Americans are about evenly divided on whether genetically modified foods are worse for your health and about the risk of additives like food coloring, according to a new poll.
Forty-nine percent of Americans believe GMO foods are worse for your health than non-GMO foods, according to the poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center, up from 39 percent in 2016.
The findings could influence policy decisions regarding the use of additives or genetically modified organisms, which some advocacy groups have called for the U.S. government to ban.
The Food and Drug Administration, which is one of the agencies that regulate genetically engineered plants, has had a policy since 1992 to consider GMO crops just as safe as non-GMO crops. The agency, however, put out a request for comments in January 2017 for how to inform its regulatory approach to GMOs.
Fears about GMOs have been building for years, as some advocacy groups have pushed for laws to require manufacturers to label their products that contain GMOs.
“In the absence of credible independent long-term feeding studies, the safety of GMOs is unknown,” said the Non-GMO Project, a nonprofit that advocates for labeling food that has GMOs.
But an exhaustive 2016 report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine found that GMO crops were just as safe as regular crops.
The Pew poll also detailed heavy skepticism about food coloring and preservatives. The poll also asked respondents about the use of additives like antibiotics and hormones in meat and pesticides when growing fruit and vegetables.
Pew found that 51 percent of respondents believe that additives pose a health risk. Another 48 percent believe there is a risk, but that the additives are in such a small amount in food they don’t pose a serious risk.
Advocacy groups are calling for greater scrutiny about the use of additives. The American Academy of Pediatrics recently called for new regulations and oversight of additives in foods that include flavorings and chemicals.
There is also growing skepticism among the American public about the safety of such products, Pew said.
“Consumer preference for ‘natural’ foods, a common label with no standard meaning from a U.S. regulatory perspective, raises concerns among some in the scientific community that the public has an aversion to additives and anything that might be seen as ‘unnatural’ in the foods people eat,” Pew said in a release on the poll.
The poll was based on responses from 2,537 people and has a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.
