So let’s consider organic food and how it might rate on the “healthy” scale.
I think organic is overrated but sure makes people feel better about themselves.
Go to them boutique grocery places, eschew eating at Mickey D’s, reject red meat, eat fish and arugula and bean sprouts, reject fried foods, bacon, BBQ, biscuits and gravy, all the good stuff that’s eaten by good people.
I say this cancer risk claim on “unhealthy” food that has fat and such is BS and mostly about fetishes. People need to eat the proper amount of a balanced not goofy diet and avoid organic food, for example, that might be fertilized naturally with manure from various sources, particularly if we be talkin’ fruits and produce. I say food produced with chemical fertilizer is safer and just as healthy. Plenty of Ames test positive naturally occurring chemicals in the food in th produce section and elsewhere, time to stop fretting about what’s healthy and unhealthy–eggs, red meat–good too and some veggies are way overrated for nutritional value.
For example naturally occurring rice and other veggies have food value, but are not great sources for protein, minerals and vitamins. Beyond that I won’t comment, since some people are so anxious about their food choices. I ate what my momma put on table when I was the oldest of ten kids and I eat what the lovely lady who cooks for me puts on the table. I am lucky to be so well cared for.
Sho nuff.
As for cancer risk, I REJECT THE AMERICAN CANCER SOCIETY CLAIM THAT ONE THIRD OF CANCER IS FROM TOBACCO, ONE THIRD FROM FOOD AND ONE THIRD FROM ENVIRONMENT–what a crock–cancer is a disease of aging, which doesn’t make food and environmental poisoning the culprit. Aging is not a surrogate for food and environment either.
Aging that matters for colon and breast and prostate cancers and other adult cancers, is about aging as in the internal cellular aging that compromises cell line reproduction (something about mitosis and bad telomeres) and immune elimination of bad cell lines from a declining immune system associated with age.
Sure, there are other factors for cancer, but food? Says who, and how, and don’t tell me bout LD 50 (that’s exposures that kill half the mice or rats) toxicology.
Besides the tumor thing is not on the up and up, they don’t look at the mice and rat tumors for cell type and grad the malignancy, they just count tumors in rodents bred to be more tumor prone.
http://www.science20.com/science_20/organic_food_does_not_reduce_cancer_risk-133093
My wife used to work for a company that took a massive survey of US farmers to gather effectiveness data on herbicides and pesticides. The “organic” farmers were considered a sort of control, but the vast majority of them farmed land that was adjacent to a modern farmer, and many of them used round up “around the house”. The circumstantial evidence seemed to indicate that successful organic farmers deliberately take full advantage of overspray, runoff, and other proximity effects. “Organic” is nothing more than a marketing buzzword.
The sad fact is, far from being healthier, organic farming methods can be downright dangerous. Fruits and vegetables are especially concerning because they are often eaten raw.
http://www.cgfi.org/2002/06/the-hidden-dangers-in-organic-food/
You say “All compounds are organic.” But later, you say “Organic compounds: Groups of elements bound together into compounds with carbon and hydrogen atoms.”
I agree with the latter, which disagrees a bit with the former; perhaps in that case you meant to say “All compounds are natural?”
just check out the lists of approved organic pesticides and tell me again just how healthy that stuff is to ingest … organic doesn’t mean no pesticides … it means approved ones …
I juist love the above observations which reminded me I also have a copy of a very informative text on the subject:
EXPOSING THE MYTHS By Graeme Platt
Spotty, runty, mineral deficient organic produce a sham
Just before Christmas I received a phone call from a lady who was not at all happy. She had heard I had not been flattering in my assessment of the quality of crops being produced by biodynamic and organic growers.
The call came not long after I had been to advise an organic grower who had spent over $40,000 on a crop that was a total failure. Instead of a harvestable crop he finished up with a few paddocks of weeds all properly bio registered at great expense. No weed, chemical fertiliser or toxic spray was ever to be used on his land. While these noble goals are great in theory, reality is a different matter. He had failed on three counts. First, the soil wasn’t rich enough in balanced nutrients required for the crop. Second, very few of the seeds he planted germinated and third, a sea of weeds beat those that did geminate.
A biodynamic guru had advised him to apply chemical fertiliser when nobody was around as a way out of his predicament. Both farming and horticulture have made some dreadful mistakes in the use of toxic mercuric compounds as fungicides and stable compounds such as DDT and Dieldrin as insecticides. These tragedies are sound reason for promoting and understanding the principles of elemental science and not rejecting them.
The spotty, runty, mineral-deficient, sickly produce promoted as health giving organic rult and vegetables is a sham.
The whole purpose of producing food is to provide a rich source of balanced essential elements in the form of digestible, carbohydrate and protein.
Starving crops of essential minerals professing it is in interest in human health and wellbeing is nonsense.
Many organic growers survive only because the land they are growing their crops on was fed minerals by three generations of farmers and horticulturists before them.
Vegetables are made up of 24 essential elements, all of which are inorganic. lt is ridiculous to claim any one carrot can be any more or less organic than another.
In third form science I learned that all things in the universe were made up of inorganic mineral atoms, which modern science has confirmed. Every object from our planet to the far reaches of space including moon rocks, space ships, carrots and cucumbers consist of inorganic mineral atoms.
The various atoms are bonded by positive-negative attraction to form the compounds of the universe, i.e. two atoms of hydrogen bonded with one atom of oxygen forms hydrogen oxide or water.
All compounds are organic
All compounds are made up of inorganic elements bonded with electrons. Some are very stable and last for eternity. Others, bound together with carbon and hydrogen atoms are very unstable, decompose very quickly and are called organic.
Whether a carrot is called organic or inorganic may appear semantic.
Promoting organic things as healthy and inorganic as a menace to good health is deceiving.
We cannot eat or drink organic compounds such as aviation gasoline, newspapers, rubber tyres. botulism. anthrax, ergot, the aids virus, methane, coal or cyanide.
Neither can they be promoted as health giving breakfast products on the strength of being organic.
We eat carrots, wheat, apricots and potatoes and drink apple juice because the balance of elements are in an unstable, digestible form.
Plants require 24 essential elements for metabolic processes.
Animals require 26. Fifteen of the 26 are regularly absent or not available in the correct proportions in the soil in which our food is grown.
Organic growers place great importance on the fact that all elements are toxic and use this excuse as justification for banning them.
All 26 elements can kill you
You can kill yourself with any one of the 26 essential elements.
There is no such thing as a toxin – there are only toxic doses.
Healthy living is not possible without all 26 elements.
The toxicity of any one element is diminished by the presence of the others in the correct proportion.
Describing essential minerals as artificial fertiliser just because they can be purchased by the sack is play on words. All minerals are natural and, with the exception of nuclear fission and fusion, mineral atoms cannot be manufactured, destroyed or in any way changed, only recycled and bonded into new compounds.
Fertilisers such as super phosphate are processed to ensure they are unstable and readily available as plant food.
The magic troika is hydrogen, carbon and oxygen. Using the energy from the sun and photosynthesis these three elements are synthesized into unstable organic carbohydrates in the form of sugars and starches.
The essential elements in soils are never balanced. A balance is achieved by plants accumulating those elements they require in the correct proportions.
The reason compost made from decomposing living things is such a wonderful aid is because it contains the right balance in an unstable form that is freely available to be utilised again by living plants,
While compost is the ultimate in garden fertilisers it has two weaknesses. First, it contains only the minerals it was made from and second, its use is impractical on a very large scale. lt is almost impossible to Feed a 100 hectare paddock and even if you could the concept of raiding 1,000 hectares to feed it is a flawed concept.
If there is little or no potassium, phosphate, magnesium, zinc, calcium, copper, cobalt, sodium, sulfur or selenium in the soil it will need to be applied to achieve healthy crops.
When the crop is sold the essential elements are removed and must be replaced. They can be replaced in a supplementary form as fertiliser.
The aim of horticulture and farming is to produce quality food containing the full complement of essential elements as unstable protein and carbohydrates so they may be used by the body.
This same philosophy should be utilised in the manufacture of’ fungicides, insecticides and herbicides.
Synthetic formulations manufactured from essential elements can be perfectly safe but they must be unstable, have a very short ‘half’ life (about 24 hours) and then decompose releasing their elements as plant and animal food. Bordeaux, one of the first fungicides widely used and a compound of water, copper-sulfate and calcium-carbonate was formulated to control botrytis in French vineyards. When Bordeaux breaks down the six elements (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, calcium, copper and sulphur) are released into the environment and are available as plant and animal food.
Poor health is a direct result of mineral deficiencies.
The effort people go to starve themselves of these is truly astonishing. The purpose of eating food is to obtain the elements and compounds required for healthy living and this is only possible through eating properly fed plant and animal products.
The health of a nation is in the hands of its gardeners and farmers. People can remain healthy only if the land which is used to produce their food is also healthy.
Definitions
Inorganic elements: all the elements of the periodic table.
Organic compounds: Groups of elements bound together into compounds with carbon and hydrogen atoms.
Atoms: a single element of the periodic table.
Essential elements: those elements of the periodic table that are the building blocks or catalysts required by living things.
Minerals: any naturally occurring solid element or compounds of elements of the periodic table at normal atmospheric pressure and heat.
Inorganic compounds: groups of elements of the periodic table bound together into compounds that are not organic.
Synthetic compounds: any group of elements bonded together by man.
Stable compound: those that do not decompose at normal atmospheric pressure, or with heat and light.
Unstable compounds: Compounds that decompose at normal atmospheric pressure. heat and light.