Slashdot Mirror
Stanford Study Flawed: Organic Produce May Be More Nutritious After All
assertation writes "A few weeks ago an article was posted to Slashdot referring to a Stanford Study stating that organic produce, contrary to popular belief is not more nutritious. According to Mark Bitman of The New York times the Stanford study was flawed. A spelling error skewed the results as well as the study ignoring several types of nutrients."
I just won the argument over this with my vegan vegetarian girlfriend. Now this! Damn it, Well, I won't being getting any for awhile. good thing the .XXX search is up.
And organic produce is easier to digest than inorganic.
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Second, this is not a scientific article. It is an editorial. Yes, I suppose Mister Bittman has a valid opinion, even some good supporting information to demonstrate that he has some understanding of the subject under discussion. Nonetheless, I don't think Mr. Bittman is even remotely what would be considered an expert in the areas of horticulture, agriculture, food production, nutrition, animal husbandry or any of at least a dozen other disciplines which might make his opinion any more informed than my own.
Not to criticize Mr. Bittman - he is an editorial author providing articles for a major news outlet. He has written a well thought-out, interesting editorial - but that's all. He doesn't have direct evidence to refute the findings of the Stanford Study - he doesn't even have any direct criticisms of the methodology employed by the Stanford group (which he should have, IMHO). What he has is an editorial opinion - well expressed, thoughtful, but at the end of the day still just his opinion.
I don't even really care about the pesticides. All I know is that when I cut open a conventional industrially grown greenhouse tomato and compare it to the tomatoes I get from the organic farm stand, the organic tomato is redder, smells better, and is a lot tastier. This is really all that matters to a foodie like me.
I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
You do realize that Nitrites and Nitrates are different things, right? In the cycle, first stage bacteria break down Ammonias (poisonous) to Nitrites (still poisonous) and second stage bacteria break down Nitrites into Nitrates (mostly harmless below 60-100ppm). It's up to your kidneys to flush what they can into your urine.
Next time he's getting some oral favors, he should scream, "OH MY GOD YOU'RE EATING MEAT!"
He'll have to dump her after that, but sometimes there's a price for victory.
paintball
This article is so incredibly biased that it's hard to discover what's actually wrong with the Stanford research. This one reads like a raving lunatic jumping up and down because "the study didn't account for pesticides!" Well, it was a study that compared nutrition based on the nutrient content of the different production methods of food. Imagine that - they studied a bunch of numbers and totaled up their findings. Note that they did not study "which is worse for the environment", or "which food contains more residual agricultural chemicals", or "which tomato tastes better", or "which food contains more antibiotic resistant bacteria", yet those were the arguments he continually raised. That was not what this study studied!
Then he blames the study because “[t]he researchers started with a narrow set of assumptions and arrived at entirely predictable conclusions." Again with the "not really surprised" response. What did he think they were supposed to do, poll the newspaper food editors and ask them which variables to study? If they don't start with a specific set of assumptions and control for as many variables as possible, the results will be meaningless. So he's outraged because they didn't pick his particular variables? Get over it.
Now, could someone study the amount of residual pesticides in ordinary produce versus organically grown produce? Of course. Could someone study the human health effects of those doses of residual chemicals? Sure.
I, too, would like to see the study go even further. I'd ask the researchers to add just a few more data points and have it become meaningful not just to outraged food writers but to all Americans. They should compare the nutrition value per dollar spent in the grocery store, instead of nutrition values per gram. Then the food writers can publish that right next to the unemployment and poverty statistics, and maybe they can write another article about "how low-income people are ruining the ecology of this country because they don't buy as much organically grown food as gainfully employed newspaper food editors." Then we'd could measure his reaction to having both organically grown and genetically modified tomatoes being thrown at him.
John
What really gets me is the false dichotomy between organic and conventional. It reminds me of how medical quacks try to differentiate between conventional and alternative (or naturopathic or whatever) medicine when the rational thing to do is to focus on what works, not what it is called. Some organic techniques are good. A lot of biological techniques like intercropping, crop rotation, focus on soil microbes, insect mating disruption, passive pest control methods like use of predator insects, increased use of biodiversity, ect. are positives. But that does not mean you should be dogmatic about it, which is exactly what organic is: naturalistic dogma. A natural pesticides is fine in organic production (and before anyone assumes organic uses no pesticides, look up the approved pesticide list), but not a synthetic one, simply on the basis of its origin? That is the classic appeal to nature fallacy. And while it is true that excessive fertilizer use has many negative consequences, why should responsible use of synthetic fertilizers be forbidden? Soil fertility management is damned complex, and it is presumptive to think only 'natural' methods are going to be of sustainable benefit. Genetically engineered crops are a great example of the naturalistic nature of the organic dogma. You can apply Bt to a crop, but if the crop does it itself, it is suddenly forbidden? Even something as simple as an apple modified to not brown can never be organic. Why? It is not natural (or rather, it is not natural and is popularized, unlike things like mutagenesis and chemically induced polyploidy).
My point is that organic has some things going for it, but not because it has some special label like 'organic'. What it has going for it are the biological techniques it uses. Of course, these techniques are not exclusive to organic; if you think your average farmer does not pay attention to things that can make their operations better, you are mistaken and have probably never even set food on an actual farm before. Ultimately, the focus should be on the scientifically verified merit individual practices, not on some label that represents a collection of practices grouped together based on the appeal to nature fallacy with some after the fact justification. The dichotomy misses the point entirely (unless the goal is marketing of course, in which case oversimplifications work great, and absolutes tend to create more true believers than nuance). Even if organic did produce more nutritious food, that would still not support the superiority of organic so much as it would indicate that there is an attribute of some growing method causing the increased nutrition that should be determined, explained, and focused on.
My Dad, a member of the London Royal Society of Chemistry, noticed this about 10 years ago. Being a very scientific family*, it caused lots of double-takes and polite WTFs around the dinner table. After a little research on the subject, turned out it's the harvesting process that's organic:
"Organic salt cannot be 'organically grown' because it is a mineral not a plant. When salt is certified organic the certification refers to the process of collection of sea salt. The saltworks must be located in a nature reserve, without risk of pollution to the water, the salt must be produced by hand, without purifying the salt or including any additives, and it must fulfil the high standards in chemical analysis." (Quoted: http://www.organicfooddirectory.com.au/organic-food/herbs-zzt-spices/organic-salt.html)
*Dad: Industrial Chemist. Mum: Chemist/Biologist/Lab Tech. Sister: Chemist/Physicist/Physiotherapist. Brother: Chemist/Computer Scientist. Me: Physicist/Computer Scientist. Cat: Psychologist/NLP Practitioner
She's a pretty valuable research colleague - easily distracted and a bit of prima donna, but she does provide her own lab test animals and she's immune to prosecution for ethics violations.
We have a dog too. He doesn't get credit.