New IOM Report on the Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods
Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects, a new report released by the Institute of Medicine, assists policymakers in evaluating the appropriate scientific methods for detecting unintended changes in food and assessing the potential for adverse health effects from genetically modified products. In this report, the committee recommended that greater scrutiny should be given to foods containing new compounds or unusual amounts of naturally occurring substances, regardless of the method used to create them.
The report offers a framework to guide federal agencies in selecting the route of safety assessment. The report identifies and recommends several pre- and post-market approaches to guide the assessment of unintended compositional changes that could result from genetically modified foods and research avenues to fill the knowledge gaps