Surveying the RR soy content of commercially available food products in Hungary

The main goal of our research was to establish to what extent Hungarian consumers are exposed to consuming genetically modified foods. To achieve this goal, 251 food samples were bought from the Hungarian food market and examined by the Central Food Research Institute (91 samples) and by the National Institute for Food Safety and Nutrition (160 samples) with PCR. The GMO screening was based on the detection of 35S promoter and nos terminator sequences. The GM positive samples were subjected to event specific detection of RR soy with quantitative real-time PCR. According to the results 38% of the examined samples indicated presence of RR soy in soy-containing foods and 6% of these samples contained RR soy above the 0.9% threshold. These results demonstrate for the first time the assessment of the presence of GMO in the Hungarian food market for large sample numbers.