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  • From: "Saor Stetler" <sstetler@earthlink.net>
  • To: <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Is Organic Food Really Healthier? (Yes)
  • Date: Wed, 23 Apr 2008 23:41:54 -0700

Is Organic Food Really Healthier?

By Deborah Rich, Earth Island Journal
Posted on April 23, 2008, Printed on April 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/81773/

Don't ask the US federal government whether there are any health benefits to
eating organic food. It won't tell. No mere coincidence, then, that no
pictures of farmers or farms (or fertilizers or pesticides) appear in the
USDA food pyramid logo. The federal government encourages the consumption of
more fruits, vegetables, and grains, but stops short of evaluating the
farming systems that produce these same foods. An apple is an apple
regardless of how it has been grown, the USDA food pyramid suggests, and the
only take-home message is that we should all be eating more apples and less
added sugars and fats.

But this message may be too simplistic. Over the past decade, scientists
have begun conducting sophisticated comparisons of foods grown in organic
and conventional farming systems. They're finding that not all apples (or
tomatoes, kiwis, or milk) are equal, especially when in comes to nutrient
and pesticide levels. How farmers grow their crops affects, sometimes
dramatically, not only how nutritious food is but also how safe it is to
eat. It may well be that a federal food policy that fails to acknowledge the
connection between what happens on the farm and the healthfulness of foods
is enough to make a nation sick.

The Results Are In

In the late 1990s, researcher Anne-Marie Mayer looked at data gathered by
the British government from the 1930s to the 1980s on the mineral contents
of 20 raw fruits and vegetables. She found that levels of calcium,
magnesium, copper, and sodium in vegetables, and of magnesium, iron, copper,
and potassium in fruit had dropped significantly.

The 50-year period of Mayer's study coincides with the post World War II
escalation of synthetic nitrogen and pesticide use on the farm. These
powerful agri-chemicals allowed farmers to bypass the management-intensive
methods of maintaining soil fertility by replenishing soil organic matter
with cover crops, manure, and compost, and of controlling pests with crop
rotation and inter-cropping. Reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides
became a defining characteristic of conventional farming, while farmers who
eschewed the use of agri-chemicals came to be considered organic.

In 2004, Donald R. Davis, a research associate with the Biochemical
Institute at the University of Texas, Austin, published a similar analysis
of data collected by the USDA in 1950 and again in 1999 on the levels of 13
nutrients in more than 40 food crops. Davis found that while seven nutrients
showed no significant changes, protein declined by six percent; phosphorous,
iron, and calcium declined between nine percent and 16 percent; ascorbic
acid (a precursor of Vitamin C) declined 15 percent; and riboflavin declined
38 percent. Breeding for characteristics like yield, rapid growth, and
storage life at the expense of taste and quality were likely contributing to
the decline, Davis hypothesized. The "dilution effect," whereby
fertilization practices cause harvest weight and dry matter to increase more
rapidly than nutrient accumulation can occur, probably also played a role,
Davis suggested.

Meanwhile, researchers at the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania were seeing a
tradeoff between use of synthetic fertilizers and food nutrient values in
the Institute's Farming System Trial (FST). The FST is the longest-running
side-by-side comparison of organic and conventional farming systems in the
US.

"We looked at the major and minor nutrients of oat leaves and seeds, grown
after 22 years of differentiation under conventional and organic systems,"
says Paul Hepperly, research and training manager at the Institute. "The
organic matter in the conventional system did not change over the 22 years,
but we got about a one percent increase in organic matter over the baseline
every year in the organic system. We found a direct correlation between the
increase of organic matter and the amount of individual minerals in the oat
leaves and seeds. The increase in minerals ranged from about seven percent
for potassium, up to 74 percent for boron. On average, it was between 20 and
25 percent for all the elements we looked at, and we looked at nitrogen,
phosphorous, potassium, calcium, magnesium, sulfur, iron, manganese, copper,
boron, and zinc. The production practices used on these oats was completely
the same the year they were planted -- the plots varied only by the legacy
of what had happened to the soil as a result of the previous farming
practices. This showed how dramatic the soil change had been and its effect
on the nutrient content of the plant. We've done these tests not only on
oats but also on wheat, corn, soybeans, tomatoes, peppers, and carrots, and
we consistently find that the organic heritage improves soil and improves
the mineral content of the food products."

Probably due in part to a fertilizer effect, and partly because the use of
chemical pesticides dampens the mobilization of a plant's own defenses,
conventionally grown whole foods also often have lower levels of
antioxidants and other beneficial phytochemicals than the same foods grown
organically.

Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center and former executive
director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of Sciences,
maintains a database of all the studies published since 1980 that compare
the nutrient levels of organic and conventional foods. Benbrook screens the
trials based on criteria for experimental design, agronomic practices, and
analytical methods, eliminating those he deems not sufficiently rigorous.
His analysis of food comparison studies shows that, on average,
conventionally grown fruits and vegetables have 30 percent fewer
antioxidants than their organically grown counterparts. This makes enough of
a difference, says Benbrook, that "consumption of organic produce will
increase average daily antioxidant intake by about as much as an additional
serving of most fruits and vegetables."

The public health implications of farming methods that restore food nutrient
density are tantalizing. Several studies released in 2007 suggest that
moving US agriculture toward organic practices could help to reduce the
incidence of some of our nation's most debilitating and costly chronic
diseases.

At the University of California at Davis, researchers compared organic and
conventional tomatoes grown in Davis's long-term farming trial. They found
that 10-year mean levels of quercetin were 79 percent higher in organic
tomatoes than in conventional tomatoes, and levels of kaempferol were 97
percent higher. Quercetin and kaempferol are flavonoids, which
epidemiological studies suggest offer protection from cardiovascular
disease, cancer, and other age-related diseases.

Another UC Davis study compared the nutritional profiles of organic and
conventional kiwis at harvest and during extended cold storage. The
researchers found that "all the main mineral constituents were more
concentrated in the organic kiwifruits, which also had higher ascorbic acid
and total phenol content, resulting in a higher antioxidant activity."

Similarly, in a greenhouse study in Spain, researchers not only found higher
mineral levels in organically grown sweet peppers compared to conventionally
grown peppers, but also that the organic sweet peppers had more than 1.5
times the level of carotenoids found in the conventional peppers.
Epidemiological studies indicate that consumption of carotenoid-rich fruits
and vegetables reduces the risk of cardiovascular disease and some cancers,
and helps to slow the development of age-related macular degeneration and
cataracts.

A study led by Lukas Rist, head of research at the Paracelsus Hospital in
Switzerland, demonstrated how farm practices affect health even several
levels up the food chain. Rist analyzed milk samples from 312 breastfeeding
mothers. He found that mothers consuming at least 90 per cent of their dairy
and meat from organic sources have 36 percent higher levels of rumenic acid
in their breast milk than mothers eating conventional dairy and meat.
Rumenic acid is one of a group of compounds that nutritional research
suggests have anti-carcinogenic, anti-diabetic, and immune-modulating
effects, and that favorably influence body fat composition.

Hay Belly Nation

Eager as we are to connect the dots between specific nutrients and specific
health benefits, we're still a long way from being able to understand or
predict the effect of raising or lowering nutrient levels in one food or
another. As Michael Pollan writes in his new book In Defense of Food, "Even
the simplest food is a hopelessly complicated thing to analyze, a virtual
wilderness of chemical compounds, many of which exist in intricate and
dynamic relation to one another, and all of which together are in the
process of changing from one state to another."

Long-term human feeding trials, meanwhile, are notoriously difficult to
control, and, though epidemiological studies show a correlation between
eating fruits and vegetables and decreased incidence of disease, these
studies don't identify which compounds in the fruits and vegetables
correspond with which health effects.

But even granting the many gaps in our knowledge of nutrient and health
interactions, reducing the nutrient density of our whole foods seems a poor
public health gamble. Americans already have trouble consuming the
recommended daily amounts of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.
Diminishing the nutrient levels in the servings we do eat would seem to only
compound our dietary problems.

Brian Halweil, senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, says that
based on data from the Centers for Disease Control, "Thirty percent or more
of the US population ingests inadequate levels of magnesium, vitamin C,
vitamin E, and vitamin A, all nutrients we get from plants."

Doctors don't see many patients walk into their clinics with obvious
deficiency-related illnesses like scurvy, says Dr. Alan Greene, attending
physician at Stanford University's Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. But
doctors are, he says, seeing a lot of suboptimal intake of nutrients. "For
instance, a huge percentage of the population doesn't get its recommended
levels of calcium. Pregnant adult women should be getting 1000 milligrams of
calcium. By the time a healthy baby is born, the baby will have about 30,000
milligrams of calcium in its body, and all of that has to come from mom's
diet or mom's body. The average mom is only getting about 700 milligrams a
day during pregnancy, so that gap is mostly coming out of her bones, and is
related to the osteoporosis we're seeing later."

Greene encourages patients to include fresh produce in their diets and to
eat organic as much as possible. "I'll talk about how fruits and vegetables
are really important, and that when you choose organic you're getting more
of the great stuff, less of the bad stuff."

Unfortunately (or fortunately for those of us who like to eat), we haven't
yet been able to design nutrient supplements that provide the same benefits
as eating whole foods. "In all well-designed dietary intervention trials,
where a carefully monitored amount of nutrients -- vitamin C, vitamin E,
antioxidants, etc. -- were delivered to the animals or people in the form of
fresh whole foods versus the same levels in the form of supplements, the
animals or people who ate the whole foods universally responded better and
were healthier," says Benbrook of the Organic Center.

Ironically, less nutrient dense foods may be partly why we're eating more
and more. Phytochemicals contribute to the satisfaction we derive from
foods. Some contribute to foods' flavor profiles, while others, like
resveratrol, help trigger satiety. It could even be that that second helping
is an instinctive attempt to secure sufficient micronutrients.

"In cattle and animals, this is known as hay belly," says Hepperly at the
Rodale Institute. "If your hay gets rained on, you wind up with very low
quality hay because the water leaches out all the nutrients. You'll see
animals eating more of this hay than they normally would. They get these big
bellies, and they're unhealthy, but they're just trying to get their
nutrients. Ranchers know that if they have animals with hay belly, they have
poor quality food. What we've done with the erosion of nutrient content in
our foods -- what we've done with additives, processing, and artificial
production methods -- is that we have basically produced a hay belly
nation."

Pesticides for Breakfast

The toxicity of many of the chemical pesticides used by conventional farmers
is of little dispute. Indeed, the EPA's pesticide registration process is
based upon identifying a level of exposure that is acutely toxic to lab
animals, then working backwards to identify an exposure level that the EPA
feels poses an acceptable threat to human and environmental health.

As our understanding of the body's intricate biochemistry advances, however,
EPA-sanctioned levels of pesticide exposure are becoming harder to swallow.

Caroline Cox is the research director for the Center for Environmental
Health based in Oakland, California. One of her favorite examples of the
complex interactions of pesticides with bodily functions comes from a study
undertaken by Texas Tech University researchers.

"The researchers were looking at possible hormonal effects of the herbicide
Roundup, and they looked at the production of male sex hormones," Cox says.
"Before a sex hormone can be made, cholesterol has to be carried by a
special 'dump-truck' molecule from the blood vessel to the place in the cell
where the hormone is synthesized. What the researchers found was that one of
the ingredients in Roundup interferes with the production of that dump-truck
carrier molecule. You'd have trouble dreaming up something so complicated.
It's no wonder that it has taken us decades to identify effects like that."

Cox and other toxicology experts disagree that "the dose makes the poison,"
the rationale underlying the EPA approach to regulating pesticides. It may
be that there is no safe dose for many of the pesticides we are regularly
exposed to.

"If you think of pesticide use starting right around World War II, since
that time science has progressed and researchers have gotten more and more
sophisticated in the kinds of science that they can do," she says. "And what
they are doing is identifying effects of pesticides at lower and lower
exposure levels. For example there are studies on amphibians that find
effects from atrazine [used to control weeds in almost two-thirds of all US
corn and sorghum acreage] at the tenth of a part per billion level, which is
such a tiny amount that it is almost impossible to grasp just how small an
amount that is. That was a study done at UC Berkeley, and what they found
was this condition called intersex in the frogs, meaning that the frogs had
both male and female sex organs."

A glance at the data gathered for the USDA Pesticide Data Program reveals
that even at breakfast we consume several servings of pesticides. In 2005,
88 percent of apples, 92 percent of milk samples, 52 percent of orange juice
samples, 67 percent of wheat samples, and 75 percent of water samples were
contaminated with pesticides ranging from herbicides to post-harvest
fungicides. None of these pesticides we eat for breakfast gets a clean bill
of health. The EPA lists some as probable carcinogens, and others as
affecting reproductive and nervous systems.

Exactly how each of us tolerates daily low doses of pesticides will vary
according to our genetic heritage, the other industrial toxins we're exposed
to, our health, and our age. The very youngest and oldest of us will
probably suffer the most damage from pesticide exposure. "At particular
moments of development, the immune and neurological systems of infants are
profoundly vulnerable to exposure to chemicals," says Benbrook at the
Organic Center. "And in the case of the elderly, their livers don't work as
well at detoxifying chemicals as they did in the middle part of their lives,
and they often have weaker immune systems."

Logically, the more often we can eat food grown without pesticides, the
fewer pesticides we'll consume. The connection between food choices and
pesticide consumption was demonstrated in a 2006 study led by Chensheng Lu
of the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University. Lu measured the
metabolites of organophosphorus pesticides in children's urine as the
children alternated between eating conventional and organic diets for five
days at a stretch. (Organophosphorous pesticides account for about 70
percent of insecticide compounds applied in the United States, and are known
to interfere with the nervous systems of insects, animals, and humans.)
Results of the study showed that metabolites of two organophosphorus
pesticides commonly used in agriculture decreased to nondetectable levels
when the children's diets were switched to organic and quickly escalated to
detectable levels when the children returned to their normal conventional
diets.

Daily doses of pesticides are particularly unappetizing given the existence
of a highly productive model of farming that doesn't need these toxic
chemicals. "If you could give me a magic wand and I could make any changes
that I want, I would have the EPA researching, developing, and helping
farmers implement sustainable agricultural processes so they don't need
pesticides," Cox says. "There are better ways to manage pests. Organic is a
great example that it can be done."

200,000 Farmers Needed

Cox's wish hints at what official acknowledgement of the interaction between
farming practices and the healthfulness of our food could mean. As a
country, we're stuck in the mode of regulating and mitigating the negative
effects of conventional farming. We could, instead, be spending our time and
resources expanding and improving upon the organic model of food production
and removing the structural barriers that limit regular access to organic
food to a geographic and economic elite.

"Organic will be five to eight percent of the US food economy in the next
couple of years," says Bob Scowcroft, executive director of the Organic
Farming Research Foundation (OFRF). "But to go from five percent to 40 is
another story. That will involve policy work and institutional change."

For starters, the nation's agricultural colleges will need to develop the
capacity to train tens of thousands more organic farmers. "Organic systems
are more complex and biologically intricate compared to a conventional
agri-chemical based production system," says Hepperly of the Rodale
Institute. "Right now, the official number of organic farmers is approaching
20,000 in the United States. If we were going to have 30 percent of US
agriculture in organic, we'd have to have 200,000 organic farmers. We're
talking an enormous ramp-up in our education system."

For that to happen, Congressional action is sorely needed to redirect the
Farm Bill away from status quo conventional farming and toward farm and food
healthfulness. "We need growing and eating organic to become a matter of
public policy because, right now, we are publicly funding the other
direction: primarily corn and soybeans -- and the atrazine, the genetically
modified organisms, and the organophosphates that go along with those
crops," Dr. Alan Greene says.

"Overall, the USDA has been spending about $2 billion per year on research,
extension, education, economics and statistics. Less than one percent is
specifically directed at the needs of organic production, processing, and
marketing," Mark Lipson of the Organic Farming Research Foundation testified
before the newly formed House Agriculture Subcommittee on Horticulture and
Organic Agriculture in April 2007.

The list of structural barriers goes on. Because there isn't good regional
market and pricing data for organic crops, organic growers pay a five
percent penalty surcharge on crop insurance premiums. When organic growers
incur an insured loss, they are repaid at conventional crop prices even
though conventional prices are usually far lower than organic prices. And
without solid third party data to back up their estimates, organic farmers
have difficulty convincing loan officers that their projected yields and
revenues are reasonable.

Many regions lack the distribution infrastructure even to supply organic
farmers with compost. "Organic is highly geocentric," says Steve Diver, who
worked for 18 years for the National Sustainable Agriculture Information
Service (ATTRA). "The organic infrastructure sucks to hell for most of the
heartland of the country." In California, Diver says, farmers can pick up
the phone and order whatever soil amendments they need, in whatever
quantities, from a local dealer who will deliver the goods right to the
farm. But in many parts of the South, five to six farmers have to band
together, order a 22-ton semi-truck load from out of state, then off-load
the product into their own vehicles and truck it home.

Organic meat producers lack access to slaughterhouses. "You can't sell meat
unless it's been slaughtered by USDA packing houses, and these
slaughterhouses are mostly at CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding
operations]," says Scowcroft. CAFO slaughterhouses generally won't deal with
the smaller numbers of animals that most organic meat producers are
slaughtering at any one time. Even when they do, the CAFO slaughterhouse has
to first be steam-cleaned and sterilized before animals can be slaughtered
there for the meat to still qualify as certified organic. "And even then,"
says Scowcroft, "there are a lot of chemicals used in the sterilization and
the cleaning process, so what you really need are dedicated certified
organic slaughter rooms."

You Can Ask, But They Won't Tell

Try to get guidance from the federal government on the potential health
benefits of eating organic, and you'll find your questions quickly and
politely deflected. The US Department of Health and Human Services will
defer to its Food and Drug Administration (FDA). FDA spokespeople will say
that "organic" is a term used by the USDA, not the FDA, and that the FDA has
no policy on organics. The USDA will say that its mandate does not extend to
passing judgement on the relative safety and nutritional benefits of organic
versus conventional foods, and that the USDA's task is simply to regulate
use of the "certified organic" label.

With that passing of the apple, the federal government excuses itself from
exploring whether conventional farming practices compromise the nutritional
benefits of whole foods, and whether modern organic farming offers a model
of food production that conveys significant health benefits. It's anyone's
guess how many more studies will be needed before the relative merits of
foods produced in different farming systems can become a topic of discussion
among federal food and health officials. Agri-chemical companies led by the
Monsanto will certainly use their considerable influence to delay that day
as long as possible.

In the meantime, we will keep eating -- but we need to ask just how well?

Deborah Rich raises olives and two children in Monterey County, California,
and frequently writes about the interaction of human nature and nature for
the San Francisco Chronicle.







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