20 replies to this topic

[Rogerdodger]

Organic food is no healthier, study finds
Wed Jul 29, 2009
LONDON (Reuters) - Organic food has no nutritional or health benefits over ordinary food, according to a major study published Wednesday.
Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine said consumers were paying higher prices for organic food because of its perceived health benefits, creating a global organic market worth an estimated $48 billion in 2007.

A systematic review of 162 scientific papers published in the scientific literature over the last 50 years, however, found there was no significant difference.

"A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance," said Alan Dangour, one of the report's authors.

"Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority."

The results of research, which was commissioned by the British government's Food Standards Agency, were published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Sales of organic food have fallen in some markets, including Britain, as recession has led consumers to cut back on purchases.

The Soil Association said in April that growth in sales of organic products in Britain slowed to just 1.7 percent in 2008, well below the average annual growth rate of 26 percent over the last decade, following a plunge in demand at the end of the year.
LINK

[OEXCHAOS]

I think that there are some serious problems with those studies, for instance not taking into account the health problems with pesticides, which are, after taste, the primary reason many of us prefer organic and near organic produce. I seriously doubt that any educated consumer is going to expect any dramatic difference in the nutrient values of broccoli grown in a non-organic farm vs. broccoli raised organically. In fact, very fresh broccoli from a responsible farmer is likely to be a more nutritious than 2 week old broccoli from an organic farm. But I'd rather not be exposed to pesticides, if possible and I'd rather not have farmers and their workers exposed to them. (Why didn't they study that, I wonder?) I'd also rather not support GMO's--not because I think they're going to make me grow an extra appendage, but because we don't really know how they're likely to affect the critters who come in contact with them or the plants that might cross breed with them. We don't really know enough about long term secondary and tertiary effects and that suggests that we not create massive displacement of heirloom and more traditional food seed stocks. And most importantly, I'd rather not support farming that use inorganic fertizers that often get into the water shed and damage fish stocks and habitat, as well as increase our dependence on foreign oil and degrade our soil quality. None of the latter stuff shows up in the "meta-study" which evaded the primary benefit to oranics in the first place. So, yeah, color me skeptical. Mark

[diogenes227]

Speaking of tests: Get yourself a nice home-grown or locally-grown pesticide-free organic tomato. Slice it. Put it on a plate. Now get yourself one of those red rocks from Mexico they call tomatoes. Slice it. Put it on a plate. Now take a bite of the first tomato. And then take a bite of the red rock. Okay, now wrap up the rock in this study and toss it in the trash. Finish eating the first tomato. Good eating to you.

[OEXCHAOS]

Perhaps you should test how good it is with a bit of fresh-picked basil?

[stocks]

"Of all dietary pesticides that humans eat, 99.99 percent are natural," write University of California at Berkeley cancer experts Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold in a recent paper for the journal Mutation Research. "They are chemicals produced by plants to defend themselves against fungi, insects, and other animal predators."

Ames and Gold's message isn't to quit eating fruits and vegetables. They just want to debunk the hysteria over synthetic pesticides and work toward a more rational regulatory system that focuses on large risks (such as poor diet and lifestyle), not small ones (such as chemical bogeymen).

"Publicity about hundreds of minor hypothetical risks, such as pesticide residues, can result in loss of perspective on what is important," the pair writes. "Half of the US public does not know that fruit and vegetable consumption protect against cancer." Even though they contain pesticides.

http://www.reason.co...show/27753.html


But there is another puzzle—exposures to many of the most suspect pesticides have been declining for decades. A 2002 study of synthetic chemical residues in human breast milk supported by an activist group, the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded, "Over the past few decades, levels of the organochlorine pesticides, PCBs, and dioxins have declined in breast milk in countries where these chemicals have been banned or otherwise regulated." A report from the American Council on Science and Health in New York which receives some industry support asserts that the residues of many organochlorine pesticides found in human tissues declined by 90 percent. So if exposure to pesticides is declining, why would male genital abnormalities be going up?


Make no mistake about it—massive occupational exposure in the 1970s and 1980s to some pesticides had tragic health effects such as causing infertility in hundreds of agricultural workers. But so far, the effect of low level exposures to pesticides and other synthetic chemicals on human male genitalia does not appear to have been "dramatic" and may not exist at all. Dueling ambiguous scientific studies bring to the fore a hard policy question: How much time and resources do we (government, industry and consumer) want to spend in chasing what have so often turned out to be phantom risks? In the meantime, spraying a lawn for dandelions and fire ants doesn't seem like taking much of a risk with one's manhood to me.


http://www.reason.co...how/116485.html

Edited by stocks, 31 July 2009 - 02:47 PM.

[Rogerdodger]

Now get yourself one of those red rocks from Mexico they call tomatoes.

You are confusing organic with fresh and varieties which ship well compared to those which have excellent flavor.

I've been growing tomatoes since I was 5.
Vine ripened tomatoes grown in "organic" fertilizers and tomatoes grown in Miracle Grow taste the same.
It's all good.

I just avoid the pesticides, except for the ones which are good for you and your vegetable trees.

Healthy Pesticides for vegetable trees: LINK

[mss]

I've been growing tomatoes since I was 5.

Vine ripened tomatoes grown in "organic" fertilizers and tomatoes grown in Miracle Grow taste the same.

It's all good.

Sort of like some other things, there is no BAD.

btw: you do know how to ripen green ones to save for the winter,-- tomatoes that is.

[Rogerdodger]

you do know how to ripen green ones to save for the winter,-- tomatoes that is.

Simple: put them on a shelf in the garage.
We usually have the last one with Christmas dinner.

[mss]

you do know how to ripen green ones to save for the winter,-- tomatoes that is.

Simple: put them on a shelf in the garage.
We usually have the last one with Christmas dinner.

You can also wrap them in several sheets of "news-paper" place them in back of a closet or other cool dark place and they last and last.
I actually had some "big boys" to last till mid Jan. Course lasting depends on how fast you eat them.

[stocks]

Well, up to a point. For a start, the idea that organic fruit and veg contain no harmful chemicals compared with non-organic produce is simply wrong, scientists argue. Certainly, there are pesticide residues in the latter but there is no evidence these are cumulatively harmful.

More to the point, organic crops - because they are untreated with chemicals - have correspondingly high levels of natural fungal toxins. Thus they balance out: artificial pesticide residues in non-organic crops, natural fungal toxins in organic. The only real difference is that the former are cheaper to grow - and this takes us to the heart of the issue, according to Professor Ottoline Leyser of York University.

"People think that the more natural something is, the better it is for them. That is simply not the case. In fact, it is the opposite that is the true: the closer a plant is to its natural state, the more likely it is that it will poison you. Naturally, plants do not want to be eaten, so we have spent 10,000 years developing agriculture and breeding out harmful traits from crops. 'Natural agriculture' is a contradiction in terms."

And this is a critical point. The idea that natural is good and anything else is bad has become deeply rooted in society. Yet the belief is flawed, for it implies the living world exists merely to provide humans with bounteous amounts of produce. Nature is a shopping trolley created for our exploitation, in other words. But fields are not natural and crops are not natural. They are the end result of thousands of years of hard work and experimentation by human beings. And that is why agricultural produce is good for us today.

http://www.guardian....2/organics-food

Edited by stocks, 02 August 2009 - 09:23 AM.