---from a google news headline in passing...---
The Guardian - ?1 hour ago? Organic produce and meat typically is no better for you than conventional food when it comes to vitamin and nutrient content, although it does generally reduce exposure to pesticides and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, according to a US study.
Here is another take on the report.
Study questions whether organic food is better
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON -Patient after patient asked: Is eating organic food, which costs more, really better for me?
Unsure, Stanford University doctors dug through reams of research to find out and concluded there's little evidence that going organic is much healthier, citing only a few differences involving pesticides and antibiotics.
Eating organic fruits and vegetables can lower exposure to pesticides, including for children - but the amount measured from conventionally grown produce was within safety limits, the researchers reported Monday.
Nor did the organic foods prove more nutritious.
'I was absolutely surprised,' said Dena Bravata, a senior research affiliate at Stanford and long-time internist who began the analysis because so many of her patients asked whether they should switch.
'There are many reasons why someone might choose organic foods over conventional foods,' from environmental concerns to taste preferences, Bravata stressed, but when it comes to individual health, 'there isn't much difference.' Her team did find a notable difference with antibiotic-resistant germs, a public health concern because they are harder to treat if they cause food poisoning.
Specialists long have said that organic or not, the chances of bacterial contamination of food are the same, and Monday's analysis agreed. When bacteria did lurk in chicken or pork, germs in the non organic meats had a 33 percent higher risk of being resistant to multiple antibiotics, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
That finding comes amid debate over feeding animals antibiotics, not because they're sick but to fatten them up. Farmers say it's necessary to meet demand for cheap meat.
Public health advocates say it's one contributor to the nation's growing problem with increasingly hard-to-treat germs. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, counted 24 outbreaks linked to multi-drug resistant germs in food between 2000 and 2010.
The government has begun steps to curb the non medical use of antibiotics on the farm.
Organic foods account for 4.2 percent of retail food sales, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It certifies products as organic if they meet certain requirements including being produced without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, or routine use of antibiotics or growth hormones.
Consumers can pay a lot more for some organic products but demand is rising: Organic foods accounted for $31.4 billion sales last year, according to a recent federal report. That's up from $3.6 billion in
1997.The Stanford team combed through thousands of studies to analyze the
237 that most rigorously compared organic and conventional foods. Bravata was dismayed that just 17 compared how people fared eating either diet while the rest investigated properties of the foods.Organic produce had a 30 percent lower risk of containing detectable pesticide levels. In two studies of children, urine testing showed lower pesticide levels in those on organic diets.
Bravata cautioned that both groups harbored very small amounts and said one study suggested insecticide use in their homes may be more to blame than their food.
Still, some studies have suggested that even small pesticide exposures might be risky for some children, and the Organic Trade Association said the Stanford work confirms that organics can help consumers lower their exposure.
The Cook quoted:
Isn't the diffreence in pesticides and antibiotics the primary point of going organic?
This is like saying that scientists could find no difference but water content between fresh food and freeze dried food. Yeah, that''s right. The water difference *is* the intended difference.
That's good news.
In another study Dena Bravata was absolutely surprised that water is wet.
There ya go.
Growing organic can lower the exposure of farm workers to pesticides. I don't suppose the brainiacs thought to measure that though. Doubt they bothered to look at water table contamination either. Those are why I care about buying organic.
marcella
And who sets the levels that are considered safe? The EPA that sent first responders into "ground zero" while it was still toxic, and reassured residents that it was safe to return home?
Would it come as a surprise that Proposition 37 on California's November ballot is about labeling GM products?
The study wasn't a "gold standard" (double blind) study. It was a review of other studies (a megastudy) which brings in judgement calls on what to include, and what to leave out. Ancel Keys, maybe the most famous perpetrators of this type of study used 6 countries to show a link between cholesterol, and heart disease. He used 6 countries when he had data for 22 countries. Needless to say, when all 22 countries were included, the connection between cholesterol, and heart disease went away, but today, Lipitor makes a lot of money from cholesterol. p 18 Good Calories, Bad Calories: Fats, Carbs, and the Controversial Science of Diet and Health (Vintage) by Gary Taubes
(at a library near you)
The "partisan" organic site
lists a John Hopkins, 2001 study of organic vs conventional (which used to be organic) . As I understand it, as explained by Alyson E. Mitchell, foods grown on different soil will have varying amounts of nutrient compounds, so matching them at a check-out counter may not be definitive. Some vegetables grown conventionally on rich soil may have equal nutrients. As she explained it, carrots and tomatoes grown organically will have more nutrients. Bell peppers and other vegetables have roughly equal amounts of nutrients grown either way.
The strongest argument I can find is a study on the "Effect of Organic and Conventional Cropping Systems on Ascorbic Acid, Vitamin C, Flavonoids, Nitrate, and Oxalate in 27 Varieties of Spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.)" by Alyson E. Mitchell
and
This is a summary:
I was listening to a most interesting report on the radio the other day and the person being interviewed seemed to be incredibly pragmatic and said that she made decisons about buying organic or not based on the chance of the 'thing' having been heavily sprayed or not.
She also made the point that although, in the western world, pesticide/chemical residues were not considered a problem by our respective governments as individual chemicals were many times lower than the legally permitted levels. she said that the real danger may arise from the conbination of these chemicals eg 'B' might be OK on its own but combine it with residue 'C' and it was realy not good in the human body. She believed govts needed to look closer at these combinations - can't remember now what she called it but it had a technical name.
Depends who's doing the pointing.
For a segment none of the folks I know who actually grow organic love, the point is to charge outrageous fees to "certify" the organicness.
For a segment not that far separated from the high-fee certifiers, the point (and they spent a lot of money buying politicians to make thier point) is to make sure that certified organic doesn't mean what you would think it does so they can charge more for "organic" food without it really being all that "organic" as you think of it.
Basically, the environment that our bodies live in has changed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the U.S., says,"Number of Americans with Diabetes Projected to Double or Triple by 2050". Something is happening, but we don't know what it is.
We know that contemporary farming uses nitrates as fertilizer, and as a result, those plants contain more nitrates, which is just another reactant to add to the pesticides on the food. Contemporary agriculture's produce is lower in flavonoids (polyphenols). Flavonoids include antioxidants, and some can lower blood pressure. Flavonoids weren't included in Stanford's megastudy on organic vs conventional produce.
In Northern California, on some fields west of Davis, Kaffka and his colleagues have been comparing organic and conventional tomatoes grown in neighboring plots. It's part of a UC Davis study dubbed the "Long-Term Research on Farming Systems Project," which was begun in 1991 and is slated to last 100 years.
So far, the researchers have found that the organic tomatoes have almost double the concentration of two types of flavonoids ? quercetin and kaempferol ? which are considered to be healthful plant compounds with potent antioxidant activity. The 10-year mean levels of quercetin were
79 percent higher than those in conventional tomatoes, and levels of kaempferol were 97 percent higher.The Answer in the Dirt
The increased flavonoid levels, Kaffka suspects, could stem from the difference in how organic and conventional tomatoes are fertilized.
On Kaffka's plot, the conventionally grown tomatoes get commercial fertilizer made with soluble inorganic nitrogen, a form of nitrogen the plants can take up very quickly. The organic tomatoes get nitrogen from manure and composted cover crops. These organic materials have to be broken down by the microbes in the soil before the nitrogen is released to the plants.
"It takes time," Kaffka says, and the nitrogen is "not instantaneously available."
With limited nitrogen, the organic plants may grow slower, says Alyson Mitchell, a food chemist at UC Davis. When this happens, she says, the plant "has more time to allocate its resources toward making secondary plant metabolites" such as flavonoids.
The above is classic organic gardening: take care of the soil, and the soil will take care of the plant, and the plant will take better care of you.
Its is quite curious that with studies like these, how the Stanford report could come to the conclusion that organic, in general, has the most nutrients.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, it is an election year (in the U.S. A.), and if pigs should suddenly learn to fly, don't be surprised.
But no one knows how valid that evidence was or how it was gathered or who paid the bill for it. I would say that the summary is weak and practically useless.
I'm darned sure that for diabetes the cause is indeed very well known - bad diet and too little exercise.
And it's nto too much of a leap to also look at other changes and realise that since we've moved so far away from how we traditonally lived that the causes for other health issues arise there. I'm darned sure that the 3 major cnacers I've had that commonly kill people came from standing under Agent Orange spray as a child.
Basically the Stanford report was only a literature review.
I suspect there won't even be any preloved pig flying suits that come up for sale post election.
They say there was no funding. Remember, they aren't testing, they are only reading other people's work, and forming their conclusions. What they read, and how they cast it in a "maybe, possibly, might" kind of a vocabulary, is essentially useless when compared with actual testing.
Yup, they concluded that the studies that they studied were inconclusive. We have seen however, other studies doing the testing found "organic" produce had more nutrients. I get the feeling that these studies weren't included in Stanford's review.
Be the first one on your block to fly a pig. You'll have to be prepared.
Correction
Basically, the environment that our bodies live in has changed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in the U.S., says,"Number of Americans with Diabetes Projected to Double or Triple by 2050". Something is happening, but we don't know what it is.
We know that contemporary farming uses nitrates as fertilizer, and as a result, those plants contain more nitrates, which is just another reactant to add to the pesticides on the food. Contemporary agriculture's produce is lower in flavonoids (polyphenols). Flavonoids include antioxidants, and some can lower blood pressure. Flavonoids weren't included in Stanford's megastudy on organic vs conventional produce.
In Northern California, on some fields west of Davis, Kaffka and his colleagues have been comparing organic and conventional tomatoes grown in neighboring plots. It's part of a UC Davis study dubbed the "Long-Term Research on Farming Systems Project," which was begun in 1991 and is slated to last 100 years.
So far, the researchers have found that the organic tomatoes have almost double the concentration of two types of flavonoids ? quercetin and kaempferol ? which are considered to be healthful plant compounds with potent antioxidant activity. The 10-year mean levels of quercetin were
79 percent higher than those in conventional tomatoes, and levels of kaempferol were 97 percent higher.The Answer in the Dirt
The increased flavonoid levels, Kaffka suspects, could stem from the difference in how organic and conventional tomatoes are fertilized.
On Kaffka's plot, the conventionally grown tomatoes get commercial fertilizer made with soluble inorganic nitrogen, a form of nitrogen the plants can take up very quickly. The organic tomatoes get nitrogen from manure and composted cover crops. These organic materials have to be broken down by the microbes in the soil before the nitrogen is released to the plants.
"It takes time," Kaffka says, and the nitrogen is "not instantaneously available."
With limited nitrogen, the organic plants may grow slower, says Alyson Mitchell, a food chemist at UC Davis. When this happens, she says, the plant "has more time to allocate its resources toward making secondary plant metabolites" such as flavonoids.
The above is classic organic gardening: take care of the soil, and the soil will take care of the plant, and the plant will take better care of you.
Its is quite curious that with studies like these, how the Stanford report could come to the conclusion that organic, in general, doesn't have more nutrients.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, it is an election year (in the U.S. A.), and if pigs should suddenly learn to fly, don't be surprised.
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