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Comment by dgesang | Hacker News Reader

> I'm still not convinced that organic is nutritionally superior or has levels of pesticides that prove harmful to humans.

I'm curious what convinced you that they are equally healthy in the first place?

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I'm not convinced that they are equally healthy. Its just that up to now, the vast majority of studies found no major nutritional difference.

American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/07/090729103728.ht...

Stanford study (others referenced this): http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2012/09/little-evidenc...

Those aren't conclusive and I'm open to being wrong, but this recent UK study seems to be the among the first to find significant differences. I bring up the organic definition in the US vs UK as a possible explanation for the results.

Surely that's the null hypothesis? It's up to proponents of organic food to prove a benefit.

Weird thinking. While I agree that it's a sensible null hypothesis, I'm not sure I agree that the burden of evidence automatically should be on proponents of organic food.

"Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time. It'd make sense that you'd have to show that the alteration you're introducing to the natural state of affairs isn't detrimental to health of the consumer. I.e., I'm making the same argument as you, I just consider unaltered food to be the baseline.

Also, "organic" is a weird name. Organic as opposed to what? Bananas made out of mineral oil?

Selective breeding is a comparatively slow and safe process. You're altering a species within its own parameters. It has little resemblance to the frankensteining we're doing right now. I'm not against it, I'm just not sure we've a developed a proper test suite to secure the process.

Selective breeding has allowed humans to transform wolves into Chihuahuas, an inedible wild grass called Teosinte into Corn (Maize), and many other drastic modifications. But those aren't "frankensteining", apparently. To paraphrase Stewart Brand, inserting the DNA to express a protein that a mammal cell normally does into a plant cell does not mean it will be furry.

I took 'frankensteining' to mean a rapid progression and skip over many states which would have been encountered via selective breeding.

To take your example, the wolf -> chihuahua would have been frankensteining had it been over the course of a singular or very small amount of generations.

It's still comparatively slow and safe, however. Even though we make some really weird alterations that way to suit our needs (which is well and good in and of itself, why shouldn't we?), the time spans are usually waaay longer than what i refer to as "frankensteining". It's not like you have a wolf, then a chihuahua, and in step 3, all wolves are suddenly chihuahuas. But that is effectively what we can do when we use more artificial methods.

I take it you haven't listened to anyone pro-organic speak? Just a few short sentences with them and you would have been aware that they make outrageous claims regarding the health benefits of organic food. And it's precisely because of that that the onus is on them to prove it. And you can't just say "we don't have to prove it because we've always eaten organic and that's natural", err or whatever argument they use. That's a prime example fallacious logic.

> "Organic" food is what we've eaten since the beginning of time.

Actually, we have not been eating organic food since the beginning of time. Most of the crops we consume today have been developed fairly recently in evolutionary terms (farming began only 12,000 years ago). Humans did not evolve exposed to fruits and vegetables we see today. Any farmed crop is not natural.

I agree - the whole 'natural food' thing is a confused mess. Nothing natural about the foods we eat - and a good thing too! Nature doesn't care about our health. Organisms have been competing for millennia for advantages. If a tree's seed sprouted better from your warm dead body, then that tree would happily poison you.

In fact foods we eat in nature can be regarded as those that kill us too slowly to notice - we avoid the others.

And cultivated crops are those we've bred to have less and less of the undesirable parts. We've inserted ourselves into the plants' genetic path for mutual benefit - we plant millions of them, and they feed us.

To eat truly 'natural' you'd have to eat things like crab-apples (grainy and bad ph - eat more than one and get a stomach ache) or tiny barely-sweet melons etc. Melons a thousand years ago were barely larger than an orange, with a couple of tablespoons' worth of edible parts. Thank the Arabs for breeding the mutant freaks we enjoy today!

It is false to claim 'organic' food resembles what humans have been eating since the beginning of time. It bears little resemblence. That's kind of like saying maize and teosinte are the same plant.

It seems like the null hypothesis should be working in the opposite direction. Heavy use of pesticides and herbicides in "modern" farming are a few decades old, and some aspects of this trend, like "Roundup Ready(tm)" crops are very recent.

I'd rather be in the control group for this loosely organized experiment.

(responding to @dgesang here, because of max comment depth)

The conventionally-grown food looks similar, tastes similar, and people have been eating it for decades with no major, obvious consequences. So at first glance they are equivalent. So it seems reasonable that the burden would be on proving a difference, rather than an equivalence.

The dietary effects on health are poorly understood. Nutrition studies are fraught with difficulties and have spawned a resurgence in methodology concerning "measurement error" in the field of statistics. You don't really know how much pizza you ate last year, but the survey will ask you to estimate it somehow... and this kind of measurement is 'noisy'.

Conventionally-grown food looks like organically grown food on steroids, to me. I suppose from the outside a human on steroid may look healthy -- Mr Universe, even -- but we know all is not well inside.

I'm not saying that's really related, but there is substantial evidence for real differences in the makeup of food grown conventionally vs organically.

Citations 10-15 in the paper the original article pertain to this - protein expression differences across fertilization types.

Quantitative proteomics to study the response of wheat to contrasting fertilisation regimes - http://vwordpress.stmarys-ca.edu/bdf2/files/2013/05/wheat-an...

"... The abundance of 111 protein spots varied significantly between fertilisation regimes. Flag leaf N and P composition were significant drivers of differences in protein spot abundance, including major proteins involved in nitrogen remobilisation, photosynthesis, metabolism and stress response."

And organically-grown food have been eating it for EONS with no major, obvious consequences. 'Conventionally-grown food' have just been thrown on the market a few decades ago without knowing any long-term effects to humans eating them or to the environment they are grown in. I don't care about proof for equivalence or difference, I only care about safety. And any food should be proven to be safe BEFORE being released, not decades later.

Ha, yeah sure, we need to proof that natures goods are fine the way they are supposed to be, but highly manipulated goods don't. That kind of thinking is one of the reasons why so many people fear TTIP. Please stay on your side of the Atlantic.

I'll just go ahead and leave this here for you:

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

Well, I didn't say that anything nature-related is ought to be good and desirable. What I meant is that 'conventional food' yet has to be proven to be equally safe as food that was not genetically tampered with, grown without using pesticides, etc. pp.

And quite honestly, I doubt that Moore had genetic engineering and todays massive (ab)use of pesticides in mind when he first stated that law. He might even have added an exception ...

Ha ha

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