The biggest benefit claimed for organic food is that you know what you’re eating i.e. you’re not eating pesticides. Yet, the UK Government spends a bucket of money on a study of studies that ignores the key claim:
“There may be a difference in pesticide residues but they didn’t test for that in this paper, and there may be environmental differences but they didn’t test for that,” Emeritus Professor Truswell said.
Despite the fact that the study is largely meaningless because it ignores a key question, the media has a field day dissing another “middle-class” issue.
More darkly, why does the study ignore the key issue? Are they just stupid? And academic journals are full of rigorously conducted but meaningless or deceptive studies, so no surprise there. Or is it some agenda the bureaucrats are running on behalf of some interest group? Never believe that because something is funded by government that it is independent, as is claimed for this research.
One Comment
C’mon, you’re engaging in just as much spin as anyone else. There was a study that aimed to look at the nutrient levels of organically grown food vs that farmed using cheaper methods (which employs pesticides etc). They found no measurable difference in nutrients. That is what was found. Now, if someone wants to spin that to suggest that there is no difference between organic and non-organic they are clearly spinning the story, since the study didn’t address every concievable impact from food, just the nutrient levels.
Likewise it is equally ridiculous to suggest that the study ‘ignored the key issue’. It didn’t, it was aimed at answering a question about nutrients and it did so. The study itself makes no claims about overall health outcomes, and you are spinning the story (or more likely, not bothering to actually read the report and relying on someone else’s article about it as your primary source) by suggesting that the study ever intended to answer that question.
Look at this from the researchers perspective, there have been many claims about organic food having higher nutrional content, so this is a key question to get some objective information on. Having done the hard work, you get pillored as some kind of stooge for the man, becacuse you didn’t do every conceivable test all at once. It’s not like you can just wave a wand and do this kind of study, it takes a great deal of careful work.
When you are covering a story about scientific research, it pays to actually read the report and address the commentary at the aims in the report. There is a real story here about how the research has been reported, clearly the spin that this results means there is no different between the two alternative is un-supported by the evidence, but to do an equally terrible job on the flip side of the spin makes you just as bad.
No, I don’t think the scientists involved in this were stupid, but I think the general public is being made stupider and stupider by this kind of lazy, ignorant reporting of science that we see all the time in the media. There is a real story here, but you’ve completely missed the point.