Where’s the proof for organic health food?
This post was published 3 years 2 months 6 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.This topic is right up the street as I often challenge the decision of paying a premium for produce, meat, candy, and juices which carry the “organic” label. Stores such as Trader Joes or Whole Foods make their massive profits because of the proposed health advantages over lesser non-organic equivalents. I’m glad to hear more and more people are challenging the advantages of organic consumables. Where’s the hard evidence?! The proof? An extra $4 for an equivalent 99 cent gallon of milk because it’s “organic”?!
Prompted by a quest for safer, healthier diets and a cleaner environment, more American consumers are buying the bountiful harvests of organic farmers. Last year, U.S. spending on organic foods reached close to $10.4 billion, making this the fastest-growing segment of the American food industry. Amid scares over mad cow disease, mercury in fish and produce tainted with harmful bacteria, new customers are joining existing ones in embracing organic foods as a sanctuary from harm and a surer route to long life and good health.
But as organic products â€â€? and their claims to superiority â€â€? have grown more common, scientists, policy analysts and some consumers have begun to ask for proof. Where’s the evidence, they ask, for the widespread belief that organic foods are safer and more nutritious than those raised by conventional farming methods?
The short answer, food safety and nutrition scientists say, is that such proof does not exist. Indeed, by one well-established measure of healthfulness � contamination with fecal matter and potentially harmful bacteria � some organic foods may pose greater risks to consumers.
Is the organic food movement just that? A movement, a temporary fad? What happens to giant food outlets which fly the organic colors 2-3 years down the road when consumers realize that that glistening apple from Joe’s chemically treated farm tastes and provides the same nutrients as the one from the “all natural” plantation [with the same type of risks]? “There’s certainly not sufficient science to prove that the claims of organic food advocates are true,”…
The problem is that most consumers make the decision to purchase organic consumables or products because their decision “supports ‘better health’”. Thoughts?
I feed my family organic food because it tastes better in general. I also buy what I can from local farmers. I have my milk delivered. I think it all tastes better. It is also much better for the environment. The pestisides and herbicides we are manufacturing and spearding all across the planet are effecting aquatic species, birds and insects.
I also grow some of my own food. My kids, 5 and 2 love to eat cherry tomatos and green beans off the vine. I love fresh herbs on a sandwich.
One of the side efects of buying food locally has expanded what foods I am exposed to. We’re eating much more leafy greens. I’m eating much less fast food as a result. These are things I never planned or expected. It just seems like a win for everyone.
I know that I make the decision to buy organic (most of the time) with the implict assumption, not necessarily that the food is healthier for me, but that it is healthier for the earth not to be utilizing massive amounts of chemicals in the production of that food source.
Organic food healthy? HA!
Read the link below, it’s a Reuters article on a recent event.
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=healthNews&storyid=2006-09-16T061935Z_01_N14336072_RTRUKOC_0_US-ECOLI.xml&src=rss
This argument (like any you could name) will have “proof” for both sides.
The bottom line is this:
Natural food has been around for eons and people have lived on it.
Chemically treated foods are VERY new on this planet and most of those chemicals cause non-optimum reactions in natural human bodies.
My body is of the natural human kind – I say fuck the chemicals… You say what want.
I can’t really speak to if organic food is healthier for you or not. My common sense says “of course it is” as it’s not laced with chemicals but I have no facts to support my intuition and am open to my common sense being wrong. It often is.
The main reasons I eat organic foods and support organic farms is I feel it’s a richer, more holistic lifestyle and leaves less of an ecological footprint. I’d rather support the local CSA than the giant grocery store. It’s a personal choice. Do I buy stuff from the giant boxes? Of course. I’m not blinded by my preferences.
For me, it’s not solely about which is healthier, like all things we could trade links about the “worse case” for each side of the debate. They all come out looking like crap in that scenario. I tend to look at eating organic as supporting a certain economic, political, social and ecological lifestyle that resonates with my own values.
I can tell the difference between a organic and unorganic chicken that has been decaying in a filthy chicken factory for weeks and been used as a football. No really it tastes better, lyke srsly dawg
“Natural food has been around for eons and people have lived on it.”
The foods we eat (natural or not) are definately not the things humans ate millions of years ago. The sort of food we eat today is very new when considering how long humans have been around.
Plus I hate when people say things that like, people live longer then ever before today so we’re certainly doing something right with nutrition.
I agree that it’s largely a fad, and doubt anyone can actually taste the difference in a blind test. But I also agree that it’s worth paying more for items that are better for the environment. Most organic food is kinder to the planet than the cheaper kind. Same goes for eggs: the ones from free-roaming hens cost three times as much, and taste the same. But I buy them because you know, really, 25 cents an egg isn’t out of my price range, and torturing chickens in factory farms for me to get 10-cent eggs seems obscene.
Well, I don’t know how much education people Bendit and whoever wrote the article have had about the Earth’s history. I can serve as a witness of fact to this matter however.
People in Africa, and natives of the jungles, grow and eat food that’s not contaminated or “treated/enhanced” with chemicals. People of India and outlying regions eat absolutely untouched food. They live perfectly healthy lives, and better yet, they don’t have to depend on the medical system to live. They live stronger, they do more physical work than most other nations of the planet. Their bones are stronger.
All throughout the world’s history you see feats of accomplishment like the pyramids, the huge rock sculptures in India, etc. all performed by human hands without the aid of machines. The people lived just as long, and better yet were healthy till the day they died, and again, with no dependency on modern day drugs and chemicals.
I don’t know where the (sorry for this, but its true) “modern world” people got this notion that food can be chemically enhanced. I don’t understand how America thinks that you can cure depression, ADHD, IBS, etc. with drugs. There was a recent report on BBC where researchers discovered that the American medical system invents ‘diseases’ just cos there’s a huge market for drugs, and people are easily gullible due to the lack of proper school education.
Back to food, you cannot enhance food chemically without creating adverse reactions. Look at American children for example, allergic to all sorts of nuts, (when they’re supposed to be the most healthy things you can eat), asthma and skin diseases like eczema, psoriasis, etc run rampant. These are certainly not common among children and people of the so called 3rd world countries. I developed a weird form of eczema after coming to the US, and it completely disappeared just in a brief visit back to my native country and eating fresh food, off the trees, and treating it with freshly acquired skin remedies from my relative’s farm behind the house.
Got back to America and the disease is back. As long as you live out your ‘enhanced’ but dying lives, you pay your medical system billions a month in medical visits, and guess what, you live with the sickness anyway.
I was just amazed when I saw almost all American homes have a medicine cabinet. Trust me, we’ve never seen those where I come from. They would be empty.
And $600 for a doctor’s appointment… Go ahead…. live it up….
Ridiculous!!
Organic. one of the few things of Los Angeles, other then traffic, that annoys me.
“Where’s the hard evidence?! The proof?”
“Organic. one of the few things of Los Angeles, other then traffic, that annoys me.”
my thoughts exactly.
benji- you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
obviously you have no idea on the filth and disease in 3rd world countries.
yeah, you eat your ‘natural’ foods, chew your herbs, dance around the homeopath, then sue the doctor because you delayed medical treatment, and have a huge bill.
Now SN is a perfect example of why you don’t argue about things like religion, politics and organic food.
“benji- you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.
obviously you have no idea on the filth and disease in 3rd world countries.”
Excuse me? He just gave you his own experience with the matter, so of course that means he doen’t know “what the hell” he’s talking about… Right. And SN downs’t know “what the hell” he’s talking about when he tells you what he had for breakfast. It’s TRUE!!!
Meanwhile, Americans eat up french fries made from potatoes that the FDA categorizes as a pestiside, and that are cooked in that wonderfull genetic abonimation of the rape seed plant called “Canola Oil” that the FDA categorizes as a pestiside.
You go ahead and eat your poisons and tell others that they don’t know what they experience, and when you get the the ripe old age of 75 and wonder why you’re nothing but an old couch-potatoe, look back on the “food” you ate.
By the way – Trader Joe’s has never promoted that they sell only organic foods – they sell low production foods at fair prices. Some happen to be organic…
Dan, Dan, Dan,
Try to ignore SN. He’ll shove one too many McNuggets down his pie hole soon enough. Thanks for pointing that out about Trader Joes, they are a fabulous chain of inexpensive, high-quality, food. Like Whole Foods except half the price and one quarter the pretentiousness.
Dan, you’ve consumed too much organic ‘pestiSides’ …
… (hopefully you finished the reading lessons) read the regulations on what can be LABELED as ORGANIC
to be ‘organic’ they just have to avoid using A,B,C,D substances,
…but that doesn’t mean they can’t use X,Y,Z or those not covered in the regulations.
http://www.ams.usda.gov/nop/NOP/standards/FullRegTextOnly.html
the USDA organic regulatory text (federal) esp these points:
§ 205.601 Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production.
…how you like that?
§ 205.603 Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic livestock production….Aspirin…Biologics-Vaccines…
eh? can you understand that?
how about this: its all about money, and the fools who pay for the LABEL.
The article you site comes from a think tank which is a front for the pesticide and pharma industies.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Council_on_Science_and_Health or poke around on the net for more if you find wikipedia’s pedigree to be suspect. I enjoy this blog immmensely, but this post seemed out of character. Long on emotion, short on fact and looking for data, however specious, which supports the conclusions you’d like to see validated. The organic debate is much larger than one post. And there are many blogs devoted to this issue, as well as the adjacent issues of factory farming and local food. As far as being upset with the price premiums associated w/ different organic items, I’m sure there are cases where fleecing is going on, but on balance and esp. w/ respect to milk and produce (I don’t know about meat) the price reflects the season, market availability, and the ease/difficulty of growing said item organically. e.g. Bell Peppers are ~3.5x more as organic, but Spinach and lettuce are roughly the same. As a place like Wal-mart enters the org. milk market that will be driving prices down, but with the attendant cost to smaller farms, ending some of the (unlegislated) qualities that people associate with organic, like small local farms.
Lastly, as far as pesticide residue and nutritional levels. The body of evidence on the former w.r.t. organic’s lower levels and overall friendlier environmental footprint is overwhelmingly in organic’s favor (Save for the cases when you get organic food shipped to you from China, significantly offesetting the env. footprint benefits). In the latter case, nutrional yields are probably about even from what I’ve read. Beyond that you are left with the subjective ‘tastes better’ argument; and, I’ve never seen a good exhaustive double blind study on that.
p.s. I didn’t really tackle meat in this post that far more of a gray area and one I’m not up on nearly as much
Organic…
…describes anything that’s carbon-based.
What the fuck does that have to do with fertilizer and pesticide? Damn near everything we encounter is organic. Plastics are organic, for heaven’s sake!
The term in it’s present use is an engineered marketing buzzword.
It’s similar to “Essential” being used as “containing essences” but people hear, and know it as meaning “necessary.” It’s done on purpose, it’s dishonest, and it makes me want to vomit.
right on socrates82, can i copy your comment for my website?
sure, just quote me. :)
there, thx s0crates82
http://tgfop.wordpress.com/2006/07/25/organic-tea/
The reason I like to buy organic as much as possible has less to do with taste and more to do with the fact that to be labeled Organic, the food has to be grown on land that has been pesticide free for 3 years. I like supporting that because I believe reducing the amount of pesticides on our land and in our water is very worthwhile.
Organic schmorganic – personally I don’t care. If it’s real – I’ll eat it. If it’s man-made, SN can eat it.
To differentiate – my girl is real, a mannequin is not. SN is entitled to all the mannequins he can eat.
mmmm …synthetic mannequins with …schmorganic chocolate…
thats a good idea, thanks Dan.
I’d rather have my food insect and disease free, thanks….spray it, genetically modify it, whatever. Fine by me. I’m not going to argue with anybody though…I’m perfectly healthy even though I eat like crap. Except….
Whatever Benji’s smoking is definitely not organic. That’s the abridged version of my response to him.
Why are all the anti-organic posts so angry? If they don’t want to buy organic, fine, what harm is it to them if I do.
You’re welcome SN – just don’t post the pictures on the ‘net…
BurdockBoy:
They get angry because they are defending their right to eat plastic in place of what their body needs in order to survive, which is of course because they flunked out of physics 101…
If someone put hamburger perfume on a mud-pie they’d sit down to lunch…
I’ve been eating organic food for, eh…’bout 6 months.
The first two weeks, I noticably lost weight without having to exercise any more than usual. Then, when I did start exercising, it was incredibly easy and fun. It was energizing; no breath shortages or cramps or anything like that.
So, it definitely has an effect on cardio and body fat percentage, both of which are extremely important to good health. Not to mention that, given the systems we have, one little things affects the rest; if it’s good for your heart, it’s good for the rest of you.
SN, Steven, etc.:
Try sprinting down the street in front of your house and see how you feel afterwards.
Also, I wouldn’t be surprised if either of you had at least three rolls of fat in your stomach alone.
I agree with BurdockBoy. I’ve been eating organic off and on for a few years now, too bad it isn’t as available or as cheap as the conventional food that is making the population sick.
I believe eating organic is better, but it’s very frustrating in this society to find enough good wholesome foods in the stores. I believe though, that eating a big chemically grown carrot is like eating half an organic carrot, just has more water and chemicals in it, so really the produce is cheaper!
The reason us anti-organics get so angry is because stupid people mislead more stupid people, hence lowering the average intelligence of the population. This is a growing problem.
“People of India and outlying regions eat absolutely untouched food. They live perfectly healthy lives, and better yet, they don’t have to depend on the medical system to live. They live stronger, they do more physical work than most other nations of the planet. Their bones are stronger. ” –Yes. Of course, Take a damned survey of the average health status/life expectancy of the Indian population. You will find the results painful. Don’t tell me that it’s biased by other factors, because a large part of the poverty is DUE TO not being able to develop and use chemicals to aid in crop growth. You’re envying these people who don’t even get ENOUGH to eat, let alone worry about whether their food have chemicals in.
“Chemically treated foods are VERY new on this planet and most of those chemicals cause non-optimum reactions in natural human bodies.” — Old doesn’t bloody well mean better. It means they hadn’t thought of anything better at the time! They didn’t HAVE the chemicals. Take skin as example: They used compounds of lead and mercury for god-knows-how-long before they reaslied that it’s not particularly good for health. They just couldn’t think of anything better.
Another reason we get so angry – it’s an unpleasant reminder of how sheep-like humans are. Organically farmed sheep, naturally.
Yz is right, “anti-organics get so angry is because stupid people mislead more stupid people” – and anyone stupid enough to eat chemicals made out of petroleum and cheap coal tar are what?
Oh, right! Stupid!
So they have a right to get angry, they have stupid people leading them to eat crap – poor fools…
I have this argument with my wife every night. About organic this and organic that. I’m cheap I’ll admit that and organic food is expensive. Healthier and better tasting I don’t know. But this I do know if you preach organics because of pestisides and hormones. Then what good it to eat apples from Washington and banannas from Peru. When you live in Maine. Just to get them to your store they just put a metric ton of pollution in the air. That comes down in out rain water, into our wells or rivers right back onto our crops. Like I tell my wife stop eating kiwi and anythig produce over a thousand miles away and then we can talk about switching to all organics till then I get my steak at the local grocery store, or a farmers market if I have the time.