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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

To assume that the food's nutrition is the only health-affecting factor between organic and petrochemical farming is silly.

What do you suggest would be a verifiable health-affecting factor that would differ between the two forms of farming?

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

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A PCB laced hamburger and one with no such contamination are going to have the same nutritional content.

Really though, part of the point of organic food is that it dumps less crap in the environment. Even if the direct impact on human health is non existent, less fertilizer runoff means fewer low oxygen deadzones at the mouth of major rivers, which means more fish, etc.

The article only seemed to be talking about the levels of nutrients found in organic vs non-organic foods. I would certainly suspect that the levels of pesticides and other such chemicals could also have a huge impact on health.

Got any proof? If not, enjoy your placebos.

I'd suppose I could drink a bottle of pesticide and tell you how I feel, but I would feel rather stupid proving the obvious.

Dosage matters. You eat plants that include chemicals that would be harmful in large doses every time you eat plants, but you don't give up eating just because of that risk.

Just because your prejudices fit the biases of the day that doesn't make them scientific.

Off the top of my head, other questions to consider are:

• The environmental effects of different methods of farming and food production.

• Are toxins more or less present in the food produced by different methods?

• Is the food more or less pleasurable to eat?

Are toxins more or less present in the food produced by different methods?

This is a good question to ask, because most plants contain phytotoxins adapted to keep microbes or animals from eating them. Human selective breeding of plants already has made plants less toxic as human foods, and human bioengineering of plants could help some kinds of plants become still less toxic to human eaters.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/109862182/abstrac...

Out of curiosity, what would be the point of making a fruit toxic to animals? I thought that animals eating a ripe fruit was the entire reason for the fruit (to distribute seeds).

Capsaicin in peppers is one example of a fruit with a powerful toxin (irritant) for one class of animals. Mammals in general can't eat chili peppers without severe irritation of the digestive tract. Birds can eat chili peppers without harm--capsaicin is specific to biochemical properties of mammals. Birds don't have teeth, and don't grind up seeds as they eat fruit. Mammals as a class have very effective grinding teeth, and thus would destroy the seeds as they eat the fruit. The plant's adaptation allows it to have seeds spread by one class of animals while it is avoided by another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capsaicin

It's ironic that most peppers are now sown because of their irritant properties.

'Verifiable' is the tough part. That is not my job.

But if I were to give it a shot, I might investigate the effects of pesticide runoff on the farming environment, and those who live around it. Or animal farms' antibiotic carpet-bombing's effect on drug-resistance of pathogens. Or the effects of farming chemical production on those who live near the factories.

Are you suggesting that we should do anything unless we can prove it's a bad idea? I'm all for science, but it is not wild superstition to think that the effects of eating trace amounts of pesticides in all our food over the course of decades might be bad for our health. Now certainly this should be studied, but how long will it take to achieve results, and how possible is it really to isolate the variables? In the meantime should we just assume superfarming methods are all a-okay?

Generally the most industrialized countries with the most modernized agriculture have people living the longest lives with least morbidity, so we have to wonder about the effect sizes of some of the issues we are worrying about here. As I mentioned in another post in this thread, plants "naturally" have toxins to prevent their being eaten, and human beings have had to develop cooking and selective breeding over time (and some agricultural practices that reduce production of those phytotoxins) to increase the safety of what they eat.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/wrangham/wrangham_index.html

Well obviously the immediate effects of being poor and living in a third world country are going to dominate any long term effects of chemical buildup, all the more so in polluted areas where the individual may be exposed to much higher levels of toxic chemicals in general.

The rest of your comment seems irrelevant. I'm not disputing in any way that plants have toxins or that we had to develop various practices to make us safer. I don't dispute that many man-made chemicals are safe and useful. I don't even dispute that pesticides could conceivably improve safety from a hypothetical insect-born contagion.

However genetically modified mono-crops sprayed with heavy loads of pesticides simply to increase yields does not strike me as something that goes towards food safety at all. It goes towards short-term profit, and you can bet the cost of any long term health effects is simply ignored until 30-40 years down the line when the soil is depleted and the effects of various pesticides have time to show up in the human population. At that point the industry will throw its hands up in the air and say "how could we have known?" while pushing the new and improved fertilizers and pesticides with a new batch of as-of-yet-unknown problems.

That's why I think it's a good idea to eat more traditionally raised food. It's not because I'm some hippie idealogue or because I don't believe in science or progress, it just strikes me as a safer bet given the severe holes in nutrition science, and in many ways, the intractability of solving the health "equation".

Yes it is wild superstition. There is no evidence that most modern insecticides harm humans at all (some do but they are less commonly used, mostly only for specific classes of pest). DDT for example had no deleterious effect on human health, until the environmentalist idiots got it banned and malaria started killing millions again in tropical regions. The most dangerous insecticides were phased out long ago, first the arsenicals, then nicotine sulfate, both of which were very dangerous to people.

ETA: DDT was dusted directly on people for flea and lice control and typhus prevention and was primarily sprayed indoors for malaria prevention so there was a lot more direct human contact than even production plant workers have with insecticides currently.

Wrong. There is plenty of evidence. Now clearly an argument can be made that the consequences of malaria are far worse, but to say "there is no evidence" reveals that you have some sort of idealogical bone to pick with environmentalists and you are not 1/10th as objective you'd like to think.

There is plenty of evidence.

Where is the evidence of direct DDT harm to human beings? I don't recall that ever being mentioned when DDT was banned in the United States (within my lifetime, so I remember the contemporary news reports on the issue). If there is a harm, how does it compare to the harm of insect-borne diseases?

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