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An article published on July 29th in the London Evening Standard summarizes a year long study by the British Food Standards Agency and concludes that there are no health advantages to eating organic food. Readers of Evolution Rx found on page 99 in the Section called Panic in the Pantry the same conclusion. Despite our 50 year romantic attraction to so called organic gardening there is nothing present or absent in organic food that helps us live longer of fight off disease any better.
In a response that is typical of those who support organic farming, most of the comments to the article angrily point to the supposed absence of pesticides in organic foods. But it just ain’t so. Most plant foods contain naturally occurring pesticides, toxins, nerve disruptors and carcinogens made by the plants to defend themselves in the ages old evolutionary struggle against the animals and insects that want to eat them. Our bodies have evolved powerful mechanisms in our livers and kidneys to detoxify these chemicals. They work just as well on the naturally occurring “organic” pesticides as they do on the man made ones at the concentrations that are usually found in produce and grains.
There is usually no consideration amongst those who support organic farming that this is an economically unsustainable practice that only a very small part of the population can afford. If all food was grown this way we would have widespread famine because it is much less productive. While we should all be concerned that our food, both animal and vegetable, be grown in a safe and responsible way, protecting the workers and the cleanliness of the food, so called “organic” is not the answer.
Tags: Diet, food, organic food, protection
September 8th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
how do you explain the fact that vegetarians have half the cancer risk of meat eaters. I want to believe that my body can naturally ward of the pesticides from vegetables, and I think I do, but ingesting the hormones and antibiotics injected into the livestock in the US so that farmers can quickly mature their livestock so they can reproduce faster can’t be good for us? Capitalism has it’s price. How do you explain girls getting their periods at 8 and 9? If this was meant to be the evolutionary process than why is cancer, autism, etc. so prevalent? Tomatoes are picked when green and ripened with methane gas…..losing all nutritional value.You can definitly taste the difference between organic and non-organic vegetable. I just don’t get it.
Thank You for all your work in this area! It’s so hard to decipher amongst all of it! It can seem that authors of these book are making a profit from inducing a moral crises.
September 9th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Dear Nicole,
Your questions are good and they illustrate a lot of the problems with health information available today.
First of all vegetarians do NOT have half the cancer risk of meat eaters. In general it is about 20% less and mostly due to the fact that they are not smokers and less likely to be obese.
Second, despite the fact that hormones and antibiotics have been used on livestock for more than 30 years there is no evidence that they are causing harm to humans. For the most part these chemicals have been metabolized ( processed out) of the animals before they are slaughtered. There is some evidence that overuse of antibiotics in animals has contributed to bacterial resistance to those antibiotics. This is a bad thing and we need to guard against this. But the risk doesn’t come from eating the meat.
Girls get their periods earlier now for only one reason. They are better fed. The age of onset of menses has nothing to do with hormones in meat and everything to do with eating more. Fatter girls have periods earlier than thinner ones. The evolutionary reason for this seems to be that if our ancestors were well fed it meant that they could reproduce sooner. Makes sense, eh?
When you read the book you will know why cancer is more common now. We are living longer and do things,like smoking, that increase it.
Autism is not more common now. The diagnosis has been changed to include vastly greater numbers of people who can therefore receive financial and educational help. It is a political diagnosis as much as a medical one nowadays. The same people with the same problems used to be called different names.
Believe it or not, all tomatoes, even in the wild, ripen because of exposure to Ethylene (not methane). This has little effect on their nutritional value but does increase the sugar content and color. The reason commercial tomatoes taste the way they do is genetic selection for species that ship well and are tougher. Taste has not been a major reason to grow them in the past. If you think you can tell the difference in taste you are not alone, but this was put to the test recently on the Penn and Teller show Bullshit covering organic foods. You will be amazed at the results.
Thank you for your questions. I hope these answers are helpful.
Bill
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