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And a 2012 survey of 200+ studies showed no significant difference in nutrition or contaminants. http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685 http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/healthcare-triag...
On a general note, how do meta analyses handle publication biases? For example, this study used 343 studies to derive their conclusions. But what if there were 5000 studies which showed that organic and non-organic food have no differences, but were not published or peer reviewed because they were deemed "not interesting"?
There's also an important array of distinctions between ingredients that are "not organic" (whatever that means): genetically modified food needs to be in a separate bucket from food that came from non pesticided crops, etc...
Overall, people will be stunned to find out how beneficial OGM foods are over their natural counterpart, and how much of it they're already eating on a daily basis without realizing it, and being more healthy for it.
I am generally pleased with the good availability of locally grown organic food where we live in the mountains of Central Arizona. If people don't want organic food, I could generally care less except for one thing: efforts to put legal roadblocks in the way of locally grown food. For example: A few years ago our Senator Jon Kyle, after taking large campaign contributions from Monsanto, submitted the American Food Sa…
Food born illness is a serious problem (~48 million people will have some form of it in the US this year). Just look at the articles on people who are fatally poisoned by things like greens and cantaloupe.
The act attempts to address this by making sure food is properly traceable back to source and cleanliness measures are taken along the way. This is most certainly in the public interest, and the intent is not to promote big agriculture but to insure process and accountability. It doesn't actually prevent you from growing and consuming food from your own garden, but when you distribute that food, the government should be able to make sure you aren't doing things like watering it with raw sewage. This is overdue in my opinion. It's just like restaurant inspection. Necessary. Small growers shouldn't be exempted from putting people at risk. They can and should grow and process food cleanly, they should keep records, and if they are unable to, they shouldn't do it.
http://www.fda.gov/Food/GuidanceRegulation/FSMA/ucm237934.ht...
TLDR; not a conspiracy but a reasonable and overdue precaution.
Have we not learned that "peer-reviewed publications" are of questionable value due to the on going debate on peer-reviews.
http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/scibytes/the_debate_abou...
http://time.com/81388/is-the-peer-review-process-for-scienti...
The problem with the term "organic" is it's broad and not well defined. It's like "agile" in our space. There are some standards varying by country some government enforced some not, and those standards have changed over time. This data seems to encompass data from many countries over a long period of time. This means how something is classified in the organic bin or not in highly inconsistent in the data set. The pa…
In the EU it's not a vague concept. There's a strict legislation for any product sold as organic, along with a logo. Main rules, taken from the EC site: - Crops are rotated so that on-site resources are used efficiently - Chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, antibiotics and other substances are severely restricted - Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are banned - On-site resources are put to good use, such…
My point of varying and changing regulation stands as well, the EU original regulation went into effect in 1993, however I am not clear on what enforcement in which countries actually occurred when. It seems it had major revisions in 2007 and took some time overall for standards to be enforced fully.
I also find it interesting that the formal regulation for "organic" restricts but still allows "synthetic" fertilizers and antibiotics. It shows the reality that the line is draw arbitrarily.
GMO is a similar issue. If genetic modification is done in a lab it's labeled GMO and bad, if it's done through breeding it's not and ok. Corn, wheat, cows, pigs, chickens and all domesticated crops and livestock exist due to genetic modification by humans, they are genetically modified organisms, now we are simply arguing over how their genes are being modified not if.
On a general note, how do meta analyses handle publication biases? For example, this study used 343 studies to derive their conclusions. But what if there were 5000 studies which showed that organic and non-organic food have no differences, but were not published or peer reviewed because they were deemed "not interesting"?
They usually have a definition for the kinds of studies they'll use. For example, they might say "only studies of this size betwee these years that measure this thing". I'll bet if you read the full analysis, you'll find something like that in it.
Again quite a poor press release for a university. * Antioxidants have lost a lot in recent studies in terms of supposed health benefits. Mentioning antioxidants without reference to today's antioxidants and health research is implying a not-proven health benefit of organic food for antioxidants, while the health benefit can only soundly be expressed for the lower levels of pollutants. * There is no link to the paper…
"The study, published today in the prestigious British Journal of Nutrition..."
The study, entitled “Higher antioxidant concentrations and less cadmium and pesticide residues in organically-grown crops: a systematic literature review and meta-analyses,” is nowhere to be found, either on the BJN website, or elsewhere on the web.
Until the peer-reviewed results are out, consider it as hype, not science. I wish I could mod down the submission.
It looks like it is not a new study but rather a meta-analysis of existing studies: "Demand for organic foods is partially driven by consumers’ perceptions that they are more nutritious. However, scientific opinion is divided on whether there are significant nutritional differences between organic and non-organic foods, and two recent reviews have concluded that there are no differences. In the present study, we carr…
Their top claim seems to be that organic food is higher in anti-oxidants. Unfortunately, the idea that anti-oxidants are good for you has always been scientifically shaky, and as more studies have been done, it's increasingly looking like anti-oxidants may be unhealthy. So, the message of this study is, avoid organic food?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the EU it's not a vague concept. There's a strict legislation for any product sold as organic, along with a logo. Main rules, taken from the EC site: - Crops are rotated so that on-site resources are used efficiently - Chemical pesticides, synthetic fertilisers, antibiotics and other substances are severely restricted - Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are banned - On-site resources are put to good use, such…
Of course my point is this this paper is vague since it doesn't specify which country/entities formal definition of organic they followed in order to classify the data. My point of varying and changing regulation stands as well, the EU original regulation went into effect in 1993, however I am not clear on what enforcement in which countries actually occurred when. It seems it had major revisions in 2007 and took som…
The same goes for GMO stuff, it's your prerogative to redefine words in any way you see fit, but lab-GMO and breeding-GMO are a conceptually real categories and there's nothing arbitrary about differentiating them.