Via Caveatbettor:
When rats are fed GMO food, do they show signs of organ damage? You get your treatment group, your control group, your outcome measures, and you do an unpaired t-test between the two. These guys use “nonparametric methods,” “Principle Component Analysis,” and a bunch of other unnecessarily advanced statistics. Basically, they tried doing it the right way, failed to find what they were looking for, and pulled out the fancy (wrong) techniques to get the result they wanted.
First, you need the fancy smancy statistics to control for differences in gender and amounts of corn that the rats were fed; in addition the rat experiment only lasted ninety days so trends would have to be examined to get any useful information from this experimant.
The bigger issue here is the limits of animal testing, most of us will eat corn for longer than ninety days and even if you fed rats this corn for their entire lifespan, that lifespan is only about three-years, probably much shorter on a diet of this corn, but not even close to the seventy years that most of us hope to live.
Plus, people don’t consume that much plain corn, we consume it in soft-drinks, we consume animals that have eaten corn, almost every processed food product contains corn in some form and we have no idea how the act of processing corn effects the chemicals in corn.
None of these issues are dealt with in a a simplistic experiment and it appears that the results are easily manipulated anyway, perhaps it is time to re-think how we test food safety.