EnviroLink Forum

Study finds organic food is no better on vitamins, nutrients

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2012/09/0 ... z25V5sfVoN

_________________
TANG SOO!

I saw an article on TV on this. The only difference found was an even lower level pesticides in some of the organic products. Not a lck of pesticides, just less. None of the products had a level which was a concern. The products which are normally peeled prior to use had no pesticides inside the peel.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

I've heard this stuff accumulates to dangerous levels in the body...somewhere...somehow. No one saying it seems to have a substantial knowledge of biochemistry, however. Perhaps they are confusing it with mercury or are suffering from mercury poisoning themselves.

_________________
TANG SOO!

only certain substances that are not metabolized by plants and microbes. Most of these persistent pesticides have been banned from use in "western" countries.

From the article; "Eating organic fruits and vegetables can lower exposure to pesticides, including for children -- but the amount measured from conventionally grown produce was within safety limits, the researchers reported Monday.}}}I wonder about those 'safety limits' and about things not tested for that may come from below USP grade petro-chemical fertilizers{{{
Nor did the organic foods prove more nutritious.(???)}}}then why have I read numerous articles for years, that factory farmed food contains less nutritional value that it did back in the late 1970s{{{
Her team did find a notable(!!!) difference with antibiotic-resistant germs, a public health concern because they are harder to treat if they cause food poisoning.
Specialists long have said that organic or not, the chances of bacterial contamination of food are the same, and Monday's analysis agreed. >>But when bacteria did lurk in chicken or pork, >>germs in the non-organic meats had a 33 percent higher risk of being resistant to multiple antibiotics<<<, the researchers reported Monday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.
That finding comes amid debate over feeding animals antibiotics, not because they're sick but to fatten them up. Farmers say it's necessary to meet demand for cheap meat(because of overpopulation's demands). Public health advocates say it's one contributor to the nation's growing problem with increasingly hard-to-treat germs. Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, counted 24 outbreaks linked to multidrug-resistant germs in food between 2000 and 2010.

The government has begun steps to curb the nonmedical use of antibiotics on the farm.

Organic foods account for 4.2 percent of retail food sales, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It certifies products as organic if they meet certain requirements including being produced without synthetic pesticides or fertilizers, or routine use of antibiotics or growth hormones.

Consumers can pay a lot more for some organic products but demand is rising: Organic foods accounted for $31.4 billion sales last year, according to a recent administration report. That's up from $3.6 billion in 1997.

The Stanford team combed through thousands of studies to analyze the 237 that most rigorously compared organic and conventional foods. Bravata was dismayed that just 17 compared how people fared eating either diet while the rest investigated properties of the foods themselves.

>>Organic produce had a 30 percent lower risk of containing detectable pesticide levels.<<"

I say, everyone build Earthships and grow your own!!! I just wash the City Market stuff good and cook the meat well. I do not buy fish or other food from known contaminated sources like SE Asia.

_________________
"With every decision, think seven generations ahead of the consequences of your actions" Ute rule of life.
“We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children”― Chief Seattle
“Those Who Have the Privilege to Know Have the Duty to Act”…Albert Einstein

I don't think organic is supposed to mean for vitamins and minerals! It's not more of the good stuff, just less of the bad stuff.

Although yeah, I was surprised when I found out that farmers are allowed to use a certain level of chemicals and still certify stuff as organic. I think, if you want truly organic fruit & veg you should grow it yourself at home!

Chemicals are everywhere and some are just as natural as anything else, which is why they are allowed. The problem is that too many believe natural is healthy or better for you and that is not the case.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

"A deeper investigation into the study reveals a few things that the researchers failed to report...


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robyn-o/o ... 57802.html



While the scientists analyzed vitamins and minerals, food isn't simply a delivery device for these things alone. We are quickly learning in this industrialized food era that our food can be full of a lot of other things. It has become a delivery device for artificial colors, additives, preservatives, added growth hormones, antibiotics, pesticides, insecticides and so much more.

....organically produced foods also must be produced without the use of:

•antibiotics
•artificial growth hormones
•high fructose corn syrup
•artificial dyes (made from coal tar and petrochemicals)
•artificial sweeteners derived from chemicals
•synthetically created chemical pesticide and fertilizers
•genetically engineered proteins and ingredients
•sewage sludge
•irradiation

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, these added ingredients are actually what differentiate organic foods from their conventional counterparts. Yet nowhere in that Stanford study, comparing organic food to conventional, are these things measured. There is no measure of the insecticidal toxins produced by a genetically engineered corn plant, no measure of the added growth hormones used in conventional dairy, no measure of the fact that 80 percent of the antibiotics used today are used on the chicken, pork, beef and animals that we eat.

Food is not just a delivery device for vitamins and minerals, as measured in the study, but it is also used as a delivery device for these substances that drive profitability for the food industry. To fail to measure these added ingredients, while suggesting that there is essentially no difference, is incomplete at best. Some might even go so far as to suggest that it is irresponsible in light of the fact that we are seeing such a dramatic increase in diet-related disease."

Some of the "organic" pesticides are far more deadly than those used on other crops and a such are not used in some cases. Organic is a wonderful marketing ploy for those who ignorantly confuse "natural" with "healthy" or "good for you". The organic foods did not show NO pesticides or chemicals, but just less and both were well below the limits for concern. The law of diminishing returns comes into play here as well.

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

MICHAEL POLLAN: Most of the big food companies are now in both businesses, and I don't know that they want to talk too much about pesticides and remind people that this is an active debate, and that there is a lot of pesticide residue in conventional foods. There are various critics of the food movement that will seize on this, and some of those people are backed by agri-business in various ways.

It's great media fodder and it's terrific that people are looking at the issue and debating it. But people should take a hard look. So much of the story depends on what do you mean by "significant health benefit?" The meta study found less pesticide residue, higher levels of anti-oxidants – plant phytochemicals thought to be important to human health; and less antibiotic-resistant microbes in organic meat. But then they say it might not be significant. I don't think they defined signficant.

http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/09/0 ... nic-study/

a Canadian dilemma that may be of interest to this thread: grain was marketed by a central agency for years to compete with Russian grain industry and USA subsidies. This worked while all grain was identical (no such label as "organic" used yet). Now, the grain system is not designed to handle twice as many forms of grain (to make a new organic category for each type) so organic grain farmers get the same price as regular grain and it is all dumped together in the same granaries and rail cars. Laws to protect the pricing system prohibited farmers from selling elsewhere. Organic farmers were still setting up shop (getting certified) and some local markets for organic meat were set up to buy this organic grain... but most of the grain was still dumped together with the regular grain. I know from the farmers I worked for (including my parents) that about half our grain crops were grown without pesticides because they are expensive (including fuel and labor to apply them). Good farming practices include crop rotation and persistent pesticides (those that stay in the soil) are a real pain to deal with because they will reduce yields of other crops grown on that field later. For this reason, they were rarely used. My point is that going organic is not very far from current "normal" grain farming practices here in the Canadian prairies (that statement might not apply elsewhere though).

Irradiation...wow. That really screws up the "organic-ness" of a food, doesn't it?

_________________
TANG SOO!

If food is irradiated, it is not technically organic.

But you can grow an organic crop which was developed through the mutations caused by irradiating the seeds of another variety of that plant and it is "just fine"

_________________
With friends like Guido, you will not have enemies for long.

“Intellect is invisible to the man who has none”
Arthur Schopenhauer

"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."
Albert Einstein

You know, we're getting to a point where that word--organic--is not only beginning to mean less and less, but in some cases the exact opposite of what it actually means.

Food crops are nothing but the products of genetic manipulation over time and, as Wayne added, irradiation as of the 20th century. Seems a bit counter-intuitive, does it not, that you can legitimately grow organic food from a product of irradiation?

But, since that obviously doesn't mean anything to you, I ask, how exactly would irradiating food cause any harm whatsoever to a product that is already technically radioactive? Yes, you heard me. Everything emits some measure of radioactivity. If you're really into avoiding something bad for the sole reason of it being present as opposed to accounting for its concentration, shouldn't you be avoiding food altogether?

_________________
TANG SOO!