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Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

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Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#181

Post by keenerd »

ewoodrich wrote: post #176
keenerd wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only primary sources. Pick a few chemicals, find their LD50 from a MSDS, find their application rate. Run the numbers. An organic fungicide: copper sulfate pentahydrate (aka CuSO4) A non-organic fungicide: iprodione (aka Rovral) LD50 of CuSO4: 472 mg/kg (rat) [1] LD50 of Rovral: 2g/kg (rat) [2] So straight up, the organic is four times more lethal to mammals. But that is just the beginning, because you have to use a…

LD50 (acute toxicity) does not necessarily correlate with harmful health effects from chronic exposure. Can you cite studies that demonstrate harms from exposure at the levels used in organic farming?

We are talking about risks to people working in the fields. Every time a farmer applies anything to a field, he will have to put on safety gear, measure out an amount, mix it with water, load it into the sprayer, drive the tractor around, and then clean up afterwards. When you are working with enough of a chemical to kill a hundred people, every single one of these steps carries the risk of an acute exposure. Dead is dead, regardless of how it happens. Don't dismiss it.

edit: From source [1]:

> Chronic toxicity: Vineyard sprayers experienced liver disease after 3 to 15 years of exposure to copper sulfate solution in Bordeaux mixture [8]. Long term effects are more likely in individuals with Wilson's disease, a condition which causes excessive absorption and storage of copper [25]. Chronic exposure to low levels of copper can lead to anemia [8]

So yeah, its still bad for you.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#182

Post by ibisum »

SixSigma wrote: post #51
mark_l_watson wrote: post #13

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…

You might choose not to eat the non-organic food but you can't avoid the Atrazine [1] in the rain, which is enough to turn the male northern leopard frog tadpoles to turn into hermaphrodites. The families of the people who work in the factory farm system are also affected. You can see talks [2] on both these subjects in the Edible Education course from Berkeley [3], hosted by Michael Pollan and Raj Patel. I can recom…

>You might choose not to eat the non-organic food but you can't avoid the Atrazine [1] in the rain

That's a very US-centric point of view. It was banned in the EU for a reason.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#183

Post by Ygg2 »

rdtsc wrote: post #146
randomdata wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The pesticide the shit out of one they sell. As a farmer myself, I find something intriguing in your comment. I take away visions of someone using way more chemical than necessary when reading this, but that stuff is expensive . There is no reason to use more. It's always considered a blessing when you don't have to use any, even if we assume the environmental/health impact is zero. Judicious use of pesticides can…

> I take away visions of someone using way more chemical than necessary when reading this The vision is spraying with the deadliest and sometimes illegal pesticides (DDT and other things). The "shit of out" is comparing to "0 pesticides". That means plucking bugs by hand in the evening from potatoes, weeding by hand, watering by hand. > Judicious use of pesticides can improve plant health and increase yields, but tha…

Have you hand plucked bugs by hand from potatoes?

My mom has a small garden (and I helped her around when I was little), it takes a LOT of time to pluck all insects from just potatoes. That is time just for that can easily be 4-6 hours. Also plucking in the evenings is like reading a book on dark side of Mars, in a barrel. You can't spot the fuckers in low light, you need best light available so only morning and in the afternoon will do.

What this comes to is this, if you use 0 pesticide that means you have to pay workers to do so which means lower efficiency and higher prices. Price for organics should (under given circumstances) be between 4-10 times more expensive.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#184

Post by listic »

listic wrote: post #109

What is "organic food"?

Downvoting instead of defining the term that is not explained in the article nor could I find a satisfactory definition online for?

I take it as an evidence that this is one of those "taboo" subjects that everyone expects everyone else to know definition of, even though not sure themselves.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#185

Post by dekhn »

baldfat wrote: post #86
dekhn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you prefer they used non-peer-reviewed publications? Also, it was a metastudy, which can address non-systematic variation in poor studies (it wouldn't necessarily protect you against systematic variation, for example if "all peer reviewed studies were flawed in the same way".

No I would prefer data that was validated by a secondary source. The idea that one can do science by writing a paper and just have it signing off by someone seems flawed and damaging to science and medicine. Reason I haven't dropped this after being down voted over 5 times. Having had a son who went through the whole cancer deal and then realize that so much of the cancer research is flawed due to bad peer-reviewed p…

Your complaint about peer review might be valid but it's irrelevant to this particular study (using the term peer review when describing a study isjust something PR people do to make them seem more valid). Peer review isn't a panacea, but that's not really its role, either. We expect too much of peer review, but it's not directly related to the issues of replication or open data (it certainly doesn't prevent either of those things from happening).

Studies like this actually build on previous studies, and if carried out properly, address many issues about individual publications.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#186

Post by dekhn »

Blahah wrote: post #74
boyaka wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think rather than talking about GMOs we need to point out the crops that are seriously and obviously bad for us: the transgenically modified crops, or apparently I just found it can be called TGM. [0] This saves us from the debate every time where somebody talks about how all our food and animals are GMO. The real destroyers of the American food supply are the 7 major crops that have been transgenically modified wi…

Transgenics are absolutely not "seriously and obviously bad for us". Almost the entire debate around GMOs is about transgenically modified crops, and to date nobody has clearly demonstrated harm from transgenics in even a single case. It's a technology, it has myriad uses and there is nothing intrinsic to it that is harmful.

Furthermore in the US an entire generation of people have grown up on GMO soy, without anybody demonstrating any credible evidence of harm.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#187

Post by SixSigma »

ibisum wrote: post #182
SixSigma wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might choose not to eat the non-organic food but you can't avoid the Atrazine [1] in the rain, which is enough to turn the male northern leopard frog tadpoles to turn into hermaphrodites. The families of the people who work in the factory farm system are also affected. You can see talks [2] on both these subjects in the Edible Education course from Berkeley [3], hosted by Michael Pollan and Raj Patel. I can recom…

>You might choose not to eat the non-organic food but you can't avoid the Atrazine [1] in the rain That's a very US-centric point of view. It was banned in the EU for a reason.

The principle of least harm.

But I was replying to someone who said they live in Central Arizona. Ironic that Atrazine is produced by a Swiss company and can't even use it in their own country.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#188

Post by vobios »

fnordsensei wrote: post #92
SpoonMeiser wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that's the null hypothesis? It's up to proponents of organic food to prove a benefit.

Weird thinking. While I agree that it's a sensible null hypothesis, I'm not sure I agree that the burden of evidence automatically should be on proponents of organic food. "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time. It'd make sense that you'd have to show that the alteration you're introducing to the natural state of affairs isn't detrimental to health of the consumer. I.e., I'm making the same ar…

> "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time.

Actually, we have not been eating organic food since the beginning of time. Most of the crops we consume today have been developed fairly recently in evolutionary terms (farming began only 12,000 years ago). Humans did not evolve exposed to fruits and vegetables we see today. Any farmed crop is not natural.

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#189

Post by JoeAltmaier »

vobios wrote: post #188
fnordsensei wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weird thinking. While I agree that it's a sensible null hypothesis, I'm not sure I agree that the burden of evidence automatically should be on proponents of organic food. "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time. It'd make sense that you'd have to show that the alteration you're introducing to the natural state of affairs isn't detrimental to health of the consumer. I.e., I'm making the same ar…

> "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time. Actually, we have not been eating organic food since the beginning of time. Most of the crops we consume today have been developed fairly recently in evolutionary terms (farming began only 12,000 years ago). Humans did not evolve exposed to fruits and vegetables we see today. Any farmed crop is not natural.

I agree - the whole 'natural food' thing is a confused mess. Nothing natural about the foods we eat - and a good thing too! Nature doesn't care about our health. Organisms have been competing for millennia for advantages. If a tree's seed sprouted better from your warm dead body, then that tree would happily poison you.

In fact foods we eat in nature can be regarded as those that kill us too slowly to notice - we avoid the others.

And cultivated crops are those we've bred to have less and less of the undesirable parts. We've inserted ourselves into the plants' genetic path for mutual benefit - we plant millions of them, and they feed us.

To eat truly 'natural' you'd have to eat things like crab-apples (grainy and bad ph - eat more than one and get a stomach ache) or tiny barely-sweet melons etc. Melons a thousand years ago were barely larger than an orange, with a couple of tablespoons' worth of edible parts. Thank the Arabs for breeding the mutant freaks we enjoy today!

Re: Higher antioxidant, lower cadmium, and lower pesticide residues in organic crops [pdf]

#190

Post by vixin »

tokenadult wrote: post #73

Another comment has already pointed out that until we see the underlying study we can't be sure that this press release is really important. I note that the claim "In the largest study of its kind, an international team of experts led by Newcastle University, UK, has shown that organic crops and crop-based foods are up to 69% higher in a number of key antioxidants than conventionally-grown crops" doesn't tell us anyt…

The evidence for molecular intervention (almost always with positive outcome) of antioxidants in the form of phytochemicals (the ones that have been around us for millions of years) in the biochemistry that occurs in animal bodies is overwhelming as a search in the literature will tell you. I've read hundreds of papers reporting such results. No one talks about proof in science but this is at least indicative though we have far to go.

To ignore the chemistry while waiting for epidemiologists to come to questionable conclusions seems odd to me. Thanks to the countless variables present when people are involved, epidemiological studies are always subject to debate.

Knowing as a raw fact that carbon monoxide irreversibly combines with haemoglobin told me a long time ago that smoking is a mug's game I was likely to lose. I didn't need later 'reassurance' from epidemiology to persuade me give up.

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