Organic foods are not healthier or pesticide free
news.immunologic.org
news.immunologic.org
Headline on the Croplife America website[2] is: "We Represent America's Pesticide Industry".
I rest my case. :)
[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrea-love-phd_scientistlife...
Both "sides" that are involved (organic pesticides vs non-organic pesticides) here are arguing for pesticide use in practice.
Nicotine sulfate which the srticle explicitly discusses as one of the "natural" substances, used in organic farming (i assune the context is US specifix here) is a) not the natural occuring nicotine of e.g. tobacco plants and b) stictly prohibihed for all types of agriculture, organic or notchemically modified nix.
And the use of the LD50 toxicity as sole metric is laughable: caring about not being exposed to carcinogenic substances, would not even make sense, when everythink that is harmful would also be accordingly toxic in the sense of an LD50 dose.
Here's her bad-faith defense of glyphosate:
https://news.immunologic.org/p/glyphosate-a-low-toxicity-her...
Which contains gems like:
>Acetic acid is used at 20% concentration in vinegar-based organic herbicides. The acute oral LD50 of 20% acetic acid is 3,310 mg/kg. That means acetic acid is 1.7 times more toxic than glyphosate.
>So, that same 70 kg person would only need to ingest 8 ounces of 20% acetic acid for acute toxicity to occur.
"Did you know if you drink a liter of white vinegar (i.e. acetic acid at 5% dilution), it'll harm you? Glyphosate wins again!"
>They’re also not applying glyphosate to finished produce items; glyphosate is applied to plants early in the growth phase, well before the actual product (corn, soybean, etc) has been produced.
They do spray it on finished crops! They spray glyphosate on crops after the cereal or seed has been produced. It's called crop dessication! They spray glyphosate, diquat, glufosinate, or other herbicides (but primarily glyphosate) on mature crops to kill the plants ("dry-down") to speed up and regulate the harvest window.
Of course, Monsanto assures the grower that "when the bulk seed/ grain moisture content is below 30% then residue levels are minimal as at this moisture level there is no longer translocation into the seed/ grain."[1]
But I have my doubts.
Crop dessication has become an increasingly common practice in the United States and Canada since it began in the 1990s with dessicating wheat and barley.
Non-celiac "gluten intolerance" began becoming a "fad" ailment in the early 2000s. There are also voluminous online self-reports of Americans with non-celiac gluten intolerance that have no such reaction in Europe. For some reason.
It is also highly suspicious that cereal crops continously grown for over ten thousand years suddenly starts to trigger symptoms in the general population in the last twenty.
After wheat and barley in the 1990s, crop dessication also started to be performed on canola and soybeans in the 2000s and went on to include sunflowers in the 2010s.
I don't think it's a coincidence that "seed oil" hatred emerged when it did.
Even further, the problem is not even necessarily glyphosate in isolation but Roundp specifically. The ingredients of any Roundup formulation are commercially confidential and are not available to the public, but one commonly known and used adjuvant is the surfactant polyoxyethylene amine (POEA).
Experimental studies suggest that the toxicity of POEA is greater than the toxicity of glyphosate alone and commercial formulations alone.
Transparency and the precautionary principle should dominate any discussion of what happens to the global food supply as it is the foundation for human flourishing. Attacking skeptics as "anti-progress chemophobes" is exactly what I'd expect someone on the payroll the pesticide ibdustry to say.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20170904155703/https://monsanto....
Also, can we now discount all the studies of harm of pesticides, unless they come from the Croplife America?
We can't afford properly refuting each occurrence, the effort is highly asymmetrical.
https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-the-principle-of-char...
I think there is a difference between avoiding all pesticides, and say avoiding glyphosate, which is why I prefer the buy the organically grown version or some vegetables. If anyone wants to chow down on glyphosate, knock yourself out, but so what if other people are paying a little more to not. That's their prerogative. Everyone can have what they want. What is this blog even arguing?
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
Many of the "organic approved" substances are also incredibly dangerous. Rotenone is a naturally derived neuro-toxin linked to Parkinson's. Pyrethrin is poison. Then you have a bunch of chlorine and ammonia based elements - maybe not as dangerous in their pure industrial concentrations as paraquat would be but certainly not safe.
(Paraquat is also very unique because it neutralizes itself in contact with soil so it's actually a lot safer in a lot of situations).
Pyrethrin in USDA Organic produce is required to be natural, not synthetic, so don't confuse the two. Also, even natural pyrethrin is a last resort Organic pesticide.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
to whom and at what dose? It's a paralytic nerve agent, so scary!! But mostly to bugs...
"mammals are able to process pyrethrin quickly and have higher body temperatures which prevent pyrethrin from working effectively"
https://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/cuso4tech.html https://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/archive/glyphotech.html
Meanwhile, glyphosate is used early before planting to kill off the weeds and so it's naturally degraded (to harmless CO2 and water) by the harvest time.
Copper is a fungicide, which is a category of product that both chemical ("conventional") and organic farmers often need to use for certain types of crops in certain types of climates, including pretty much any fruit. There are chemical fungicides which are more targeted and thus can be "greener" in some ways than copper, but there's also a lot more which are substantially worse.
Whereas RoundUp/glyphosate is an herbicide, which is a category of product that chemical farmers use extensively but organic farmers use rarely to not at all, relying instead on cultural and mechanical means. And what organic herbicides are used rely on contact rather than systemic action.
Funnily enough, both are pretty terrible when used near bodies of water. But chemical agriculture requires a much greater volume begetting much greater runoff.
So of course, the (often paid) promoters of “YOLO agriculture” will use that as an argument, putting under the rug that the industry they defend is doing bullshit with people's health and the environment.
There ought to be a middle ground, but unfortunately we live in a permanent culture war so there cannot be reasonable discussion about anything, really.
What do you find is nonsense about this? Did you not read the article and think it was about "pesticides" vs "no pesticides"? It is actually about how the organic label often results in farmers using more pesticides.
That's highly misleading:
1. Copper sulfate is required to be used such that copper accumulation is limited in the soil. [1]
2. Rotenone [2][3] and nicotine sulfate [3] are not allowed as USDA Organic pesticides.
Really, superkuh, for a user like you, your comment is embarrassing.
[1] https://pnwhandbooks.org/plantdisease/pesticide-articles/mat...
[2] https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/national-organic-...
[3] https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-7/subtitle-B/chapter-I/su...
"The most frequently quantified [organic] pesticide was copper." https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2015/5570...
> Analysis of these articles revealed no significant difference in ..., zinc, and copper.
> restrictions limit the use of copper salts.
I see a theoretical risk but not a practical problem here. At best you've identified a place where the regulations might need tightening.
Given these two really bad, even disengenuous, examples the true bit about the copper sulfate use is probably misleading too. I wouldn't say it's embarassing not to know this off the top of my head but I do appreciate that I won't embarass myself in the future by repeating the falsehoods (re: USDA regs). Thanks.
I do wonder how this works with a large amount of the produce I buy in the USA being grown in other countries though.
Perhaps one could argue "well, that's not because it's certified organic, it's because it's a smaller farm that uses these other crop-growing techniques blah blah blah". OK. Irrelevant. The point is, when I buy conventional produce, and then I buy organic produce, the organic stuff is clearly higher quality. Even better? Go to a farmers market and buy directly from the source.
Most of the negative impact of agriculture on the climate and on biodiversity happens when we convert an acre of land from its natural state to agricultural use. This is much worse for the environment than the presence of pesticides.
Organic produce consistently takes about 20% more land to produce the same amount of food. As a result, choosing organic over traditional means choosing worse outcomes for the climate and worse for biodiversity.
Agree that climate and biodiversity are two very important factors, but there's others. Health effects (e.g. quality-adjusted life years) being one, soil health & resilience another. Monocropping pesticide-laden foods is not some ideal state.
The thing I'm noticing too is that people on HN are way worse at systems thinking than their confidence makes them seem. People on HN are always looking at food systems in isolation. It's weird because they're observing the systemic effects of these systems.
As an example, you don't have to use farmland to make up for that "productivity loss" (very narrow to look at these systems as just their food output in the first place). In the US, we have 40 million acres of grass lawns. The most useless thing to grow ever because the vast majority is non-native grass (some NPC will say "erm it gives us oxygen", which like... yeah so does literally anything else and nature isn't here just for breathing). For cropland, we have 328 million acres.[0]
40/328 ≈ 12%
And like sure, we can't use 100% of the lawns to grow food, but the idea that the reduced yield + needing 20% more makes organic "bad for the environment" because obviously that means taking the existing natural land and turning that into farmland is so unimaginative and lazy. We have a lot of ways we can make up for that 20% "loss". [1] Of course, there are always master mental gymnasts who will say weird things like "growing food on the streets? it'll get polluted!" (I regret to inform them that many farms are right up next to highways, so they should be upset at ICE cars) and "eww it's going to make a mess and there will be bugs" (ok, go live in a hospital and eat IV nutrition if you want to live a sterile life, we need bugs to survive, sorry). Although a question for me remains how much land is actually necessary to provide food for the US without imports.
But there is still so much to be done to make organic farming better (beyond just doing the bare minimum for the certification). Incorporating intercropping, trapcropping, agroforestry, covercropping, crop rotation, no-till and so on. I'll even let a few "weeds" like goosefoot pop up. I guess really, one must qualify organic farming by prefixing "regenerative". The first thing I thought of when I started thinking about how I would farm in an ideal world is how the majority of land would be dedicated to nature - prairie and forest must be 2/3 of it. (Oh no it's unproductive! Not! Tons of stuff to eat out of a well-managed prairie and forest.)
Yes this stuff becomes more labor intensive, but isn't the promise of AI that it will write all the "it's this, not that"s while I do the work that matters - feeding people?
[0] https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/111436 [1] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1720760115
I know several people who are otherwise gluten-intolerant but can eat anything there with no trouble.
All of the food issues we're suffering from in the US -- celiac's disease, food allergies, gluten intolerance, dairy intolerance -- are relatively rare in Europe.
It's interesting that it works like fish and mercury contamination. Big fish accumulate mercury in higher concentrations than little fish. The little fish accumulate small amount over certain periods and are eaten by big fish which rapidly accumulate the chemical. The higher in the food chain the fish, the more mercury. It's a parallel with the degree of food processing. The more processed the food, the more contaminants.
You could characterize it as a general problem that humans and the planet are facing now. We have a problem with long chains. We are neglecting their costs. Even in the software industry, as a software developer, long chains of logic introduce their own problems with slight side effects at every stage accumulating into problematic unexpected behaviors and adding significant maintenance burdens. Guess what AI coding is contributing to? Longer chains of logic to solve the same problem.
At some point we have to put our foot down and reject unnecessary complexity and reject minor conveniences. There is too much fake convenience and fake safety which actually create much bigger inconveniences and hazards in the long run.
Everything in our society seems to be mirroring the debt-based system upon which our society is founded. Everything works like a debt which will have to be repaid later, with interest.
I tend to suspect that the "gluten-intolerant but can eat noodles in Europe" is a bit bunk. These days the top source of Durum wheat used in luxury European products is ... North Dakota and Canada.
I suspect the root of the issue is that the European lifestyle in general is so much healthier (less processed food, smaller portions, more walking) combined with the excitement of travel gives people a overall boost in their constitution.
I think it's possible and also it might be something different happening with the noodles/flour than gluten intolerance which is not well defined anyway (we are not talking about coeliac disease here to be clear). For example my wife can't eat wheat (+durum), spelt and rye products from our country without issues, but can eat rye and spelt products from Austria, anything from Greece and most but not everything from Italy, and that is true both when on vacation there and also when buying their products here (or in case of Austria, buying in Austria).
One thing I want to mention is that gluten-free noodles from big brands (like Barilla) have evolved so much that I now prefer them to their gluten-full equivalents.
Anecdotally, we have no history of food allergies in the family but my daughter has severe sesame allergy, milk, egg and nuts allergy. We are from South America but live in the UK.
I think as organic food became more mainstream it also became more about an individual's health and less about larger environmental and social concerns, but those concerns are at the heart of the original organic movement.
Apart from that I buy organic because it's also better for the environment. Among other things also due to lower nitrate levels in the groundwater. Which is consistently above the maximum allowed concentration in Germany for years. https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/nitrate-in-...
Organic farming is essentially the idea of farming more ‘in line with nature’, and is concretely defined and regulated by different laws in different places. If these regulations aren’t yielding the expected results, it may be a good idea to drop or improve them. What I find dangerous, though, is the easily acquirable belief that the idea of organic farming is deceptive and worthless.
Certain practices present in conventional farming are known to be problematic and it’s perfectly reasonable to be concerned and seek to avoid them. Organic farming can miss the goal, but my understanding is that it’s aiming in the right direction. Therefore, I think a more responsible conclusion to draw would be ‘today’s organic farming isn’t what it should be’, not just the plain ‘organic foods are not superior’. In this form, I fear the message does far more harm than good.
A lot of what I buy happens to be organic, but I eat it because it tastes good, not because of the label.
I do think organic bananas taste better than non-organic. Same with meat and eggs, but any high-quality meat is great, organic or not.
For flour, pasta, and cereal, I feel like it comes down to the brand, not whether it's organic.
Maybe food quality is more complex than what an organic label actually measures.
In seriousness does this mean I’m ok to buy the regular broccoli at the store next time?
So there was absolutely no reliable data they used? It was _entirely_ misinformation? That seems dubious.
> Most people have been misled to believe that organic is superior and that’s not your fault
I'd like fewer cancer causing chemicals sprayed onto or around my food. I'm not sure that's "superior" but it seems "more reasonable than not."
> in order to drive people to purchase organic produce
Not exactly a "hard sell" is it?
> All pesticides are toxic
And "toxic" defines a _wide_ range of features and outcomes, does it not? Now who's fear mongering?
> Another study making claims about glyphosate in urine, that the median glyphosate levels in organic food consumers and individuals with known exposure are essentially identical (390 vs 400 parts per trillion, respectively).
So corporate farming is so onerous that there's no way to avoid glyphosate cross contamination? I found this whole thing to be a very goofy analysis that seems preoccupied with punching down on some imagined conspiratorial enemy.
You can't just say this without a link.
You have to think about who is motivated to write this kind of stuff. Invariably, it's people selling conventional pesticides or people paid by such people. The lobbying is strong, contrary to the arguments. This is actually a very good sign, these despicable people feel threatened.
I don't know the rules of the organic label in the US, here in Europe it's not perfect, and yeah, thhere are still pesticides including some bad stuff like copper sulfates that are allowed, and the level of care absolutely vary from ome producer to another but it's still better than conventional products for pretty much everything except for the price if you don't factor in the cost of the damage done to the environment and yourself.
This kind of misinformation needs to be firmly fought back. They want to sell glyphosate, which they try to trick us into thinking it's not bad, that's the full extent of it. It's bad, we are better off without it, that's it, end of the story.
Results Among 68 946 participants (78.0% female; mean [SD] age at baseline, 44.2 [14.5] years), 1340 first incident cancer cases were identified during follow-up, with the most prevalent being 459 breast cancers, 180 prostate cancers, 135 skin cancers, 99 colorectal cancers, 47 non-Hodgkin lymphomas, and 15 other lymphomas. High organic food scores were inversely associated with the overall risk of cancer (hazard ratio for quartile 4 vs quartile 1, 0.75; 95% CI, 0.63-0.88; P for trend = .001; absolute risk reduction, 0.6%; hazard ratio for a 5-point increase, 0.92; 95% CI, 0.88-0.96).
Conclusions and Relevance A higher frequency of organic food consumption was associated with a reduced risk of cancer. If these findings are confirmed, further research is necessary to determine the underlying factors involved in this association.
So rich people who can afford expensive food get cancer less often.
But at the same time I don't think its healthy to _always_ question everything in the mainstream. Its mainstream for a reason (sometimes an angle pushed by economic groups like big cig in the example above), and sometimes the reason is reasonable. Be critical and keep an open mind, but don't assume its fake because its mainstream.
Some kind of fallacious argument in this form