This one is awesome. It starts on the Stanford study (showing organic is no more healthy than conventional) and fires back at all the ridiculous reasons for buying organic (pesticide residue, cancer risks, etc). I tried to do some of that in the “Debunking the Organic Myth” series, and this article furthers those arguments.
Check. It. Out.
“As can be seen from the popularity of rip-off artists like Whole Foods markets, organic foods are popular. The U.S. market for organic produce alone was $12.4 billion last year.
Some of the devotion from consumers attains almost cult-like status, which is why a recent article by Stanford University researchers that was dismissive of health or nutritional benefits of organic foods created such a furor.
The study, by researchers in the university’s Center for Health Policy and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, was a meta-analysis in which results from the scientific literature were combined but no new, original laboratory work was conducted. Data from 237 studies were aggregated and analyzed to determine whether organic foods are safer or healthier than non-organic foods. They concluded that fruits and vegetables that met the criteria for “organic” were on average no more nutritious than their far cheaper conventional counterparts, nor were those foods less likely to be contaminated by pathogenic bacteria like E. coli or Salmonella.
The investigators themselves were surprised by the result. “When we began this project, we thought that there would likely be some findings that would support the superiority of organics over conventional food,” according to physician Dr. Dena Bravata.”
Finish reading here.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.
