Largest ever study of its kind finds significant differences between organic and non-organic food

a reply to: khnum

Maybe so the common man does not live too long past his retirement age..

purp..

originally posted by: brandiwine14
I wonder to myself sometime what fruits and vegetable would have been like hundreds of years ago before they ever started the gmo, pesticide and just downright ruination of our produce. Can you imagine how wonderful most would have been in taste but also the health benefits?

I can no longer eat corn, it tastes like candy...gross. I buy organic everything anti gmo, etc...for my family as much as I can.

Let people deny the truth if they prefer, it is their health on the line.

There is a Roman cook-book which dates from 2000 years ago, the Apicius:

www.celtnet.org.uk...

However, other items that are staples of modern Italian cooking were present in ancient Rome; Pliny the Elder discussed more than 30 varieties of olive, 40 kinds of pear, figs (native and imported from Africa and the eastern provinces), and a wide variety of vegetables (Jacques André listed 54 cultivated and 43 wild vegetables in ancient Rome).[6] Some of these vegetables are no longer present in the modern world, while others have undergone significant changes; carrots of different colors were consumed, but not in orange.

en.wikipedia.org...

originally posted by: AugustusMasonicus
I was always under the impression that maize and some grasses were considered the original genetically modified food stocks since our ancestors began selectively breeding them millennia ago.

Typical PR agency (paid by Monsanto) blurring the lines BS.

Selective breeding and growing on natural cycles, with natural fertilizers, on non-depleted land, using organic methods.

is NOT the same as

Genetically splicing genes from a totally different species (not variety) into the DNA, spraying it with industrial poisons, growing it on totally depleted land with industrial fertilizers that provide 0.5% of the minerals the plant actually uses/gets from healthy soil and none of the healthy soil bacteria that we are now understanding is crucial for human immune system and health.

So no, they are not the same.

Stop peddling that Monstanto-Bayer-Syngenta paid-for PR crap and please use your own brain and do some research.

originally posted by: Pathaka
Typical PR agency (paid by Monsanto) blurring the lines BS.
...

Stop peddling that Monstanto-Bayer-Syngenta paid-for PR crap and please use your own brain and do some research.

Try reading the thread prior to acting like a total toolbag with your comments.

a reply to: purplemer

Thanks for sharing purp... It is a shame that we have to even bother calling food organic. The other food pumped and laden with chemicals and pesticides should be labelled as such...

originally posted by: brandiwine14
I wonder to myself sometime what fruits and vegetable would have been like hundreds of years ago before they ever started the gmo, pesticide and just downright ruination of our produce. Can you imagine how wonderful most would have been in taste but also the health benefits?

I have my own garden, I don't have to imagine. If you eat a fresh tomato after eating a store bought one it's night and day. Everyone with a garden will tell you the same.

You should try growing one, it's not as hard as it may seem. It's well worth the effort.

originally posted by: mahatche
You should try growing one, it's not as hard as it may seem. It's well worth the effort.

I agree and whatever I do not eat I immediately process into tomato sauce so we have homemade sauce all year.

a reply to: purplemer

Yeah, and Wikipedia also described David Beckham as an 18th century Chinese goalkeeper. So the choice is to live a Wikipedia defined life, or one that is fact and evidence based. Thhe word "organic" has been co-opted by those who are too intellectually lazy to use a correct, albeit more complicated, description.

a reply to: LABTECH767
One important detail is those were supplemented antioxidants. They were not naturally occurring in the diet. Still, I would not shrug off this research. I know that past research has almost unanimously concluded fruits and vegetables do not increase cancer, but the reductions in cancer risk are still not clear. Some of the studies indicated some reduction while others even hinted at increased cancer risks, but overall, fruits and vegetables - which are naturally high in antioxidants - are probably good for you. But even more sure is the research which links exercise to decreased cancer risk. The effect is apparently dramatic.

So I'd say it's not just cancer that matters. Cancer is one of those things that diet seems to have little effect on. Overall health is best met by a balanced diet including all of the fruits and vegetables and other food groups.

I'm definitely not a vegetarian. There're many nutrients we can only reliably get from fish/animal flesh. So I'm trying to be rationale about it.

a reply to: F4guy


Regardless of your above answer the facts do not deviate you are getting confused between two types of organic. Organic chemistry and organic farming they are two different faculties

kind regards

purp..

Here's an interesting UK review of fruits and vegetables and their effects on cancer risk:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov - Fruit and vegetables and cancer risk...

The summing up of the review is that there's no proven link between fruits and vegetables and reduction in cancer risk.

The conclusion:

General nutritional principles indicate that healthy diets should include at least moderate amounts of fruit and vegetables, sufficient to prevent deficiencies of any nutrients, especially micronutrients such as vitamin C, which are mostly supplied by fruits and vegetables. However, the available data suggest that general increases in fruit and vegetable intake would not have much effect on cancer rates, at least in relatively well-nourished populations. Future research may be productive if it can be focused on biological pathways known to be relevant in the development of specific types of cancer, and can reliably assess long-term intakes of relevant fruits and vegetables. Currently, advice in relation to diet and cancer should include the recommendation to consume adequate amounts of fruit and vegetables, but should put more emphasis on the well-established adverse effects of obesity and high alcohol intakes on cancer risk.

Here's an article about a study published in 2010:
www.webmd.com - Fruits, Vegetables Offer Little Cancer Protection...

Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is good for many reasons, but don't expect it to offer much protection against cancer, according to a new study.

The researchers aren't saying the fruits and vegetables have no effect. "Fruits and vegetables are likely to be protective, although the effect is not likely to be large," says study author Paolo Boffetta, MD, MPH, deputy director of The Tisch Cancer Institute at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

But he hastens to add that eating plenty of fruits and vegetables is good for a number of other reasons, such as reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. His study looked at the big picture, he tells WebMD, and so it's still possible that specific fruits and vegetables, or substances in them, could be more cancer-protective.

''In the past, there was a strong belief that fruits and vegetables were strongly protective against cancer," Boffetta says. "In the last 10 or 15 years there have been a number of studies that did not confirm this relationship."
...........

I also think if you want to argue for a vegetarian diet over omnivorous habits, you should not argue it on nutritional ground because all the evidence is pointing at a balanced diet, not a vegetarian diet. If a person wants to argue for a vegetarian diet free of animal products what they need to base their argument on is instead the life of the animal. Is growing an animal only to skin it and butcher it something you support? And what about factory farms where they pack animals into tight quarters in often miserable conditions and, in some countries, at least, dump them into a boiling vat as they're still alive? This is where a "herbivore" needs to go with their argument. Of course, new research will inevitably come out proving animals are far inferior to humans and so cannot be reasonably compared to us. Furthermore, with the ability to grow meat from cell cultures, there won't be any need to get our meat directly from living animals.

Oh, and there's another angle to the vegetarian versus meat diet thing. GLOBAL WARMING. A meat eating diet is very expensive and very polluting. Pound per pound, meat requires up to ten times more resources to produce. There's no way around this either, since it's simple physics. There're various ways of tweaking the formula to get what you want if you want to spin it, but science will win out in the end. Of course, you have to get past the dietary requirements of the human body, as it requires some nutrients that're only readily found in fish or animal flesh. But you should really only be arguing this over with someone who eats too much meat or with someone in combination with the previous argument I posed.

Meanwhile, I read not too long ago that when experts from across the world were chosen to pick from among the most popular and effective diets, one of the top five on the list was the DASH diet. Look it up. Not surprisingly, the Atkins diet - the carnivores among us - was low on the list.

a reply to: jonnywhite

Text

7 Reasons Vegetarians Live Longer

time.com...

www.medicalnewstoday.com...

Study links vegetarian diets and longevity

www.washingtonpost.com... .html

*tip toes into thread*
Bananas are a herb....

*tip toes back out of thread*

Rainbows
Jane

originally posted by: angelchemuel
*tip toes into thread*
Bananas are a herb....

*tip toes back out of thread*

Rainbows
Jane

Ah thanks I learned another new thing today!

Is a banana a fruit or a herb?

Both. A banana (the yellow thing you peel and eat) is undoubtedly a fruit (containing the seeds of the plant: see 'Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable?), though since commercially grown banana plants are sterile, the seeds are reduced to little specks. The banana plant is called a 'banana tree' in popular use, but it's technically regarded as a herbaceous plant (or 'herb'), not a tree, because the stem does not contain true woody tissue.

www.oxforddictionaries.com...

a reply to: Krazysh0t

+1 Krazysh0t

I think a big problem with the debate is that the definitions for genetically modified/genetically engineered are confused and lumped in together with old fashioned cross breeding. Cross breeding of plants has been around for almost as long as humanity has been around. When the scientist get in there and tinker with the plant's DNA, or add in a portion of DNA from another plant or animal, they are changing the resulting plant much more than with simple cross breeding and can never be 100% sure of what the outcome will be.

It's nice to see that some people, like yourself, do understand the difference. I also wanted to mention +1 for SCI, its nice to see a fellow fan! Sometimes i really do feel like i was born on the wrong planet.

Besides studies, I have said before, we ought to trust our "gut" on this. When whatever we eat makes us look like crap, feel like crap, and make abnormal crap...then, perhaps our bodies are trying to tell us something.

Food, fruit, veggies and even meats/poultry tasted better back in the day. Meat tastes metallic sometimes now. Growth hormones in meats cause us all to grow too...hence the obesity problem....plump poultry, makes for plump people. I got attacked plenty last time I stated trusting my gut. Gotta think on it tho, our bodies very often can "tell" us what it wants and needs and can tolerate better than any advertisement can.

I don't know about the U.S but in Canada organic doesn't always mean that you are guaranteed a product free of pesticides & other chemicals.

When I was going to physiotherapy, my physiotherapist has a couple friends who are organic farmers. They told him that organic produce can have pesticides & other chemicals up until 2 weeks before they are to be harvested. When it gets to the last 2 weeks, they have to stop using pesticides & other chemicals but can still label the produce as organic.


As for antioxidants, I posted this article that I found on Science Daily how antioxidants can accelerate cancers and why they don't protect against them

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Please don't encourage it, our ancestors grew food without the use of a microscope. They used a male plant and a female plant to make better, stronger, tastier offspring. Not at all like it is done today when we talk about GMO. You can't patent that mechanism because nobody invented it and there are endless possibilities.

NOTHING beats good ol' O NATURAL.

Let me remind all the GMO lovers out there that they sealed and locked up REAL seeds from REAL plants in different bunkers around the world when GMO was planned to be released.

If they were so sure this was the best way to go then why the need to take such a measure? I mean surely this was all tested before we could consume this stuff? Right?

Actions speak louder than "scientific" studies.

Why don't we just label all this GMO food? Let the market decide. Include who is financing all this nonsense on the labels, like now. Put your money where your moth is, we will see if your bullshizah walks. Probably could with a few of the right genes.

Science is like a religion some use it for light and love and others for dark and greed. Pick your house of the Lord wisely and think who is trying reinventing the wheel here? Patents? Owning nature? Sounds kind of greedy to me.

Use your money with due diligence folks, give it to those who want the best for humanity, those who respect the dirt and the creatures that crawls on it and the beast that eats a top of it. Including us.