early frog recordings took place.
In the wild, rabbits aren't in the habit of digging up root vegetables such as carrots, potatoes and beets. They much prefer wild greens, such as grasses and clover. In fact, carrots may actually be bad for rabbits, because although the vegetables are high in good nutrients, including beta carotene, they are also relatively high in sugar. This means that feeding a rabbit lots of carrots could lead to tooth decay or other health issues.
a 1934 book by entomologist Antoine Magnan... refers to a calculation by his assistant André Sainte-Laguë, who was an engineer. The conclusion was presumably based on the fact that the maximum possible lift produced by aircraft wings as small as a bumblebee's wings and traveling as slowly as a bee in flight would be much less than the weight of a bee.
Many people are under the misconception that the flower heads of the cultivated sunflower (Helianthus annuus) track the sun... Immature flower buds of the sunflower do exhibit solar tracking and on sunny days the buds will track the sun across the sky from east to west... However, as the flower bud matures and blossoms, the stem stiffens and the flower becomes fixed facing the eastward direction.
Dinural E-W oscillations of the heads occurred initially but ceased as the flowers opened and anthesis commenced, leaving the heads facing east
Glass, however, is actually neither a liquid—supercooled or otherwise—nor a solid. It is an amorphous solid—a state somewhere between those two states of matter. And yet glass's liquidlike properties are not enough to explain the thicker-bottomed windows, because glass atoms move too slowly for changes to be visible.
While a "darknet" is an online network such as Freenet that is concealed from non-users, with all the potential for transgressive behaviour that implies, much of "the deep web", spooky as it sounds, consists of unremarkable consumer and research data that is beyond the reach of search engines.
One of the best-known fallacies in ECONOMICS is the notion that there is a fixed amount of work to be done – a lump of LABOUR – which can be shared out in different ways to create fewer or more jobs...
Fact: Lightning often strikes the same place repeatedly, especially if it's a tall, pointy, isolated object. The Empire State Building is hit an average of 23 times a year
Believe it or not, this long-held myth is far from the truth. While the odds of being struck by lightning are low, the chances of lightning striking the same place twice are high. Lightning can, and often will, hit the same spot multiple times.
If you don't try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, ... but theory predicts—and animal experiments confirm—that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness
...will we humans explode in the full vacuum of space, as urban legends claim? The answer is that we won't explode, and if the exposure is short enough, we can even survive.
Although many people might think that males have fewer ribs than females — most likely sparked by the biblical story of Adam and Eve — there is no factual evidence.
We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE crop safety for the last 10 years that catches the scientific consensus matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide, and we can conclude that the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops.
The literature about Biodiversity and the GE food/feed consumption has sometimes resulted in animated debate regarding the suitability of the experimental designs, the choice of the statistical methods or the public accessibility of data. Such debate, even if positive and part of the natural process of review by the scientific community, has frequently been distorted by the media and often used politically and inappropriately in anti-GE crops campaigns.
Currently available transgenic crops and foods derived from them have been judged safe to eat and the methods used to test their safety have been deemed appropriate. These conclusions represent the consensus of the scientific evidence surveyed by the ICSU (2003) and they are consistent with the views of the World Health Organization (WHO, 2002). These foods have been assessed for increased risks to human health by several national regulatory authorities (inter alia, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, China, the United Kingdom and the United States) using their national food safety procedures (ICSU). To date no verifiable untoward toxic or nutritionally deleterious effects resulting from the consumption of foods derived from genetically modified crops have been discovered anywhere in the world (GM Science Review Panel). Many millions of people have consumed foods derived from GM plants – mainly maize, soybean and oilseed rape – without any observed adverse effects (ICSU).
There is broad scientific consensus that genetically engineered crops currently on the market are safe to eat. After 14 years of cultivation and a cumulative total of 2 billion acres planted, no adverse health or environmental effects have resulted from commercialization of genetically engineered crops (Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, Committee on Environmental Impacts Associated with Commercialization of Transgenic Plants, National Research Council and Division on Earth and Life Studies 2002). Both the U.S. National Research Council and the Joint Research Centre (the European Union's scientific and technical research laboratory and an integral part of the European Commission) have concluded that there is a comprehensive body of knowledge that adequately addresses the food safety issue of genetically engineered crops (Committee on Identifying and Assessing Unintended Effects of Genetically Engineered Foods on Human Health and National Research Council 2004; European Commission Joint Research Centre 2008). These and other recent reports conclude that the processes of genetic engineering and conventional breeding are no different in terms of unintended consequences to human health and the environment (European Commission Directorate-General for Research and Innovation 2010).
In spite of this, the number of studies specifically focused on safety assessment of GM plants is still limited. However, it is important to remark that for the first time, a certain equilibrium in the number of research groups suggesting, on the basis of their studies, that a number of varieties of GM products (mainly maize and soybeans) are as safe and nutritious as the respective conventional non-GM plant, and those raising still serious concerns, was observed. Moreover, it is worth mentioning that most of the studies demonstrating that GM foods are as nutritional and safe as those obtained by conventional breeding, have been performed by biotechnology companies or associates, which are also responsible of commercializing these GM plants. Anyhow, this represents a notable advance in comparison with the lack of studies published in recent years in scientific journals by those companies.Krimsky S (2015). "An Illusory Consensus behind GMO Health Assessment". Science, Technology, & Human Values. 40 (6): 883–914. doi:10.1177/0162243915598381. S2CID 40855100.
I began this article with the testimonials from respected scientists that there is literally no scientific controversy over the health effects of GMOs. My investigation into the scientific literature tells another story.
Here, we show that a number of articles some of which have strongly and negatively influenced the public opinion on GM crops and even provoked political actions, such as GMO embargo, share common flaws in the statistical evaluation of the data. Having accounted for these flaws, we conclude that the data presented in these articles does not provide any substantial evidence of GMO harm.
The presented articles suggesting possible harm of GMOs received high public attention. However, despite their claims, they actually weaken the evidence for the harm and lack of substantial equivalency of studied GMOs. We emphasize that with over 1783 published articles on GMOs over the last 10 years it is expected that some of them should have reported undesired differences between GMOs and conventional crops even if no such differences exist in reality.
It is therefore not surprising that efforts to require labeling and to ban GMOs have been a growing political issue in the USA (citing Domingo and Bordonaba, 2011). Overall, a broad scientific consensus holds that currently marketed GM food poses no greater risk than conventional food... Major national and international science and medical associations have stated that no adverse human health effects related to GMO food have been reported or substantiated in peer-reviewed literature to date.
Despite various concerns, today, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the World Health Organization, and many independent international science organizations agree that GMOs are just as safe as other foods. Compared with conventional breeding techniques, genetic engineering is far more precise and, in most cases, less likely to create an unexpected outcome.
The EU, for example, has invested more than €300 million in research on the biosafety of GMOs. Its recent report states: "The main conclusion to be drawn from the efforts of more than 130 research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years of research and involving more than 500 independent research groups, is that biotechnology, and in particular GMOs, are not per se more risky than e.g. conventional plant breeding technologies." The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.
A report issued by the scientific council of the American Medical Association (AMA) says that no long-term health effects have been detected from the use of transgenic crops and genetically modified foods, and that these foods are substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts.
Crops and foods produced using recombinant DNA techniques have been available for fewer than 10 years and no long-term effects have been detected to date. These foods are substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts.
"Bioengineered foods have been consumed for close to 20 years, and during that time, no overt consequences on human health have been reported and/or substantiated in the peer-reviewed literature".
Several scientific organizations in the US have issued studies or statements regarding the safety of GMOs indicating that there is no evidence that GMOs present unique safety risks compared to conventionally bred products. These include the National Research Council, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Medical Association. Groups in the US opposed to GMOs include some environmental organizations, organic farming organizations, and consumer organizations. A substantial number of legal academics have criticized the US's approach to regulating GMOs.
Overall finding on purported adverse effects on human health of foods derived from GE crops: On the basis of detailed examination of comparisons of currently commercialized GE with non-GE foods in compositional analysis, acute and chronic animal toxicity tests, long-term data on health of livestock fed GE foods, and human epidemiological data, the committee found no differences that implicate a higher risk to human health from GE foods than from their non-GE counterparts.
[...T]here's little evidence that detox diets actually remove toxins from the body. Indeed, the kidneys and liver are generally quite effective at filtering and eliminating most ingested toxins.
Most parents assume that children plus sugary foods equals raucous and uncontrollable behaviour. ... according to nutrition experts, the belief that children experience a 'sugar high' is a myth.
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