With an ever increasing global population, massive developing world hunger, and with an estimation that a child dies for every two seconds world wide from starvation; there is a great promise in the use of GM technology to benefit not only the farmers, but also societies worldwide. The problems are different in the developed societies and GM crops can also help solve them.
It is well known that consuming more raw and cooked vegetables improves health although consumption of vegetables is not high. It reduces the risk of heart disease, helps to maintain weight, and improves blood pressure and cholesterol levels. While some nutrients found in vegetables such as water-soluble vitamins and enzymes may be depleted during cooking, levels of some other nutrients may be increased. People don’t really wish to eat raw vegetables and they don’t have time to cook vegetables.
Cooking vegetables can make the cell walls less rigid, which makes it easier to absorb certain nutrients and digest food better. Compared to raw carrots, cooked carrots, for example, have more beta carotene, an antioxidant that can be converted to vitamin A and improves bone, eye, and reproductive health. The amount of lycopene, a carotenoid that has been associated with reduced incidence of heart disease and cancer, increases when tomatoes are cooked.
Given that most housewives in the developed societies do not have time to cook food, a number of French scientists have been working on growing cooked vegetables. The scientists have started by growing cooked potatoes by increasing the soil temperature around the potatoes growing in the ground. The next vegetables the scientists are working on is carrots and sweet potatoes. The vegetables that grow outside the ground, for example, spinach, beans, tomatoes, may be more difficult.
