Organic Food no healthier than regular food.

[Thanas]

To be honest, I buy organic out of many reasons, which the pesticide issue is just one of many. Supporting traditional pig breeds, local business, a distinct taste etc... I am not that worried about pesticides truth to be told.

[General Zod]

To be honest, I buy organic out of many reasons, which the pesticide issue is just one of many. Supporting traditional pig breeds, local business, a distinct taste etc... I am not that worried about pesticides truth to be told.

Wouldn't most pesticide issues be taken care of by washing the food off before you eat it anyway?

[Laughing Mechanicus]

This British study doesn't seem to contain any original research. So a group of researchers analyzed 50 years' worth of other studies, then published their conclusion? Isn't that analagous to earning a PhD in Archaeology by studying the works of other archaeologists in the college library (I know, a bit of a stretch since a PhD is supposed to have original work)? And as noted, the study is focused only on the nutritional value of organic vs. "regular" food. Would it have been too much to ask for a funded study to, maybe, go buy some organic and "regular" food and have it analyzed for nutritional content? And, while they were at it, analyze what if any trace toxicity, hormones, spores, insects, or other harmful substances were in the respective foods. Just looking at other peoples' work and drawing conclusions from that seems like a lazy way to address the issue.

You are an ignoramus - this type of study is known as a systematic review of literature, they are among the strongest and most reliable ways something can be scientifically validated. The very simple reason for this is that, by their very nature as a meta-analysis, they control for bias, errors or bad methodolgy in the included studies by evening it out against the other studies present. They also, as demonstrated amply by the study at hand, allow the research to examine an extremely long time period or large area of study without actually requiring a fifty-bloody-year long study to be run.

They are not "lazy" as each study which is included must be individually vetted and it's data must be assimilated correctly in order to preserve it's meaning. This requires a huge amount of manual statistical correction of data.

If the researchers did what you suggest, and just bought some local produce and tested it then all they would have succeeded in doing is proving that their local organic produce at the specific time of the study produced no health benefits. That is easy for organic food growers to hand wave away and say "it's only a fluke result in one area". This new literature review is cast fucking iron, even over 50 years and with all the variables that have come and gone in farming in that time there has never been a health benefit to eating organic produce.

And tell me where the fuck is even mentions anything about this being someone's PhD thesis?

[Broomstick]

Yes, but if you're worried about eating pesticide and high doses animal growth hormones (and you might be) because you know your body hasn't evolved defenses against those chemicals because they weren't part of our environment until a century ago... organic food might be the answer for you.

Depends on where you live. In the US the definition of "organic" used allows for certain types of pesticides. In my area we have a dairy that couldn't be labeled "organic" but it does market itself as growth-hormone free. By all means, be concerned about what you eat, and what's on what you eat, but don't fool yourself - simply shopping "organic" is not a real guarantee of quality, at least not in the US. You need to look beyond just the easy label.

And "a century ago" is a little far back for most of the chemicals you're thinking of, which didn't come into heavy use until post WWII

Now, another concern of organic food is what may be in the soil. Some crops will readily absorb things that are very, very bad for you. I have recently learned, for example, that spinach is sometimes used to clean up lead contamination in the soil, as it picks up the element very readily. That's good because, after several years, the lead levels in such soil may drop to safe levels but meanwhile that spinach - no matter how organically grown, no matter how pesticide free - is contaminated, potentially badly enough to make you quite ill.

Is this not a concern for food grown with pesticides and such? The fact that I spray spinach with bug-killers doesn't make it any less effective at absorbing lead out of the soil.[/quote]
I'm sorry - did you miss my point that "organic" was not, in fact any guarantee of safety? True, ANY spinach can suck lead (and other metals) out of the soil, but that was my point - buying organic spinach grown on high-lead or other contaminated soil is not healthy. So not healthy, in fact, that you might be better off with a non-organic vegetable grown on uncontaminated soil.

As I said - you need to look beyond just the label.

[J]

Wouldn't most pesticide issues be taken care of by washing the food off before you eat it anyway?

It depends. Some produce such as mushroom are somewhat (or fairly) porous so pesticides will soak into them, and once it's in it's not coming out. Some herbs are like that as well, once something gets on the leaves it's really hard to get it back out.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but if you're worried about eating pesticide and high doses animal growth hormones (and you might be) because you know your body hasn't evolved defenses against those chemicals because they weren't part of our environment until a century ago... organic food might be the answer for you.

Depends on where you live. In the US the definition of "organic" used allows for certain types of pesticides. In my area we have a dairy that couldn't be labeled "organic" but it does market itself as growth-hormone free. By all means, be concerned about what you eat, and what's on what you eat, but don't fool yourself - simply shopping "organic" is not a real guarantee of quality, at least not in the US. You need to look beyond just the easy label.

Yes, but while you may need to think deeper than "does it have an organic label?", it's a sure bet that if you're worried about anything new that goes into food, even a single thing... Monsanto is likely not the label for you.

And I don't think it's unreasonable to be worried about those things, even though they have nothing to do with nutrition content. I don't see any reason to expect organic food to be more nutritious than petrochemically enhanced food, and I think that trumpeting the fact that it isn't as a sign that the organic food industry is a fraud is poor reasoning.

And "a century ago" is a little far back for most of the chemicals you're thinking of, which didn't come into heavy use until post WWII

I was trying to give myself a margin of error, since I don't know precisely what decade petrochemical fertilizers and pesticides first saw substantial use.
_______

I'm sorry - did you miss my point that "organic" was not, in fact any guarantee of safety? True, ANY spinach can suck lead (and other metals) out of the soil, but that was my point - buying organic spinach grown on high-lead or other contaminated soil is not healthy. So not healthy, in fact, that you might be better off with a non-organic vegetable grown on uncontaminated soil.

As I said - you need to look beyond just the label.

Yes. Does that make me wrong?

[Broomstick]

No, it means you didn't read carefully enough.

[Guardsman Bass]

I occasionally try the organic stuff, but I've never really noticed a taste difference in anything other than apples. The organic corn and normal corn tasted the same, and both tasted inferior to the corn I grow in my backyard (where I use normal pesticides and stuff).

I visit the local farmers' market, but their stuff isn't necessarily organic - a lot of it is normal stuff grown locally.