Organic Food.
Recently I was talking to the participants in the ½ Marathon Clinic I am teaching at the Beaches Running Room about nutrition. Each clinic does have a lecture on nutrition and I am always pretty unhappy with the outcome as the amount of contradictory advice out there about the very basic process of eating is a bit annoying. I know a lovely woman named Terri who is a specialist on diet an nutrition and she will be giving a lecture to my group this week. There will be things she says to them that I disagree with but she is the subject matter expert and I am the fat, over opinionated runner. Still, I do give my students one piece of advice, tongue well in cheek: “Never eat organic food”
This does get some people’s back’s up to be sure and I do intend this to be a humorous statement as much as anything else but there is a fundamental element to my opinion that no-one has ever challenged me on. There is no such thing as non-organic food. All food is organic. Organic has a couple of definitions one being something derived from living processes, the other being a compound based on carbon, hydrogen and oxygen atoms. In other words anything we eat, anything, is, by definition organic. Of course, people don’t mean that when they talk about organic food. They mean that it is “natural”, “free of chemicals”, “grown without fertilizers or pesticides”.
Hogwash.
Let’s deal with these one by one:
- Natural – no crops grown today are the non-manipulated originals. All modern crops, whether “organic” or not have been genetically manipulated by humans to become the modern versions. Granted the techniques are usually limited to artificial selection (cross breeding, hybridization, grafting) and the new techniques are far more sophisticated, but we have been breeding our food for as long as we have had agriculture.
- Free of chemicals – see “organic” above. Nothing is free of chemicals. Everything is made up of chemicals including you, me, your children and pet cat. All food is made up of chemicals and a molecule doesn’t care whether it is derived from “natural” processes or built in a lab. The only important thing about a molecule is what is in it and its shape and those will be the same if the molecule is the same, no matter the source.
- Grown without Fertilizers or Pesticides. Again, not on any farm, anywhere - except perhaps on a subsistence farm in the third world which is doing an inadequate job of feeding the farmer who is running it. Fertilizers are everything in farming and Pest control is essential to keep yields above minimum levels. The difference is the source of the fertilizers or Pesticides not whether they are used or not. Organic farmers may use manure rather than direct nitrates but they are using a fertilizer. Oh, and by the way, the manure pile that fed a recent batch of sprouts in Germany may have been the source of the eColi breakout in Europe that killed some folks.
- It is better for you. There are really not any studies which demonstrate that to be the case. In fact any studies that are at all credible show no better nutrition profiles for organic over non-organically produced food. There are not as many studies as you would think as they are very difficult to do and it is important to understand why. We can tackle a study on organic food two ways. First we can do a basic nutritional chemical analysis – those studies have been done and overall there is no compelling evidence that organic food is better (one recent article here from the Telegraph in the UK: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/5932100/Organic-food-has-no-added-nutritional-benefit-says-Food-Standards-Agency.html). The second approach is much harder. Take a couple of thousand people, divide them into two groups. Feed one group only organic produce, feed the other group only non-organic produce. Make sure that the participants do not know which group they are in and make sure the individuals managing the data collection also do not know which group is which. Run the test for a suitable duration (say five years) and look at health outcomes after normalizing the data for demographics, lifestyle and other factors. Health factors to look for? Well, I would start with incidents of cancer and heart disease, life expectancy, perhaps neurological outcomes such as incidents of senile dementia? The bottom line is that such a test would be hugely difficult and take decades and given that from a nutrition point of view the foods are identical, well, it is a difficult study to justify.
- Tastes better. Based on what? Highly subjective but I have never seen a credible taste test which shows identifiable differences. If someone tells me they can taste the difference I am sure they believe they can but they know what they are eating and so could be predisposed to believe that their preferred food tastes better. Here is my challenge to those folks. Have the courage of your convictions – do a double blind taste test on your own. You can do it with a couple of friends, it won’t be scientific, but it might be instructive. Here is how to do it: Have a friend go to the market and pick up two sets (organic and non-organic) of the following items: Apples, Bananas, Tomatoes. Or, if you want, any three vegetables or fruits. Your friend must try diligently to make sure that the organic and non-organic look as much alike as possible without any noticeable blemishes. The same friend then must wash the produce and remove any labels of stickers from them. Two second friends will each carve up servings of the produce not knowing whether they are working on the organic or non-organic foods. They put them on plates labeled 1 and 2. You and as many others as you like then taste and vote on which tastes better. The results are tabulated by your second set of friends and reported back after the fact to the purchaser of the food who then assigns the results to the two identified groups. How will it turn out? Don’t have a clue. My prediction would be that with a large enough group (say 100 or more tasters) it will be a statistical tie. On the individual level it could go either way but my guess is that the perceived differences will be quite minor. Try it, nothing wrong with a bit of home science to keep life interesting.
- Better for the environment. Tough one as no farming techniques are environmentally pure. We have to farm, irrigate, fertilize, pest control, harvest, ship and store our food, all of which takes energy primarily in the form of fossil fuels. Still, according to Normal Borlaug, a Nobel Peace Prize winner for his work on feeding starving masses (agriculture scientist - saved over a billion people from starvation - look him up on Wikipedia). We can, with organic farming techniques, feed 4 billion people on this planet without mass deforestation (which would suck from an environmental point of view, I am thinking). Where do you want your kids to be on the side of the following equation: 7 Billion Population - 4 Billion sustainable. Almost 1 in 2 has to go...
So, back to my running group. One of my students asked why I got emotional about this sort of thing. Hmm... I have been in countries where the life expectancy is below 50. I have been in places where malnutrition is rampant. I have learned first hand the lesson that Norman Borlaug, so succinctly taught with the following quote: " some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things"
Ultimately Dr. Borlaug called it, the organic food movement is an elitist phenomenom manifesting itself in an affluent society. It is simple snobbery and I would encourage the snobs to get over it. There are people starving out there, folks. If you really want to make a difference, boycott organic and give the considerable money you save to the World Food Program (http://www.wfp.org/). Famine has returned to Africa, the only continent where many countries do not part practice modern agricultural techniques and a continent where organic food supporters have actively pushed for the banning of Gentically Modified Crops. I guess ideological purity trumps starving babies. The 20 - 30 % of your annual food budget that you waste on, in my opinion, a fiction, is needed elsewhere.
Little editorial comment here - do not take my word as gospel - I am an engineer and a businessman not an agricultural scientist, botanist or biochemist. These are my opinions only and while I like to think I have thought them through and researched them., I am not infallible. If, however, you choose to disagree with me, be prepared to discuss it, I would welcome such a discussion. These are matters of science, not emotion and science has a code for dealing with this sort of thing that helps us establish the truth. The scientific method is clear, pure, repeatable and completely unemotional. Let's base our discussions on critical thinking, not feelings.
Next time I will try to blog about something less controversial, still, I had to admit this was fun to write!
Paul
