Vegetarian just means not eating meat. I define meat as being made of a dead animal. An egg is not an animal.

That’s really interesting. I feel like the science of allergies in general is so strange to me. Like, the fact that so many people’s bodies just react negatively to certain substances which are completely harmless to most people. It’s wild how it works and what can affect it.

Also CRISPR-edited foods are not quite the same as the GMOs that existed prior to CRISPR. The methods are different, so we can’t necessarily assume that potential risks are the same. More testing needs to be done, but it’s a fairly new technology.

>Cancer can be caused by a multitude of things

"Cancer is a genetic disease—that is, it is caused by changes to genes that control the way our cells function, especially how they grow and divide." https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/understanding/what-is-cancer

i.e. It is caused by changes to our own DNA. These can come from many sources. However, generally when you eat something, it does not affect your DNA. If it did, then every time you ate something, it would change your genome. We know that's not how genetics works. There are certain viruses that can integrate their own genome (provirus) into the host genome, such as HIV. However, this is entirely unrelated to CRISPR.

>CRISPR gene editing carries a potential risk, study finds

This study was referring to using CRISPR on humans, in treatments for certain diseases. You will also notice that the very article you cited does not insinuate that this means we shouldn't be using CRISPR for this purpose at all, stating "the researchers suggest adding a check for retrotransposition to standard safety testing for CRISPR/Cas9 editing systems." They're basically just saying, here's another thing we should look out for when testing if certain treatments are safe. They did also mention a potential alternative method of gene editing to CRISPR, base editing. I would have to read more about this method to really understand its potential applications, but it sounds like something that would be useful for treating conditions which result from point mutations in the DNA. So, it could be a good alternative for certain applications.

Sorry, went off on a bit of a tangent. It's just an interesting subject.

To get back on track, you will also notice that this article is not talking about risks to people eating things which have been genetically edited by CRISPR. It's talking about editing genes in human cells. That is because eating something which has been genetically edited by CRISPR will not have any effect on your own genes. As far as I know, no studies have found any evidence of this being a risk.

I'm not going to say that there are absolutely zero risks to foods being genetically edited by CRISPR. They could always accidentally make a food poisonous by turning on or off certain genes. Generally, if this became obvious or people found out about it, nobody would want to buy the food that was poisonous, so it wouldn't be very profitable. For this reason, companies are generally going to want to test for that. But yes, there have been many cases in the past of companies selling a product that was adverse to people's health, either knowingly or unknowingly. CRISPR isn't going to change that.

tl;dr Eating something genetically edited with CRISPR cannot change your own genes, so it can't give you cancer. There could still be other risks because companies only care about profit, but they are the same as with any other product a company sells.

You realize cancer is caused by mutations in your own DNA, right? When you ingest something, its DNA does not affect the DNA of your own cells, that’s not how that works.