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Organic has no health benefits

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Re: Organic has no health benefits

#81

Post by zargon »

jff wrote: post #31

If you want bruised, overpriced fruit and vegetables, head on down to the local organic market! Spend 10 minutes to sort through a basket of tomatoes at the hippie organic market on Maui (the only store in the village) to find the four or five that aren't bruised to hell and back, then pay double price for the privilege. And then there's the sustainability and economic problems. Can the farms near NYC produce enough…

My conventional grocer ships the kale to Wisconsin from Georgia, and by the time it gets here it is yellow and wilted. Compared to the farmers market, where the kale I find is dark green and crisp. Same story for most other produce. The winters drive me crazy, because kale grows great in January in Wisconsin, yet the grocers insist on shipping it from Georgia, so I go without.

Efficiency compared to what? Stripping of minerals? Loss of topsoil? Petroleum dependence? Water contamination? Yeah, it's true, conventional farming is more efficient at all those.

You're concerned about needing more farm land with "organic" practices, but in truth, "conventional" farming is destroying arable land at an alarming rate.

Edit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livestock%27s_Long_Shadow

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2008/09/soil/mann-te...

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#82

Post by biohacker42 »

req2 wrote: post #79
biohacker42 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, saturated fats are the molecular basis of many hormones including testosterone and estrogen. You may need very little of them but you do need some.

Did you notice the link and decide to respond with a non sequitur, or just miss the link?

I noticed it was a link to men's health and my latent homophobia prevented me from rtfa. (I am only half joking.)

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#83

Post by biohacker42 »

hachiya wrote: post #80
req2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saturated fat? http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&#38...

Pop science doesn't vindicate textbook science which still discourages high amounts of saturated fat. And the Massai (and Inuit) referred to in your link are hardly good examples. They have short lifespans (as low as in the 40s), suffer from atherosclerosis and thickening of the arteries. The Inuit are also not long lived and have a high rate of osteoporosis. These groups' "adaptation" to a high protein meat diet is…

It is speculated that the Masai are protected from their atherosclerosis by physical fitness which causes their coronary vessels to be capacious.

Exercise, exercise, exercise.

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#84

Post by potatolicious »

Retric wrote: post #48
apgwoz wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. The article avoids the "truth" as to why most people even eat Organic. The health benefits in eating organic are in what you aren't eating (e.g. pesticides, etc).

It's also just a strait up lie. "Among the 55 of 162 studies that were included in the final analysis, there were a small number of differences in nutrition between organic and conventionally produced food but not large enough to be of any public health relevance, said study leader Dr Alan Dangour. Although the researchers say that the differences between organic and non-organic food are not 'important', due to the r…

I disagree - it's called margin of error and confidence intervals. If the difference is not large enough it can easily fall into the realm of statistical error.

I would check myself I were you. Disagreeing with research is fine, but calling a bunch of trained scientists liars is a pretty serious accusation, especially when you yourself are not trained in the field.

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#85

Post by shard »

omouse wrote: post #34
jff wrote: post #31

If you want bruised, overpriced fruit and vegetables, head on down to the local organic market! Spend 10 minutes to sort through a basket of tomatoes at the hippie organic market on Maui (the only store in the village) to find the four or five that aren't bruised to hell and back, then pay double price for the privilege. And then there's the sustainability and economic problems. Can the farms near NYC produce enough…

You're absolutely right. It's amazing how many people have jumped on the organic bandwagon when they have reaped the benefits of GMO crops and efficient farming. It's like climbing up a ladder and then kicking it away once you're at the top.

I don't think that's a valid argument. It's perfectly okay to notice that what you're benefiting from is not something you want to support. I can replace words in your argument thus: "It's amazing how many people have jumped on the safe work conditions bandwagon when they have reaped the benefits of horrible work conditions in third world countries."

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#86

Post by mattmaroon »

jrockway wrote: post #52
mattmaroon wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Preservatives are found in processed foods, not vegetables. Organic vegetables generally don't last any less long than normal ones. They make lots of organic frozen prepared foods. You can get organic macaroni and cheese in a box that's just like the regular (but tastes better). There are organic canned soups, pasta sauce, frozen burritos, etc. You name it you can buy it.

Be careful with this. You can get the "USDA Organic" logo with less than 100% organic ingredients. So it's possible that your frozen dinner has preservatives and other crap in it that you are trying to avoid by "going organic". Read the ingredients to be sure. If it's something you can't buy and add to your food yourself, it's probably in there for the seller's benefit; not for yours. (Less spoilage == higher profit…

Umm, not legally. The USDA regulations specifically forbid artificial preservatives. (Natural ones like citric acid are fine.)

They can and sometimes do cheat, even though the fines are enormous, but reading labels won't help with that.

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#87

Post by req2 »

hachiya wrote: post #80
req2 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saturated fat? http://www.menshealth.com/cda/article.do?site=MensHealth&#38...

Pop science doesn't vindicate textbook science which still discourages high amounts of saturated fat. And the Massai (and Inuit) referred to in your link are hardly good examples. They have short lifespans (as low as in the 40s), suffer from atherosclerosis and thickening of the arteries. The Inuit are also not long lived and have a high rate of osteoporosis. These groups' "adaptation" to a high protein meat diet is…

Thanks for providing a more interesting response than GP.

In the absence of 'textbook' science citations, I'm going to have to rely on 'pop' science that does provide citations to respected scientists at accredited institutions who have performed actual studies.

http://www.marksdailyapple.com/saturated-fat-healthy/ provides another copious set of links to refutations (based on citations, not appeals) of traditional saturated fat studies and other indications of its overly maligned status.

I'll also note the penultimate sentence of the abstract you link: "The Masai vessels enlarge with age to more than compensate for this disease."

Exercise or not, it's worth noting that the study does not draw any strong correlation between saturated fat and a decreased health.

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#88

Post by dasil003 »

tokenadult wrote: post #41
dasil003 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you suggesting that we should do anything unless we can prove it's a bad idea? I'm all for science, but it is not wild superstition to think that the effects of eating trace amounts of pesticides in all our food over the course of decades might be bad for our health. Now certainly this should be studied, but how long will it take to achieve results, and how possible is it really to isolate the variables? In the m…

Generally the most industrialized countries with the most modernized agriculture have people living the longest lives with least morbidity, so we have to wonder about the effect sizes of some of the issues we are worrying about here. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, plants "naturally" have toxins to prevent their being eaten, and human beings have had to develop cooking and selective breeding over time…

Well obviously the immediate effects of being poor and living in a third world country are going to dominate any long term effects of chemical buildup, all the more so in polluted areas where the individual may be exposed to much higher levels of toxic chemicals in general.

The rest of your comment seems irrelevant. I'm not disputing in any way that plants have toxins or that we had to develop various practices to make us safer. I don't dispute that many man-made chemicals are safe and useful. I don't even dispute that pesticides could conceivably improve safety from a hypothetical insect-born contagion.

However genetically modified mono-crops sprayed with heavy loads of pesticides simply to increase yields does not strike me as something that goes towards food safety at all. It goes towards short-term profit, and you can bet the cost of any long term health effects is simply ignored until 30-40 years down the line when the soil is depleted and the effects of various pesticides have time to show up in the human population. At that point the industry will throw its hands up in the air and say "how could we have known?" while pushing the new and improved fertilizers and pesticides with a new batch of as-of-yet-unknown problems.

That's why I think it's a good idea to eat more traditionally raised food. It's not because I'm some hippie idealogue or because I don't believe in science or progress, it just strikes me as a safer bet given the severe holes in nutrition science, and in many ways, the intractability of solving the health "equation".

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#89

Post by 321abc »

meta wrote: post #21
igrekel wrote: post #4

Strange how the study doesn't address the main reasons why I would tend to favor organic foods: less pesticides, its the only way (at least in Canada) to control GMOs in what you eat. Of course there would be other environmental reasons as well, but it still remain based on monocultures.

I was under the impression that "Organic" in Canada is mostly a meaningless title. It isn't enforced and can be applied to a wide swath of products that most people would not consider Organic. I checked Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_certification#North_Ame... ) and it says that the Government has published a set of Guidelines but applying organic labels is up to "Private Sector"... However, doing s…

The meaning of "organic" is getting watered down:

http://www.manyhands.com/articles/story.cfm?id_no=6010024200...

For example, "products labeled 'Made With Organic Ingredients', which contain at least 70 percent organic ingredients, but can contain up to 30 percent non-organic ingredients"

Re: Organic has no health benefits

#90

Post by Retric »

potatolicious wrote: post #84
Retric wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also just a strait up lie. "Among the 55 of 162 studies that were included in the final analysis, there were a small number of differences in nutrition between organic and conventionally produced food but not large enough to be of any public health relevance, said study leader Dr Alan Dangour. Although the researchers say that the differences between organic and non-organic food are not 'important', due to the r…

I disagree - it's called margin of error and confidence intervals. If the difference is not large enough it can easily fall into the realm of statistical error. I would check myself I were you. Disagreeing with research is fine, but calling a bunch of trained scientists liars is a pretty serious accusation, especially when you yourself are not trained in the field.

Edit: The report is fine it's the reporting that's off.

Note: not large enough to be of any public health relevance

It's like overclocking a 4Ghz CPU by 0.01 Ghz. It's measurably faster, but not noticeably faster in normal use. So you can say it's an insignificant change, but you can't say they are the same speed. So "Organic has no health benefits" would not be a true statement without significant qualifiers.

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