Yes, you read it correctly if you read the Yahoo News yesterday.
It got my attention. But boy, was I fuming. This is another perfect way the media manipulates you. It worked on me! I clicked on the title! But reading the article further down, the information clearly says, the studies were too small and the length of the study was too short, that there is not enough evidence – whaaaat? Then, why didn’t they say that in the first place instead of leading people on with a wrong headline?
How about this headline?
Organic food ‘waste of money’
I found an article in a Singapore news site that had this headline citing the same article. So now the headline that state these flawed studies with inconclusive findings, is on the other side of the world!! Great.
Read what it says in the beginning of the Yahoo article.
“A “disappointingly small” number of well-designed studies have looked at whether organic foods may have health benefits beyond their conventional counterparts’, according to the review, by researchers with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Health in the UK. Moreover, they found, what studies have been done have largely focused on short-term effects of organic eating — mainly antioxidant activity in the body — rather than longer-term health outcomes.”
No wonder they couldn’t find any difference; they didn’t do the study long enough and they didn’t have enough subjects! So if the studies were clearly flawed, then, how could you publish the finding with a headline like this? It would deter people from buying organic, then.
Oh, and this is the kicker. These were the last two paragraphs.
“Organic foods are made without the use of conventional pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, antibiotics or hormones — which could potentially reap benefits for people’s health and the environment.
The current review, Dangour and his colleagues point out, did not look for studies on the possible health benefits of reduced exposure to those substances. Nor did it address the environmental impact of organic food production.“
ARGH! So these are not good enough ‘health’ reasons?…that I won’t be poisoned? I know media sensationalize stories and controversy sells but this was so misguided and so misrepresented. And because of articles like this, nay sayers (and are you listening? Johnson? Brad?) about organic foods will stand up to me and say, “You see? Organic doesn’t mean it’s better!”
Well, I’m not the only who says it is. One of many published articles about the organic being better for you is from Timesonline and it states,
“…levels of antioxidants in milk from organic herds were up to 90% higher than in milk from conventional herds. As well as finding up to 40% more antioxidants in organic vegetables, they also found that organic tomatoes from Greece had significantly higher levels of antioxidants, including flavo-noids thought to reduce coronary heart disease.”
Well, these are good enough reasons to me but I’ll tell you why I like to eat organic.
- I don’t know about you but I rather eat apples that taste like apples and not covered with 30+pesticides and wax.
- I rather eat foods that were cared for by humans rather than machines that sprayed and chemically weeded.
- I rather eat strawberries that were recently picked when they were ripened on the bush than picked earlier and chemically treated to last longer.
- I rather not take antibiotics when I’m healthy but when I am dying of an infection and pray that my infection is not antibiotic resistant from all the unnecessary, preventive antibiotic usage on the conventional farms.
- I rather eat foods from farmers that cared about the environment and the soil when growing his crop
- I rather eat fruits that taste better.
Read Mayo Clinic’s reasons why organic is better.
What do you think about these misleading headlines?
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