Organic food 'not any healthier'

"one of the key co-authors of the study, Dr. Ingram Olkin, has a deep history as an "anti-science" propagandist working for Big Tobacco. Stanford University has also been found to have deep financial ties to Cargill, a powerful proponent of genetically engineered foods and an enemy of GMO labeling Proposition 37."
http://www.naturalnews.com/037108_Stanford_Ingram_Olkin_Big_Tobacco.html

Thanks Lisa for the hound-dogging! I really doubt that any of the cited contributors to the study have ever been in a real garden or tasted something really well grown.

Damn this study! Our 83 year old grandma seen it and now she thinks she has valid ammunition to slam our transitioning lifestyle of trying to eat better. Why is striving for better health and happiness so socially unacceptable?

Haha, I was playing around on a mainstream gardening site recently and ran into basically the same thing. People tend to believe "science", and especially the "science" they hear about on TV, whether or not it has any grounding in reality. In my experience, though, whatever the masses do and believe is almost always either wrong or so oversimplified as to be wrong.

It's like those idiotic middle class people who buy organic food and then spray their yard with chemicals. Glaring proof that they don't understand at all, they're just following things they heard from someone else and never bothered to read up on. I think what is more socially unacceptable than anything is just plain thinking, and that's been the case since always (something about socrates and hemlock).

I think what is more socially unacceptable than anything is just plain thinking, and that's been the case since always (something about socrates and hemlock).

Good point, if you're going down, best to go down for impiety.

Interesting rebuttal by Brian Fung in The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/09/organic-food-isnt-more-nutritious-but-that-isnt-the-point/261929/:

"[W]e should remember that organic began chiefly as an argument about the environment. From the agency’s perspective, to buy organic is to respect the land your food came from. It means taking pains to ensure that your farms remain bountiful and productive, even decades from now. The case is one part self-interest over the long term, and one part a statement of ethics."

LaLena, tell Grams to stick with the Geritol, and you stick with what you know is right.

Yeah you guys are right, as soon as I learned to think for myself my family and friends wanted me to go away. Screw 'em! Someday they will all be crawling through food forests to beg for help.

I skimmed, so I apologize in advance if the gist I got from it was incorrect.

I'm willing to bet that due to the lack of some sort of item comparison list, that most of the comparison was around boxed and otherwise manipulated foods. Here the 'commerce' takes over and the lines between wholesome and downright dead are blurred, a bag of organic marshmallows is very likely no more healthful than a box of conventional marshmallows.

No way is an organic tomato, grown locally, harvested at it's peak, is not vastly more nutritious than a tomato grown in a different country, using commercial process, and picked prior to ripeness then shipped and stored for quite some time before consumption.


My opinion, is that rather than waste time attempting to decipher the language used in studies (comical how university studies of say, 15,000 words, could be summarized in 15 words of layman's terms... if only you had the patience to translate) and reason back and forth on the 'value' and 'honesty' of their conclusion, is that if you step back for a moment and realize that 99.9% of everybody, everywhere, are motivated by money.

The University which performed the study may have skewed it because of funding, the news agency(s) tout the title of the study as conclusive for the sake of publicity, so on and so on...

On the flip side, just because a product is 'organic' doesn't mean it was held to the highest standard... There are people looking to make a buck wherever you go, remember? Don't forget that people use the snake oil charm when and wherever possible.

I'm just trying not to look past the forest, because the trees are in the way.