Is Organic Food better for you? The only test you need

March 30th, 2008

The Guardian, once again, has a pro-corporate, pro-pharmaceutical propaganda piece in its toilet paper.

It goes like this:

Organic food ‘no benefit to health’
Eating fruit and veg is more important than whether produce is ‘green’, says expert

Jo Revill, Whitehall editor
Sunday March 30, 2008
The Observer

Parents who want their children to eat healthily should focus more on serving them extra fruit and vegetables and less on giving them expensive organic produce, according to one of the country’s leading nutrition experts.

Lord Krebs, former head of the Food Standards Agency, said families were becoming ‘deeply confused’ by conflicting messages about healthy eating.

The market for organic food reached more than £2bn last year, with most consumers from households with children under the age of 15. An average of £37m is spent each week on organic produce, mostly in south-east England.

[…]

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/food/story/0,,2269340,00.html

Without going into wether or not Lord Krebs is corrupt or not, or is a paid liar or not, or wether or not Monsanto, GSK or any other corporation is really behind this proclamation or not, we can say one thing for sure.

Organic food is better for you than non organic food.

And I can prove it.

Lets say you are someone with an infant child.

You have two glass ten litre beakers, marked ‘A’ and ‘B’, of distilled water in front of you and your baby.

I take a container of commercially available liquid pesticide, open the lid, and dip the tip of a thin sewing needle into the surface of the pesticide. I then dip that needle into the beaker marked ‘B’ and then stir the water vigorously.

I pour some water from beaker ‘A’ into a baby’s bottle marked ‘A’, and some water from beaker ‘B’ into a baby’s bottle marked ‘B’. I pour out 90% of the water in bottle ‘B’ and then replace the missing volume with water from beaker ‘A’.

Now.

Which bottle do you give your baby to drink?

Any sane person will give their baby bottle ‘A’. No parent with a single working brain cell will knowingly give their child the water in bottle ‘B’ which has been tainted by a miniscule amount of pesticide.

This is what Organic food is about, at the most basic level. Deliberately feeding people pesticide, at any concentration IS INSANE. It is better to eat food that has not come into contact with pesticides than it is to eat food that has come into contact with pesticides.

Organic food has not been sprayed with pesticides, and so therefore, it is better for you.

And that is THAT.

Then of course, there are all of the other ramifications of spraying crops, the pesticide entering into and remaining in the soil and rivers, the animals poisoned by it, etc etc. But I digress. Anyone who tells you that pesticide in small concentrations is safe to eat either works for one of the manufacturers of these poisons, is a paid liar for them, or they are stupid or ignorant.

Exactly the same demonstration can be made about organic meat.

Organic meat has not been injected with growth hormones, steroids and all manner of unnecessary and monstrous interventions. Would you feed your child a piece of meat that has trace amounts of animal growth hormone in it, or one that has no trace of such a thing?

The choice is obvious, and anyone who says that these trace amounts of drugs is harmless is is one of the above, a liar, a paid liar, ignorant or just plain stupid.

I would love to know how much money these journalists and newspaper editors are paid to regurgitate this nonsense unchallenged. Obviously they have no morals or human decency.

Thankfully, the majority of people are now waking up to why they should be eating organic food, and no, they are not so stupid as to conflate having a balanced diet with what organic food is all about. These imbeciles can publish all the papers they like, make all the proclamations they like in whatever newspaper or media they choose; we are ignoring them. Every time they publish a new paper or make another absurd proclamation, they become further discredited, and every time a trashpaper like the Guardian uncritically reprints their lies, they too become more discredited an look more foolish.

The same, tired religious dogma is trundled out:

However, according to Krebs, an eminent scientist and principal of Jesus College, Oxford, there is still no reliable, peer-reviewed evidence to show that there is any clear health benefit to eating this ‘green’ produce.

And we do not care. We do not care about the eminence of Krebs, Jesus College, Oxford, reliable peer reviewed evidence, his proclamations or anything else these suspicious characters, charlatans and religious fanatics come up with. Their credentials are meaningless. We are not eating poison because you say it is safe to do so. We are not going to give our children pesticide to drink because there is ‘reliable, peer-reviewed evidence’ saying it is safe. We are not going to sit around and wait to be told what is or is not beneficial or what is or is not safe to eat. You have lost all credibility, all authority, and no matter how you are announced in the newspapers the slavering ‘journalists’ intoning from your sacred scroll of hierarchical science power, we do not, and will not believe what you say.

Note how when the writer of this nonsense tries to balance out her article by quoting The Soil Association, she only quotes ‘A Sopkewoman’. No list of credentials, letters, academic associations…just ‘A Spokeswoman’ not even ‘an eminent Spokeswoman’. These sorts of cheap tricks no longer work; in fact, they can never work when the initial premise is so absurd, counterintuitive and blatantly false. What is in fact happening is that the more you are associated with these discredited bodies, the LESS you are believed, thanks to the decades of lying for money, bullshit and PR.

But you know this!

Organic food is better for you, better for the environment and better for the animals that are used as food.
Organic food is bad for evil scientists, bad for pharmaceutical companies and bad for fear-mongering journalists.

And that, my friends, is a proclamation you can trust!

5 Responses to “Is Organic Food better for you? The only test you need”

  1. Alun Says:

    As I understand it, there are no peer-reviewed papers on the effects of long-term pesticide intake in food precisely because of the long-term and possibly sub-clinical aspects of the potential problem. Not only this, but the changing chemical nature of pesticides means new studies would be needed to follow up the next 20 years… by which time a new chemical form of pesticide arises.
    Basically it is extremely difficult to study effects of chronic pesticide exposure, and to seperate out that effect from the myriad of other potential confounding factors.
    Does that mean there is no significant effect? Certainly not. Back in 1996 the British Medical Journal pointed out how difficult it is to assess pesticide effects in peer-reviewed articles.

    An excellent summary of studies done is here…http://www.pesticides.org/docs/1chronic-neuro-tab.pdf
    Of course, one should then refer back and see which studies were supported by agrochemical companies etc etc. Just in case.

    Nevertheless, remember that it is misrepresentation (or, should we say ‘mis-speaking’) at best to say there are no articles showing that organic food is better for you. While this is strictly the case, one could say there is plenty of evidence to suggest chronic pesticide exposure is bad for you, and logic suggests therefore that eating organic food, in which organic (ho ho ho!) chemical pesticides are absent, is, shall we say ‘less harmful’.

    Just a few days ago even BBQ published Pesticide Parkinson’s link strong. Surprisingly even the “director of research at the Parkinson’s Disease Society” said “only one in 10 had had long-term exposure to pesticides.” Obviously he has not thought about food. Of course, the Grauniad ran the exact same story 2 days before their ‘no benefit to organic’ splash. There’s joined-up journalism for you.

    The agrochemical industry and BigFarmer (sic) has a lot (of money) to lose in this battle. There is a big media push against any benefit for organic produce at the moment, but don’t believe the tripe.

  2. meaumeau Says:

    Also why not read through the standards of the three main ‘independent’ food accreditation schemes in the UK:

    Red Tractor, Freedom Food (RSPCA), Soil Association.

    Remembering you can only raise your expectations to what is explicit in each scheme you can see that both the Red Tractor and Freedom Food schemes basically provide ‘best practice’ advice for industrialised farming.

    If you want any assurance that your food is not part of that sort of system (the massive animal sheds, lack of biodiversity, huge reliance on oil), then either you have to grow your own food (or be on very good terms with your supplier) or choose organic food – there is nothing close.

  3. mary13 Says:

    Why not eat organic for a month and see how you feel? A fair experiment, yet one that involves cooking for oneself and making careful choices. Not necessarily the easy path …

    On the other hand, some argue that you could eat purely organic, but if the food is not prepared with love and kindness, it will turn to rot anyways. Intentions, intentions …

  4. Alun Says:

    The new wave of anti-organic propaganda: organic food is bad for the environment!

    First, biased tripe masquerading as a magazine piece on BBQ. Previously they had this slightly more balanced piece.

    And last week, the “7 Myths Of Organic Food” debunked by Robert Johnston, who claims to be an ‘environmental expert’ but I can’t find his credentials anywhere. “these foods are an indugence the world can’t afford, argues environmental expert Rob Johnston”.

    Robert Johnston is a doctor and freelance journalist. He was an executive producer for Lifetime Television in New York and medical adviser for the Millennium Dome Body Zone.”

    His ‘article first appeared online before the Indescribablybad picked it up.

    If these studies and articles have not been funded and placed by BigAgro then I’m a monkey’s uncle. The thrust of these articles is that only by intensive, chemical-driven farming can we save the world. And we’ll be healthier too.

    Smacks of desperation, with a whiff of fear.

  5. Coordinated attacks on Organic food by Pharma-shills | BLOGDIAL Says:

    […] Organic Food better for you? The only test you needAlun: The new wave of anti-organic propaganda: […]

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