A blog of aggregated miscellanea and things I like uncovered from my daily travails. I'm @jacobjay, a peripatetic designer/developer of British persuasion, having interests in gastronomy, fashion, technology, interiors and sustainability. I'm currently living between New Delhi and France, working on a Lua web platform and e-commerce. I dig Macs, mountain biking and smelly cheese.
BBC News: Organic ‘has no health benefits’
This news paints a narrow picture of an important and much wider subject. “Organic” is an abused and misused term that encompasses many ethical and philosophical approaches reaching far beyond an individual’s short-term health. Whilst the BBC went with a misleading headline the Telegraph got it right: “Organic food has no added nutritional benefit”. Breaking it down…
• Nutrition is but one property of health. It’s important to emphasise that the cited review is suggesting *only* that organic is no more or less nutritionally beneficial. It is misleading to say organic food is no more healthy than non-organic.
• ‘Organic’ has become a perceived label of ‘goodness’, but a consumer must be careful to assess such labels for hyperbole.
• Bad food is unhealthy whether or not it is organic, which is pretty much all processed food (fast food, junk “food”).
• Organic food does have less contamination from hormones, preservatives and pesticides that are used in industrial-scale production, and may thus be considered healthier as a result of reduced longer-term impact of exposure to such toxins.
• Obviously there’s no significant harm in eating unhealthily sometimes, or from consuming small quantities of toxins. Our bodies are very capable of eliminating bad stuff, but it’s reasonable to reckon that to do so continuously leads to longer term subtle or pronounced effects on health.
• The most nutritious food is whole (unrefined and unprocessed) and fresh. Healthy food is furthermore grown somewhere trustworthy (i.e. local) without contamination. This includes movements such as slowfood, wholefoods, and rawfoods with community, organic and biodynamic production. I’ll call this ‘real’ food.
• Small-scale local farming of ‘real’ food (tending to be organic) is undoubtedly better for the environment and livelihood of the producers, restoring crop diversity and also reducing the exposure of the general population to toxins from pesticides in the environment.
• ‘Real’ food grown on a smaller scale (again, likely to be organic) could be more nutritious than from large scale farms, whether those are organic or not. But this would be dependant on many variables, and the difference may be small.
• You may find that ‘real’ foods taste better, which may for some be a reason to choose it.
• ‘Real’ food tends not to be genetically modified, however the health effects of this is again subjective, and can only be used as “better safe than sorry” argument for organic until the effects of these techniques are known.
Finally dietary requirements vary from person to person, but health is both physical and mental, and diet affects both.
