Organic Panic: A Dietary Dilemma

amount of faith and worldview wrapped up in this topic. Identity. Yeah, your identity, how you fit into the world. Uh. And also though we have studies a kind of pointing to both sides of the argument, the argument of organic foods. Yep, we are going to talk about organic food in particular. We're gonna look at the scientific studies into its nutrition value, also it's effect on the environment and whether pesticides do anything to us or not. Yeah, and we're approaching this

from a you know, a middle path standpoint here. So again we're probably gonna piss off everybody. I have a feeling that like, if you are hard line in any one of those camps you're going to be disappointed. But if you're just kind of like I was, approaching this like I'm like, you know, I go to the grocery store and I see organic and I go, yeah, maybe, but you know, I also have to like weigh my

concerns about costs. Uh. This is maybe going to be a better episode for those people, people who haven't made up their mind yet and are just kind of generally curious about the science behind agriculture in the United States. Yeah, and if nothing else, again, we're gonna approach it with an open mind and it can be a conversation starter. I'm sure everyone will have some feedback on this because if nothing else, everybody eats, that's what we all do every day. Well, we have to pick out new foods

with which to essentially construct our new bodies. Were to try and put kind of a weird sci fi spin on it, we're all kind of we're like that mad scientist who's lost his body and it's a brain and it's a brain in a jar and he has to go, oh, I need a new body. What am I gonna do. I'm gonna build it out of corpses, and I'm gonna build it out of machine parts or some sort of energy force field. We have that similar situation, except we have to choose more These carrots are those carrots? Do

I do? Do I do? Meet? Do I do? Um? You know? Sweet? What am I building my new body out of tombstone pizzas? I don't know? Uh? Yeah, I'd say a good like percent of my body is maybe tombstone and red barren um. And so okay, we recognize that you may have some strong feelings about this, so we figured this is a good point for us to at the top remind you of all those places where you can tell us what you think about organic food

and what you think about our take on it. So we are stuff to blow your mind, and we are on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram now on all of those will blow the mind. Uh, come visit us check out the stuff that we're posting there. We don't just post about our own podcasts. We also do videos and we write articles that stuff goes up there, but we also try to curate all the bizarre audity science stuff that comes across our path as we're doing research throughout

the week. So that's a great place to follow us and see all the kind of like neat, weird stuff that we come up with in our travels, and of course there's always stuff to blow your mind. Dot com is the mothership. That's where we'll find all the podcast episodes, videos, blog post links out to those social media accounts, and hey, expect a facelift for that website in the months ahead. Everything's getting redone, spruced up, the little more user friendly. Um,

we're looking forward to that. We had a very exciting talk the other day about a potential news stuff to blow your mind logo, which I think I'm very excited about. Looks very cool. Okay, so organic food, I feel like the best place for us to start is just sort of an introduction into not what it is, but the trajectory of how it became a part of our culture. And a lot of this episode will be US centric

because we're both Americans. We live in America, and a lot of the science seems to be done here, even though a lot of the food is grown internationally. So let's go back traditional farming before the Industrial Revolution in the twentieth century. Think The Witch the movie The Witch Right, and they're they're growing their pathetic little farm in Massachusetts

and they're trying to survive. Right. That's organic farming. Uh, that's and that's basically what we're talking about going back to here because Uh, in the nineteen thirties there were two British scientists named Lady Eve Balfour and Albert Howard, and they started looking at the role of agricultural production in healthy food, and in particular, Howard recommended recycling all of our waste, you know, including animal waste and human waste basically sewage, so that we could fee the soil

on our farms. Around the mid twentieth century, incomes the influx of chemical pesticides and fertilizers, they started to become widespread and organic farming actually took on this weird kind of cultish aspect. Like other farmers sort of looked at it like why why are you still bothering with that? Like, and when they would say things like well, you know, I'm worried about these pesticides and the health effects or whatever. Uh,

they were looked at as proponents of doom and gloom. Well, you know, I think it's one thing it's important keep in mind about agriculture in general, is just to remind everyone that agriculture itself is essentially unnatural, and it's it's taking these plants that grow, you know, in a natural balance, in a natural situation with other plants, taking and then

growing them exclusively in a you know, a plot of land. Yeah, totally, Like just think of like and we'll talk about these later, but like even organic practices like rotating crops in a particular way or using predatory animals to pick off the pests rather than using pesticides, like you're affecting the ecosystem one way or the other. Yeah, you're still manipulating the environment.

And so what we're talking about with agriculture in channel, it's just like to what degree or manipulating the environment, what tools are using to manipulate the environment, and on what scale. Absolutely so in the sixties and seventies, this movement really picks up the organic farming movement. And the reason why is because this book comes out by Rachel Carson called Silent Spring. It sounds like a horror movie. But no, maybe it is. Maybe it's written as a

horror movie. Organic food produce organic Yeah, maybe wow, that that's write that one down. Put a copyright next to it. Uh So, Basically, this book emphasized all the problems with pesticides. At the same time, the United States was facing two problems, water pollution from farming and the energy crisis in the seventies. So farmers were like, well, maybe we will start using fewer michals just because of these things going on. Now,

I'm gonna burn through history real quick here. Okay, nineteen eighty the U. S Department of Agriculture starts actually getting interested in organic farming, and they publish a report on it. A year later, in nineteen eighty one, the American Society for Agronomy argued that organic farming contributed more to sustainable agriculture. However, they had clashes with the Reagan administration and so some of that stuff didn't necessarily make it to the public

as quickly as they wanted it to. By the time we get to the late eighties and the nineties, and I remember these these times, well, this was really when I started first hearing a lot about organic farming, and I was a teenager. Um, the environmental movement really started to gain sway. There were practices and emphasis on maintaining bio diversity, animal welfare, and fair trade practices. That gets

us to two thousand two. This is when the U. S d A created what are known as the National Organic Standards, and those overrite any state regulations and create the labeling system that we use now. So when you go to the grocery store and you look at a label on produce or meat or whatever about what it's

organic content, that's because of these National Organic Standards. And I'm gonna buzz through them real quick, but they're important to think about when you, like, I'm glad I read this stuff next time in the grocery store, I'm definitely gonna consider it. Okay, if it says a hundred percent organic, that means the product was made only with organic products. Products that say they are just organic, but they don't say a hundred percent organic, they have to have ent

organic ingredients. And then if they quote contain organic products, then they have to have at least seventy percent organic ingredients in them. If there's under seventy, you don't get a label, no label for you. You You don't you don't get to advertise this. Now. One thing that's important to remember that I read here is that the U. S A does not regulate farmers who are producing. I believe

it's under five thousand units. So you know, if you're just like if you have a small farm and you go to a farmer's market and you're selling your wares, I suppose you could make your own stickers that say organic, even if you're you know, spraying chemicals all over them.

That seems unlikely right now. And on the chemical note, it is worth noting here, I think it's important that when we're talking about organic farming and conventional farming, because because you know, it comes back to the whole thing like like what is organic often feels like a weird label because it's not like the alternative is inorganic, so you're eating metal. But anyway, so, conventional farmers they can apply any pesticide approved for use in the United States. Uh,

it doesn't mean they can just apply anything. There's oldest Okay, organic farmers they can't use all of the same chemicals. Now that doesn't mean organic farmers, um, you know, allow insect pests and weeds to just run rampant. Uh. And and they can also use pesticides and weed killers, but they have a smaller list of approved substances to use. Right So when you're buying organic, it doesn't necessarily mean

pesticide free. It just means different pesticides. And there's something to be said about that too, that will will delve into a little bit more later in the episode as well, and that like, you can be growing crops organically in soil that maybe used to have pesticides, and those pesticides can stick around for a couple of years. Indeed, so here we are. It's twice sixteen, and food safety is still a concern, right, We're all worried about it. Especially.

I thought of you quite a bit during this episode because you have a young child, and I would imagine that, uh, you know, if I were a parent, I would be thinking what should I put in this little person's body? Right? Yeah, I mean that that is always that has been on our minds since that I came into a lot of terrible way to go about talking about feeding a child.

But yes, yeah, I mean, well, you're you have all this, all all of this emotion and energy and time and money invested in this child, and you want, you absolutely want everything to be best for the child, and then you find yourself in the situation where you're like a dude, he wants he wants these susages. Well, maybe maybe soysagees in a good example, because I feel like most of

the soysage options are probably organic. But al right, so let's see, you're buying fruit because the kid eats the colossal amount of fruit, and you're like, do I get them the organic bananas and the normal bananas? I want him to have the best, But doesn't make that much of a difference, And then you end up, yeah, you gotta you gotta think about how this colossal amount of fruit he's eating costs money, and then you if you if I get the organic? Sometimes I feel like I

doubt myself. Am I engaging in his magical thinking? Here? Am I sort of curbing my bets like someone who just goes ahead and prays to a few different gods in case they're there, you know, like, in case it makes the difference, I'll go ahead and spend the money on the organic. But is there any is there any

science backing me up on this? So if you're like Robber and are out there and maybe you're thinking about that for yourself, or maybe you're thinking about it for your children or or jeesus, I don't know, Like I imagine some people even think about this with their pets. To write like organic food and pet food is probably a big deal. UH, because as well discussed too, it's like gets, they're they're sort of different sides to want

you buy organic. They're sort of the there the user uh ended the version of it like houses affecting me, houses affecting the child or the pet. But then there's also the production level of it. You want to you're buying a product that is the end result of one version of the agricultural industry, and you are buying a product in theory that reflects your ideals for that industry. It's actually a perfect segue into paper that I looked

into for this episode. UH. It in particular looked at the advertising of organic food and uh specifically how it highlighted both personal and environmental concerns in tandem. UH. And now that way is the most influential way to get consumers to buy organic food, especially when the promotional messages align with the core values of consumers culture. Right so here in America, UH, where we align with what in the article is referred to as egoism. UH. And we

like to think that we align with altruism as well. Right, And those are the two ways sure fire ways to get somebody to buy organic food is to make them think about themselves and what's good for them, and then to make them think that they're thinking about the welfare

of others around them. Uh. And so if you get that's the one two punch that will sell organic every time apparently, and selling organic, I mean that's that's a key point here as well, because it's not just you know, a bunch of roadside farmers, you know, maybe putting a sticker on something. We're talking about an industry that in two thousand twelve was a reported twenty nine billion dollar

industry and according to Euromonitor International, just one source. Uh, they claim that by two thousand seventeen, this could be a trillion dollar global industry. We need to get some organic food sponsors. You need to get on it. Yeah, there's a lot of there's a lot of mon today. I don't think our food oriented, but I'm going to have a talk with them. Well, we have some coming up coming along. I think we do have some food sponsors coming up. But you know, the key here is

that when someone is selling you organic. Yeah, there are marketing firms involved here, There are graphic designers involved here. All the energy and manipulation that goes into selling you absolutely anything is in play here. If you've got the government involved, it's a big enough industry for them to be paying attention. And uh, you know, call me liberal, but I am glad when the government is regulating what

goes into my food, like, I'll take it. Uh. There may be some farmers out there that don't like that, but but it gives me a little bit of peace of mind. So backing that up, poll showed that forty five percent of Americans are actively see can to incorporate organic food into their diet. This isn't just like I'm going to the grocery store and I see the organic avocados next to the regular avocados and I grab organic.

They're going to the grocery store with a list that says organic avocados on it, right, like they want to put it in their diet. In it was projected that the organic food industry would see a sixteen percent growth rate going into So that's leading us to that one trillion dollar number. Man, put that into perspective, the average American household spends four thousand dollars more a year on

organic food than unconventional food. That probably matches up with our fruit badget I think for this for this kid, Wow, yeah, he's just a he's just all made of fruit. That's that's well. From what I know about your kid, he really likes bananas and giraffes. So yeah, yeah, bananas and drafts. He only eats bananas. Were not actively buying a black market if you but yeah, but if you did, if

you organic giraffe meat, alright, only the best. So what we we talked a little bit about the whole U. S d A thing, But what exactly is organic food? You know? Like, what's the difference here? Yeah? I mean that's the question we all end up asking ourselves when we're we're in the line, you know it is it what is the difference? Or am I just paying extra

so I don't have to think about what the difference is. Well, So a lot of the like history and basic breakdown stuff that we're giving you here comes from the Salem Press Encyclopedia entry on organic food and the debate in particular, But we also looked at I would say another god like twelve twenty studies of what's going on with organic food in science in particular, organic food is any crop or animal product that's produced without pesticides, man made fertilizers, additives,

or growth regulators. So we're talking about fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, and meat. Now, So me being the vegetarian on the show, I was like, oh right, meat, Like I didn't even realize that you could buy organic meat, but that makes sense. Oh yeah, I mean, I mean the whole meat. The whole meat issue is a kind of a subject unto itself, right, because you you get into issues of not only like like the organic aspects of the food, but also the

you know, how are the animals treated, what were they fed? Yeah, so that's that's almost a whole podcast onto itself. Yeah. So the idea here originally was to encourage soil and water conservation, go back to that seventies thing with water crisis, uh, and reduce pollution. So they started using natural fertilizers to feed soil and plants. Also included, sorry, also excluded from the organic food category would be genetically engineered feuds. That's

another episode. Genetically engineered foods, human sewage and their radiation that kills germs and bacteria. So you you know, if it's just a swamp things situation waiting to happen, right,

toxic avengers, I think. But but seriously, yeah, so like those uh, I think of those like weird foods that had started popping up in grocery stores that are like giant versions of the fruit that like we used to buy, you know, the apples that are like twice the size and globe bright red and it's like, oh, they look super pretty well that's because they're genetically modified and I radiated, or yeah, they're the kind of apples that I remember hearing they would they would have them on set for

mad Men, and they would have their their their historical accuracy department would come in and say no, no big, Yeah they're too big, Like no, no, apple um would have been this size. That's funny or like, uh, you know, I I shouldn't say this. And also I'll just throw out there that I don't know whether these are genetically modified or not, or if it's just a hybrid fruit. But grapples. Have you ever had one of those before?

It's like a grape apple combination. Yeah? Are they the size of a grape, so like an apple the size of a grape or more like a smaller apple, if remember correctly. Yeah, I don't think I don't remember trying that one. Yeah. Well, you know, I don't know necessarily that that would be considered organic, but I'm sure that there is a organic way to produce such a thing if you're I don't know, holistically growing them together anyway.

So for pest control, these organic farmers they say what they follow that guy's advice, like I Howard, and they use biological means crop rotation and animal maneuver uh. And like I mentioned before, the U. S d A has strict governmental standards about what qualifies was organic. You don't get that seal without meeting with the U. S d A. Now here's the thing. It's voluntary, but many producers use it.

Why because of the marketing value right like wild It's like if you're a farmer and you say, you know what, I'm gonna like change this whole production method that we're doing, uh to organic. You're doing it because you recognize that there's value in the market. Yeah, and you're creating a premium product that you can then they can then sell at a premium price. One last thing keep in mind throughout this podcast, the words natural and organic are not

interchangeable terms. Okay, so when we're talking about organic, that doesn't necessarily mean natural. Right, And to go back to my earlier point, if you want to get serious about agriculture, and uh, just about anything in agriculture is not natural unless you're walking, you know, unless it's like hunter gathering level. Yeah. Yeah. We actually did an episode of brain Stuff that was sort of about like, uh, you know, if the world ends,

like how do I go about foraging for food? And I did all the research and for the outline for it. It's pretty fascinating, but like, yeah, it's hard to find. Like, dandelions are one of the few things that you can just eat, but you can't eat them if they're like within something like fifty meters of any road or or human environment, like like even a farm, because of the potential chemicals that could uh travel on the air and

get on them. So go dandelions. All right, We're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to look at some of the science behind the pros and the cons for organic foods. Essentially, the scientific argument that is still going on at the end of this episode. You're still gonna have to make up your own mind. So so don't worry. We're not we won't do it for We're not going to do an attempt to do it for you. But yeah, quick break, and

then we're right back in it. All right, we're back. So yeah, let's talk about some of the pros and cons here. Let's start with Now, let's let's be positive, and let's start with the pros. What the science telling us about the advantages of organic food Well, proponents say that organic farming reduces the environmental impact and protects the soil. However, experiments show over a number of years there is a nine seven percent reduction in pesticides and organic fields. So okay,

so that's good, right, a majority. And this is this gets back to people with children. A majority of pesticides that are found in infants and kids originate from their diet, so it does seem to make sense for them to eat organic at these vulnerable ages, right as their bodies

are processing and growing. Another plus about organic foods is that they can counteract pesticide exposure to their Studies that show that children who eat organic foods that have eaten foods that have pesticides in them, it will reduce the pesticides in their body by fift So it's like a you know, cure late wounds spell for pesticides. So we're basically looking at a goal here of uh, reducing the

amount of pesticide residue that's on the produce. Right. It's not like, let's let's not let's be clear here, like convey National Foods is not like they spray the pesticides on them and then they just put them in the grocery side, right, But there's a residue that's left over. However, there are residues on both organic and non organic slash conventional foods. They almost never, however, exceed government safety thresholds.

So the U. S d A is just as strict with conventional grown foods as they are with organic foods. So that's important to keep in mind. Yeah, Now, the certainly the the issue of kids is a big thing,

and we're probably gonna keep going back to that. The In two thousand and twelve, the American Academy of Pediatrics advised parents to limit a child's exposure to pesticides, but they also they didn't make a statement about whether organic foods are ultimately a better choice for children than conventionally grown foods. They they they admitted that more research was needed to nail it down, but they went a had made this this advisory, um and and a lot of

research has come in the wake of that. One study that is often mentioned, and this is ultimately a small study, but a two thousand fifty study publishing Environmental Health Perspectives, looked at twenty Oakland, California kids and twenty kids from the agricultural region of Salina's hundred miles away. So they ate a conventional diet for four days, in an organic diet for seven days, and then they returned to conventional foods for five days. Then, of course we took some

urine samples. Uh was why wouldn't you and us, I mean, their kids. There's gonna be urine. Oh yeah, it's it's

gonna be everywhere. Seventy of their urine samples collected daily contained evidence of pesticides, but of the six most frequently detected pesticides, two of them decreased by nearly fifty percent when children were on organic diets, and the levels of a common herbicide felled by twenty So the advantages there are pretty obvious, right, so we'll take that in the column four organic foods that if in particular for children, right, uh, pesticides don't seem to be a great thing in their bodies,

and if we want to reduce them, then organic foods is a good way to do that, either by just feeding them exclusively organic food or giving them organic food

occasionally to reduce the pesticides in their bodies. And of course this is all uh, this is all important to me too as not always a parent, but as an adoptive parent, because you know, you you enter into the scenario with so many unknowns about the child's past nutrition was yeah, I mean you know, I know, you know, we knew basically, but when it comes down to like was this organic that they were eating, you know, what was pesticide level, etcetera? What what other kind of you know,

uh agents were they exposed to? Like you, it's it's easy to do than just say, well, let's go as organic as possible, let's limit as much as possible any any new uh you know, but pollutants, any new pesticides thrown into the mix. That makes sense and as far as pesticides go, we're learning more and more about how

these substances travel and how they affect organisms. In two thousand, two thousand fourteen study publishing in Environmental Toxology and kim As Tree recorded pesticide compounds including fungicides in Pacific chorus frogs living in national parks, forests, and other locations high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Now in some cases we're talking UH sixty two miles a hundred kilometers from the

nearest farms that had used those chemicals. We're seeing those chemicals pop up in the frogs, and UH the pesticides have such as this have been found to harm frogs immune systems, impact development, and even trigger sex changes. Granted we're talking about sex changes and frogs. Sex changes in amphibians far different UH situation than any kind of conceivable sex change in a human, but still we're seeing we're seeing an impact on how their bodies work. We're saying

we've also seen connections to colony collapse in bees. So the take over here seems to be that that pesticides, first of all, when you introduce them to an environment, they're not gonna just stay on that farm there that they have a way of getting out. Yeah, and we see them harming vulnerable creatures such as amphabians such as frogs.

Uh So the underlying message here is, yeah, this seems like something we should reduce as much as possible, as much as is sustainable from a feed the world standpoint, And if you have the ability to limit the amount of these things going into your child, then then I

feel like I should do it. Yeah. And from the you know, also keep in mind, from the perspective of like being pro organic, there's still like, as we're talking about how much it can travel, these pesticides can still get on organic fields because of how much they travel. Or for instance, if three years ago a farmer was spring pesticides, then they cleared the crop, then they started growing organic on that soil, there's still some pesticides in

the ground there as well. So you know, it's complicated. Yeah, and there's uh I don't want to go into too much detail. And there's a two thousand fourteen study that was oubolished in environmental health perspectives and they looked at pregnant women living near fields treated with pesticides, and they observed a correlation between proximity to pesticide fields and autism

in the in the children. So this study, just to give you grounding, here n seventy pregnant women, one third left than one third of them lived less than a mile from a site where pesticides have been applied, and the women had a sixty percent higher risk of having a child with an autism spectrum disorder if they lived

closest to those sites. But again, this is just one study, and like pretty much, this is the kind of caveat we can throw out in any of these where we have a lot of individual studies looking at little corners, limited testing populations, and of course limited frames of time. We don't have those big, you know, centuries spanning studies

involve lots of people. Yeah, So this whole like podcast search was done during the same week that John Oliver released the scathing commentary on how science is reported in the news, and if you haven't seen it, I really recommend it. We actually did a piece on how stuff works now about it. But uh, I had that in the back of my mind as we were working on this. Every every study I saw, I was like, well, that's twenty people in California. I know, like what do we

actually gather from that? And and as Oliver points out in his piece, it's like what what we need to be doing is replicating the studies so we can we can determine whether or not they're valid, and then also doing a review of all of the studies. Right, there's not often a lot of money to be made in

those things, so they're not done luckily. In organic In the organic food debate, there have been a lot of reviews done, so that's a good thing, and in particular, um, there's so there was one that looked at thirty four studies from just the seventies in hill around now and it found that organic vegetables have the same and maybe sometimes higher nutrient contents than non organic conventionally grown food. Uh. The gist of this is it's probably not more nutritious

to eat organic food, all right. So when this we're getting into that big study that came out in those posting the Annals of Internal Medicine and start everyone up quite a bit with the with these key findings and this also we're we're definitely getting into the potential cons the downside or the just sort of the the the even kill nature of organic foods. And this is outside of cost, right, Like you go to the grocery store and the first thing you think of as a con

is like, well, that's a dollar more per thing, right, whatever. Yeah, obviously that that's a problem. You know, if they were the same price, maybe it would be a lot easier to say, Yeah, but I can only pay three dollars extra, you know, so many times just for a you know, a vague feeling of of of betternests. Right, we'll keep in mind that four grand number that the average family is spending on to keep organic food in their home. Yeah,

so this study is interesting. They collected two hundred peer reviewed studies. This is the crazy part to me. The way they started was they searched fifty thousand papers that so there's been that many papers written over fifty years about organic food, so clearly there's a lot of interest in this. Then from fifty thousand they whittled that down to a hundred and sixty two that were relevant to

the question of the nutrient content. This required them to compare the nutrient content in organic and conventionally grown food stuffs. Then they assess the quality of each one of those articles, and of those, only fifty five of those articles were

identified as being of satisfactory quality. So this says something about sort of like the the um I guess rigor of the scientific studies on organic foods alone, like how much quality was put into them and sort of like how much scrutiny was put into them for this particular Annals of Internal Medicine. Uh, Look, they ultimately came down and said, uh, we're gonna identify the satisfactory quality and look at thirteen of the most commonly reported nutrient categories

across the board here. Yes, so a lot of this is coming down to nutrients, Like is organic a more nutritious choice than conventional? And the studies indicated this is not the case. And but one of the primary reasons is that organic and conventional veggies they vary tremendously in terms of their nutritional payload. So you have so many different factors, genetic makeup of different varieties, the rightness, the weather, when is this food coming in, where is it coming from,

how long is it take to get there? It all factors in and or the organic conventional divide is not the best divide between higher and lower nutritional quality, and we don't have a good system to measure these things yet. Yeah.

One of the really interesting sort of like anecto oats that put this into perspective for me is like you can go to the grocery store and you've got the carrots in front of you, and one carrot can be sitting next to another carrot and it can have three times the amount of beta caroteen as its neighbor that's on the same shelf. And that's not even whether they're organic or conventionally grown, right, it's just based on all of these different factors that go into growing a thing

in the world. Now, I also want to point out and this this kind of dips back into our potential pros category here, but a I do like two British journal nutrition study they argued that you see seventeen percent more anti oxidants in many forms of organic produce. Um, So for some nutrients, organics might be better. For other nutrients, conventional might be higher. Again, it doesn't give us a clear indication, but it may be uh, you know, pushes a few more points back in the in the pro category.

And then of course another we're focusing here on on a nutritional value on anti oxidants, but that's hardly the only factor. Who we've already talked about pesticides. But then also there is the distance that the food is traveling to reach you. Yeah, So the way that this is measured is in something called food miles, and there was a study that looked in particular at the greenhouse gases that were emitted when produces transported long distance and how

that mitigated the benefits of growing them organically. And by food miles, what we're talking about here is the distance that the food travels from the field to the store. Ultimately, buying organic food is comparable to its environmental impact, uh tow conventional food grown the bought at the market based on the miles. And the example here goes like this. Essentially,

so you've got mangoes and green peppers. Let's look at those. Okay, mangoes travel from Ecuador or Peru to the United States rather than from Mexico to the United States, so they've got longer to travel, which means that they're you know, burning more fuel. Green peppers, if they're growing organically, they're grown in Mexico instead of in the United States. So again a further food mile from as they say, from the farm to the market. Uh, and so ultimately that

ends up adding to the environmental impact. So the take I'm here is if the recipe calls from mango, go ahead and substitute green pepper, and you can feel a little better about your pepper. Yeah, exactly. Well, what they actually recommend is they just say, you know, if if it's that big of a concern to you, switch to locally produced food or go to your local farmers market. Yeah. I think that's always so good. I mean, that's why I enjoy going to the local farmers market, you know.

And and I say that with the caveat that there, Yeah, you end up engaging in a lot of a lot of judgment calls that are more based in Oh well, this hearkens back to some idealistic idea about what agriculture is. This feels more you know, granola and and comfortable. But but yeah, some of the some of the science indicates that it's a good choice. Some of the science indicates, uh, well, maybe you're just paying extra for the feeling and the experience of going to the farmers markets opposed to the

nutritional take up. I suppose that's like always keep in the back of your mind, like, uh, let's go back to that marketing study, like is how much of your egos involved in there? And how much of your altruisms involved there? And sort of way the two against one another. Um, so there's we said, like, there haven't been a lot of long term studies done here except one. There's one really long term st being done and it's out of you see Davis. And it's called the Long Term Research

on Farming Systems Project. It started in and the goal is for it to go a hundred years so they can see what the benefits and cons of organic farming are. So it's been twelve it started in nineteen any one, so it's been a little over twenty years at this point. After ten years, they found one thing, well at least one thing that was worth report. Okay, uh, tomatoes raised inorganic plots contain significantly higher levels of certain antioxidant compounds,

and that gets us back to the antioxidant thing. But for the most part, most studies about organic food are conducted over like a two two and a half year span if that, so we're not really looking at longitudinal effects on how this affects a human being throughout the course of their lifetime. But hey, when that study finishes up, individuals who are alive then will have the benefit of the study and maybe they'll get to go see that Robert Roderiguez film that went in the vault and listen

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build that website. All right, there's a couple other cons uh to organic farming that we should hit here. So they may, like we said, they may or may not actually be healthier or less contaminated than conventional food. They're obviously more expensive. The reason why they're more expensive is because of intensive labor that's involved with handweeding, as well as the cost of feeding organic food to livestock. Right,

so that you know grows over time. And like I said, even though organic farmers don't use pesticides, chemicals can still blowing into their farms, and in particular, the soils can be polluted with something called polychlorinated biphennels uh and the soil there can be contaminated for up to three years. So that's why I've been saying three years over and over again throughout the episode, is because I had that

research on the brain. Also, in the two thousands, there were actually salmonilla and E. Coal i outbreaks on organic foods like spinach. Oh. Yeah, this has been in the news very much so of late concerning certain restaurants as well. Yeah, and it's worth mentioning too, right. So the reason why is food contamination can increase when farmers use manure instead

of synthetic fertilizers. Why, Well, because bacteria exists in manure. Right, it's more of a culprit for food borne illnesses, and this bacteria can get into the soil, increasing that risk even further. But keep in mind this is not not isolated just to organic farming. Right, we use maneuver for everything, and it's in conventional food too, right, I'm using it right now. Um. And then you've got the chemical and

anti microbial washes that I mentioned earlier as well. So they're allowed in conventional farming, not allowed in organic farming. Uh so, but it leads to recalls of the foods that have the bacterial contamination in them, which is usually the organics that aren't sprayed with these washes. Uh. But you know that depends on how like again, like what do you want your food to be washed with water

or anti microbial chemical baths? Um? This accounted for and by this I'm referring to specifically organic foods with bacterial contamination. It accounted for five to seven percent of all of the food recalls during the first half of so our numbers are basically from Uh, you know, we're in mid sixteen here and there hasn't been a while. There have been recalls, we haven't accounted for all of them yet. So probably because of organic foods expanding through the market share,

that's why that food recall bacteria contamination has risen. It's not like because there's like a particular breakout necessarily. It's more along the lines of like we talked about earlier, people are buying a lot of organic food now and

one last thing that they can of produce. And this is definitely I would I would say falls under the egoism uh clause here is that they spoil faster because they don't have the preservatives and pesticides and all that, all the chemical stuff that makes them look great for

a long time. Uh, they go bad quicker. Yeah, that's the like because I remember as a remember as a kid, we would get these, you know, the giant red apples that all may kind of have kind of tasteless in a way, kind of waxy, but those things will last forever um and nowadays, especially if I'm at a certain store and we obtain a prepackaged container of organic produce, you get that home and you find, oh well, all the ones at the bottom are already starting to go bad,

so I'm left with with half of what I paid um a premium price for Yes, it's true, it's true, and I have to eat those immediately or they're gonna go. But I get that, especially like when I buy spinach or when I buy strawberries, there's inevitably stuff that's already gone bad at the bottom, even after I just first brought it home from the grocery store. But hey, that's

the way of life, all right. Well, you know so so so far, I feel like all that any of us can do is you sort of take all the information and figure out to what extent you're going to utilize it in your food choices, and then how you're gonna roll that out. So for me, it sounds like what I would want to do is I I like the tomato fact, and hey, I like fresh tomatoes. I like fresh local tomatus when they're in season. I should I should go that route, maybe get the antioxidant boost.

But what can I do about the pesticide issue? Yeah, well, you know, in terms of cutting pesticides out of your food, and maybe you also want to watch your budget. Here are the most pesticide Latin foods in particular. So let's say you you're like, all right, I want to buy organic just to like focus on the pesticides and and keep them out of my kid's body, right, Okay, The most pesticide Latin foods are apples, celery, sweet bell peppers, peaches, strawberries,

imported nectarines, grapes, spinach, lettuce, cucumbers, blueberries, and potatoes. Okay, However, the least pesticide residue is found on cabbage, onions, avocados, sweet corn, sweet peas, pineapples, mangoes, asparagus, kiwi, and grapefruit. So those are the ones that you can worry less about, right, Maybe you know, if you're weighing the scales of justice between your pocketbook and the pesticide factor, you know, maybe it's okay to go ahead and buy an avocado that's

not organic. All right. So there you have it, organic food. Some of the pros, some of the cons, what the science is saying, what our hearts are saying. And we would love to hear from everyone, Like, like I said, we're not trying to make up anybody's mind here. I would like to hear what a what your take on organic foods is And then if you take any of the science to heart, if you take any of the the the arguments to heart, how do you roll that

out in your own life? Like what choices are you making? What what is your line in the sand for organic and conventional. Another thing that we were not able to determine just by like doing the research that I have concerns about because I'm paranoid, is how these UH studies were funded to write, Like what kind of relationships the university has had with local farmers, whether they're organic farmers or conventional farmers, or just an industry in general. How

are they funded? Who were they partners with, who are they friendly with? That kind of thing? You know. So maybe some of you are out there, you work in academia, and you go, oh hey, I remember that study. The reason why it said that though, was this you know the secret history behind it. I mean I worked in academia long enough to know that things like that happen. Yeah, I mean. And it also comes back to the fact

that there are major players involved here. This is totally this is this is how we eat, So that the government is involved, UH, major organic food companies, major major conventional food companies, and often those are the same companies with their their hands in both pots. Yeah, and let's remember that one trillion dollar number, right, everybody's going to be fighting for a part of that pie, whether it's

an organic pie or not. Indeed, indeed, all right, So, hey, you want to get in touch with us, you want to reach out to us again, go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's the mothership, that's we'll find all the podcast videos, blog post links out to social media accounts like Facebook and Twitter. We are blow the Mind on both of those. We are also on

Tumbler and Instagram. And if you want to write us directly, the old fashioned way to talk to us about organic food, you can hit us up at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Doot column