The Vegetable Detective | Hacker News Reader

The Vegetable Detective

craftsmanship.net

60 pointsjoahua24 comments

I'm kind of alarmed at how not-alarming people are finding this. The idea that eating the foods we most need to eat for health will result in heavy metal poisoning via a vector about which there is no regulatory control or even awareness is a pretty big deal.

This is definitely something that deserves more attention. The long term effects of trace amounts of heavy metals is something very alarming indeed.

I hope someone more serious is looking into it (or has already done so) but my alarm is checked by the crack-pot flags this guy's raised for me. Most obviously that he tries to demonstrate P(A|B) by testing P(B|A) - if you don't understand basic statistics, your conclusions are suspect.

"To test this link, Hubbard started playing a little game. Whenever the clinic would send him someone with the kind of chronic problems associated with thallium, or any other complaints that were hard to pin down, Hubbard would scribble kale on a little note-card and turn it face-down on his desk. After a short work-up, he’d ask the patient to list his or her favorite vegetables. Over and over, people would mention the crucifers, especially kale. Hubbard would nod, say he expected as much, then show them the note-card on his desk to prove it."

Compelling.

What are the odds things would turn out any different with the rest of the population of Marin?

I stopped reading after this sentence:

"One kale sample reported thallium at 1.14 ppm, nickel at 20 ppm, and aluminum at 120 ppm. (As has been widely reported, aluminum is often suspected as a cause of both autism and Alzheimer’s disease.)"

It's pretty controversial claim that aluminum is related to Alzheimer's disease http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/guide/controversial-claims-r...

Not sure why you're being downvoted for this comment. That was one of the red flags for me as well.

"Often suspected" is a deliberately misleading and alarmist way to present the current scientific data on the relationship between aluminium and Alzheimer's disease.

Is there good information available regarding soil nutrient density for the plants that we eat? I've seen surprisingly little discussion of this topic in the healthy eating community, which I assume is due to lack of data.

My layman's understanding is that the nutrient density of the soil is equally (if not more) important to the "healthiness" of vegetables than the particular species of plant itself. It's almost common sense, on some level.

Snopes argues this article should be disregarded for lacking rigorous data. http://m.snopes.com/kale-not-safe/

I realize that most readers are innumerate, but this sort of bombshell reporting really calls for numbers and a proper statistical analysis.

It's not just the readers that are innumerate, unfortunately.

Every food pretty much follows a Gaussian curve in terms of benefit. There's an ideal amount, with too little being bad, and too much being bad. All plants have some form of natural toxin as a defense against being eaten. Even broccoli has oxalic acid which can lead to kidney stones in high amounts. Cooking helps mitigate these, as well as sourcing from an organic farm or your back yard. But it's always safer to eat a variety of vegetables, so you distribute whatever toxins each one has, natural or man-made, and get varied nutrients. There's no silver bullet.

"sourcing from an organic farm or your back yard"

Sourcing from your back yard (and to a lesser degree, a single farm; and to a still lesser degree a single geographic region) means you're not eating veggies grown in a variety of soil compositions, even if you are eating a variety of plant species.

The most extreme way this can fail (that's common enough to note) is if the soil in your back yard is high in lead.

'A molecular biologist is finding what could be dangerous levels of heavy metals in plants like kale, often called the “queen” of the vegetable kingdom. And they’ve shown up the most in organic varieties.'

Seems as if there is no food ingredient that is really safe, always ? Something that can be trusted to be healthy whatever.

Why would there be? Plants weren't put here for our benefit any more than animals were. It would be an astonishing coincidence if the optimal diet consisted of any one thing. Unless it was maybe breast milk.

Although the problem here isn't the plants themselves, it's heavy metal pollution.

In addition to the misguided notion that somehow, someway, vegetables sold as organic are vastly superior to vegetables grown and sold in any other condition.

I don't think you read the article - the metals were the direct result of fertilizer which would not be allowed in organic farming. The catch is that the fertilizer (coal ash) was used to grow corn and soybean animal feed (which cows can't even digest properly, but that's another story...) and then the manure of those cows went to organic farms - so the purported vector of attack was indirect.

I'm no cheerleader of organics and think it's foolish that GMOs are by definition non-organic. However, I buy them when I can primarily because of my concerns with pesticide and fertilizer overuse.

The catch is that the fertilizer (coal ash) was used to grow corn and soybean animal feed (which cows can't even digest properly, but that's another story...) and then the manure of those cows went to organic farms - so the purported vector of attack was indirect.

That's exactly my point though, organic farming is not a closed system no matter how much the public might desire to believe it is. There are some tenants of growing organics but it's not standardized nor systematic. I believe it is potentially deceiving in the worse cases. Of course the issue at hand is not organic farming but instead cruciferous veggies such as kale and broccoli but I only mention the idea because it's an integral part of Hubbard's "perfect storm":

"Now, Hubbard had what he often calls “a perfect storm”: contaminated vegetables, misleadingly pushed on the public as nutritious—and clean—leading to misdiagnosed ailments. “Where does this list end?” he wrote in one of his numerous messages emphasizing these points. “There is undoubtedly a series of similar perfect storms at work in other heavy metals and our food supply, including infant/baby foods, pet foods, and beyond.”"

But if everyone grew "organic" food, then it would be moot point. A full organic system is a better than a full non-organic system. So while current organic food might be contaminated through side channels, making more of our food production 'organic' would be be beneficial - not because organic food is great nutritionally in and of itself, but because having more of it benefits the food system.

That said, I don't eat much organic food. However, this article has made me want to eat more organic food.

But organic agri necessarily uses _more_ pesticide and fertilizer. It's the only way their crop yields can match their GM analogues.

I'm not sure that's how I understood the article. Did you see the part that said "This proved kale’s powers as a hyperaccumulator, but it disproved, or at least shook, his belief that coal ash was the culprit."

Vastly? Maybe not. Somewhat? Yes. Depending on what you mean by "vastly". I mean, what are we talking about? If there's j% chance of a k-point iq drop (or developing a neurodegenerative disease) or some non-neurological physical problems over, say, 30 years, or some years earlier than you otherwise would have... what do those numbers have to be, and what does the problem have to be, before you consider avoiding pesticides to be "vastly" better? Certain problems would be picked up by the FDA studies and taken into account when setting residue limits; other problems (like slight mental deficits) wouldn't.

Pesticides are generally not healthy. It does depend on what plant is under discussion, of course. Some are routinely more contaminated with pesticide residue than others, but some are badly contaminated (google "dirty dozen" pesticide).

I'm also completely passing over the potential ecological harm caused by pesticides.

The interesting part is the thing that makes crucifers nutritious would seem to be the same thing that makes them uptake thallium.

I often wonder what water high water-content fruits like strawberries have been subjected to. An interesting article but I don't think I'll knock broccoli on the head just yet.

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