Comments on: The Lowdown on Organic Food

By: teoroy

teoroy — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 21:12:06 +0000

I would love to hear her reply/

By: edward

edward — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:11:29 +0000

Also organic pesticides do not harm and pollute the earth , i think thats a pretty good +

By: edward

edward — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 03:09:26 +0000

when you say conventional does that include Genetically modified foods also, because if it does i highly disagree with that. frankenstein gene corn no thanks

By: Michiko Strowe

Michiko Strowe — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:22:12 +0000

I have a blog with blogger. I have registered my blog using a gmail account. Now, I want to use a new gmail account and I wanted to import my whole blog along with the posts and comments to this new gmail id.. . Please tell me, is this possible and how can it be done?.

By: Eric Thurston

Eric Thurston — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 05:43:16 +0000

Denise,
RE raw foods, I recommend the book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human by Richard W. Wrangham

The author makes a pretty good case for the hypothesis that pre-humans had the use of fire and that this had a significant role in human evolution. The gist of the argument is an argument that humans do best on cooked food because we evolved eating cooked food.

Anyway, thanks for the enlightening blog.

Eric

By: Dana

Dana — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:54:40 +0000

Oh and even if petroleum does come out of the ground, I tend to not think of it as natural *above ground* because that’s not where you find it in most areas of the world. The earth’s crust has to leak before it will come up. What’s “natural” to organisms on top of the earth’s crust tends to be things that come from on top of the earth’s crust. People like to play games with words here and I ain’t going along.

By: Dana

Dana — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 04:53:17 +0000

One advantage that organic pesticides (insect/herb/fungi) have over synthetic no matter how toxic either is, is that many of them are made from biological sources. In the long run they are what’s going to be used on produce because if the Peak Oil folks are right, petroleum will become too expensive for most applications over the next several decades. Might as well get used to natural controls now.

It’s going to suck trying to find good fungicides when we hit peak copper, but there are other ways to control fungus.

But at bottom people need to start thinking of food production as a biological process, not a mechanistic one. I think that will have the greatest influence over whether we can continue to look to plant foods as a source of nourishment rather than have them become a source of poison. There are more ways to control pests than by spraying them.

By: Another Halocene Human

Another Halocene Human — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 11:11:35 +0000

Also, re: myth #2: some food crops attract some truly nasty fungi. You might be eating mycotoxins with your organic strawberries.

Soooo totally agree with myth #1. Worker treatment is very important to me, but few in the US seem to care. “Organic” is a loosely-defined term that ultimately rests on the “vital essence of soil” theory of biology (ie, a defunct one) and is hence meaningless. Sometimes organic methods are safer for the farmer. Sometimes conventional and organic methods are the same! Most farmers I know don’t want to die from huffing 3000x the safe level of pesticides and hate being beholden to Monsanto, too. In the US we have big, structural problems which are mostly about power, money, and politics. The little guys at the USDA were right to resist tacking a pointless “Organic” sticker on the same, old migrant slave labor picked produce grown on the same, old depleted soil. Btw, still waiting for proof of the nutritional superiority of organics … I hear crickets.

I also hear crickets are good eatin’.

By: Ray Templin

Ray Templin — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:10:43 +0000

Question: What is the difference between “food-grade hydrogen peroxide” and “regular” hydrogen peroxide that I buy in the store? And, where can I get the food-grade hydrogen peroxide?

Thanks.

By: Theo Richel

Theo Richel — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 22:37:04 +0000

Hello,
I admire your work wrt the China Study very much, but wrt Bruce Ames I wonder whether you understood him right. When Ames (and Gold) talk about natural pesticides, i.e. chemicals that show in toxicological tests to be just as carcinogenic or more then man made chemicals they are not referring to some sort of products of natural origin that farmers spray on their products, but to chemicals that the plants make for their own good, to protect themselves from attacks by insects, molds etc. Plants do not grow for our sake, but want a life of their own. Where man made chemicals are heavily regulated and we ingest only milli or micrograms of them, nature still produces similar substances that we consume without any regulation in quantities that are hundred to thousandfold bigger. Ames is indeed the inventor of the Ames test, but I consider his work on carcinogens more important (Starting with ‘Dietary carcinogens/pesticides’ in Science 1984). Since Ames claims that natural and man made pesticides have a similar toxicological properties and that there is no health benefit in organic food consumption, on the contrary. I think he is right. The whole debate is probably about nothing since cancers is (again Ames) probably caused by endogenous mechanisms in the human body that have biochemical similarities to the hazards of the man made or natural pesticides but are quantitatively very much more important. Each cell produces carcinogenic substances all the time. We have billions of them, and they can finally break down a human body. Ingested chemicals may do the same qualitatively, but are quantitatively hardly important. That is imho the point Ames tries to make.