I thought you all might like to see this. debi kelly, MAC
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hemmelgarn, Melinda
> Sent: Monday, April 17, 2000 6:38 PM
> To: Kelly, Debi
> Subject: FW: Organic food response from Joan Gussow
>
> Can't remember if I sent you this response. Joan is THE expert.
> Melinda.
> NOFA/CT Annual Meeting
> Saturday
> Hemlocks Conference Center
> November 11, 1995
> Hebron, CT
> 1:30- 3:00 p.m
>
> Is Organic Food More Nutritious ?
> And, is that the right question?
> by
> Joan Dye Gussow, Ed.D.
> Mary Swartz Rose Professor Emeritus,
> Nutrition and Education
>
> Several weeks ago, I was at the Michigan Organic Harvest Festival at
> a Community College near Ann Arbor. As a member of the wrap-up panel, I
> responded to an audience question by saying that the overall nutritional
> superiority of organic food was undemonstrated and very difficult to prove
> scientifically.
> When I left the stage I was attacked, quite literally, by a woman
> who was almost breathless with outrage and illogic. "Of course, they're
> superior," she kept saying. "All you have to do to prove it is feed them
> to gerbils." At one point she said "So you're telling me when I buy
> carrots I shouldn't care whether they are pale or deep orange?" To which
> I replied, "Not at all. The deeper orange ones probably have more
> carotenes." And she shot back triumphantly, "Well, the organic ones are
> always darker orange."
> I seldom yell at citizens, but ultimately I yelled at her something
> explanatory like "Would you just shut up and listen for a minute?" But
> she wouldn't, and I had to leave before we resolved our disagreement.
> Before I left, however, a man who was listening to our encounter and
> nodding sympathetically to my responses, handed me a sheet of paper which
> turned out to demonstrate his hope that, despite all my arguments, there
> really was evidence showing the nutritional superiority of organic
> produce. I'll get back later to what was printed on the paper he handed
> me, but I tell this story up front to illustrate that I understand the
> problem we all face. People want to believe organic foods are more
> nutritious. And if we can't assure them that they are, they sometimes
> threaten, as this woman did, to stop buying them.
> My interest in the nutritional value of organic as compared to
> conventional foods began many years ago, even before I was a nutritionist.
> In the late 1960's, there were a lot of claims about the nutritional
> superiority of organically grown food, and Rodale Press was at the
> forefront of the claim making. My very first piece of independent work as
> an experienced researcher but a beginning student in the field of
> nutrition was an effort to examine the widespread claim that modern
> agriculture had created mineral deficient soils. My conclusion, after a
> lot of research, was that a more likely outcome than mineral deficiency
> was contamination of the soil with lead, mercury and especially cadmium
> because of the over use of some rock based fertilizers.
> It was around this time that I met a lovely man named Jerry
> Goldstein who was then working at Rodale Press. (Jerry is now the
> publisher of among others, the magazines In Business and Compost Science
> and Utilization ). I took advantage of his affiliation to press him for
> sources regarding the Rodale claim that organically grown produce was
> superior nutritionally. Jerry answered thoughtfully, "Well, Joan, when we
> were a small beleaguered band and needed to make a lot of noise to get
> attention, we said lots of things. I think the real argument for organic
> is environmental."
> By that time it was already clear to me that part of the problem in
> proving the claims being made was the way in which the studies were being
> done. They were always short term studies looking at produce from one
> field treated "organically" (usually with a shot of manure) and another
> field treated "conventionally." My fairly simple-minded understanding at
> the time was that the basis of organic was to build up the soil. Planting
> into any old ploughed up field meant there had not been time for organic
> practices to build up fertility, nor for the chemicals to "burn up" (in
> the language of the time) the residual fertility in the conventional plot.
> Moreover, I knew enough about plant physiology to know that the mineral
> content of plants was largely dependent on the mineral content of the
> soils where they were grown, and that most differences in vitamin content
> were likely to be either genetic or caused by climate or other variables
> unrelated to specific growing techniques.
> Moreover, if organic produce was more nutritious, that fact might
> well not be demonstrable by comparing lists of nutrients. (This has
> become increasingly obvious recently as an ever lengthening list of
> "non-nutrient" substances turn out to be essential to long-term good
> health.) So if one wanted to test nutritive value, I thought, the
> foods--organic and conventional--would need to be fed to someone or
> something. But who on earth had such data in 1970 when I was asking the
> question? Imagine my delight when I accidentally learned about the
> British Soil Association!
> In the 1940's, when chemical agriculture was just being brought on
> line, The Soil Association had set aside three similar parcels of land to
> be farmed in different manners--an organic section, a chemical section,
> and a mixed section in which some composts were used, but chemicals were
> also allowed. Lady Eve Balfour, founder of the Soil Association, has
> written that she was very suspicious of this new kind of chemical farming
> which was driving out practices that had kept Britain alive for
> generations. She felt some land should be set aside so over time, the new
> and the old ways of farming could be compared. In 1972, when I learned of
> the Association, the plots had been kept in cultivation in these different
> ways for 30 years.
> So on April 9, 1972, I wrote Brigadier A.W. Vickers, General
> Secretary of the Association and asked him whether they had ever fed the
> crops from these fields to animals or humans. And on April 17 Brigadier
> Vickers replied. He indicated that they had a great many research reports
> on the composition of the crops grown on the different sections--after all
> they had 30 years worth of work. But it was difficult to draw conclusions
> from such a mass of data. Then he added this paragraph. "As regards the
> question of foods grown in different manners being fed to animals and/or
> humans under controlled conditions, the answer is that the Small-Animal
> Feeding Experiment is now in its third year, but has not yet been able to
> publish any scientific results. . . . . . They are reluctant even to
> indicate whether these laboratory animals fed on organic food are in every
> way 'superior' to those fed on non-organic food. They are prepared to say
> that as regards fertility, activity, intelligence and passivity, the
> organically fed animals are 'superior' to the non-organically fed." As
> someone looking for scientific data, I found this response disappointingly
> vague.
> I told the people at Rodale about the Soil Association studies and a
> short time later, Vickers responded to their letter asking about evidence
> of organic superiority by saying "It is difficult to produce
> scientifically acceptable evidence to prove that food grown by organic
> methods has a higher nutritional value than food grown by controlled
> chemical agriculture." Then he added "There is a fund of circumstantial
> evidence and a great deal of emotional conviction about the value of
> organically grown food for the health of both humans and animals." More
> than 20 years later, that's still a pretty good statement of where things
> stand.
> I have tried, in the interim, to keep abreast of efforts to answer
> the question, but I must confess that my interest in the details has
> flagged as a variety of often not very well designed studies have reported
> a confusing welter of results. In 1982, Dietrich Knorr, a food scientist
> interested in organic food, published a review of the literature until
> then (including the European literature) in which he noted that many of
> the studies "lack an adequate design for sufficient comparisons, the most
> common problem being the insufficient duration of the studies."
> The studies he cited (of which there were nine) showed no consistent
> sensory differences between organic and conventionally grown produce; and
> showed inconsistent effects on the growth rate and/or reproductive
> performance of rats, mice, and/or rabbits from feeding them wheat grown
> organically or conventionally. The most consistent data related to higher
> levels of nitrate-nitrogen in conventionally grown vegetables, and a
> tendency for organic produce--especially potatoes--to be drier, that is,
> less watery, and hence to lose less weight in storage.
> In 1992, Hornick published in the Journal of Alternative Agriculture
> a paper titled "Factors affecting the nutritional quality of crops," in
> which she pointed out that USDA's l980 report on Organic Farming had found
> insufficient evidence to show organic produce nutritionally superior to
> conventionally grown produce. She felt that this fact reflected, once
> again, "the lack of scientifically sound and statistically valid data from
> experiments with properly controlled variables." Sounds familiar, doesn't
> it?
> Her paper provides an excellent description of what can go wrong and
> what needs controlling in any study that hopes to do a valid comparison of
> organic and conventional crops. She also makes clear that showing an
> effect of "soil cultural and management practices on the nutritional
> quality of crops" is insufficient to prove organic more nutritious. It is
> also necessary to "assess the effect of these practices on the
> bioavailability of food nutrients after ingestion by humans and animals."
> Lacking such controlled studies, there is enough cumulative evidence, to
> indicate--to those who wish to be convinced--that organic foods have a
> variety of qualities that should over the long term make them
> healthier--including lower levels of pesticide residue, lower levels of
> nitrate-nitrogen, greater density, better flavor if they are properly
> handled, etc. And there is evidence that animals given the choice will
> sometimes move to an organic or biodynamic field from a conventional one.
> But the available studies are conflicting enough and their results are
> varied enough to convince anyone who isn't a fan of organic, that such
> differences as can be demonstrated are not worth writing home about, and
> are certainly not a reason to promote organic food.
> And that brings me back to the paper I was handed as I left the
> Michigan Organic Harvest Festival. It came from page 9 of something
> called John Dromgoole's The Natural Gardener Inc and it was headed "Ever
> wonder if organic produce really is better for you.?. . Look at these
> statistics . . . comparing mineral contents of Conventional vs. Organic
> produce. Provided by the Firman Bear Report and research conducted at
> Rutgers University." Pretty serious stuff, huh? Rutgers University. The
> data presented show dramatically different levels of calcium, magnesium,
> potassium, sodium, manganese, iron and copper in snap beans, cabbage,
> lettuce, tomatoes, and spinach, depending on whether these crops were
> grown organically or conventionally.
> Now it so happens that I have the Firman Bear Report which was
> published in Soil Science Society Proceedings in 1948. It was among a lot
> of papers related to this topic that I got from the Rodale files in the
> early 70's. So I decided to see whether Bear and his Rutgers colleagues
> had actually found these dramatic nutrient differences almost half a
> century ago.
> At first, I thought Mr. Dromgoogle and I were reading from different
> hymnals. Because my Firman Bear paper had nothing to do with organic
> growing. The purpose of his study was to get vegetable samples from a
> geographically representative group of 10 states to see what sorts of
> variations would be found in their mineral content as a result of
> differences in the soils, climates and fertilizer practices. Some farms
> in all states used fertilizer though east north-central states made more
> use of "clover sods and manure." but there is no way of telling from the
> paper which farms in which areas produced which vegetables.
> This is, however, the document from which Mr. Dromgoogle's
> ostensibly organic numbers came. After reporting their data vegetable by
> vegetable and state by state the authors compare the highest and lowest
> readings for each of the nutrients tested--the highest Calcium reading for
> snapbeans is 40.5 milliequivalents per 100 grams, the lowest 15.5. These
> figures mostly reflect the effects of geography, but they are identical to
> those labeled "Organic" and "Conventional" in the piece of paper I was
> handed. This identicality continues for each nutrient in each vegetable,
> except for five differences which are clearly typos. Considering the
> pairs of eyes and hands through which this wildly distorted information
> must have traveled in these almost 50 years, the 35 numbers have been
> copied astonishingly accurately. But these numbers do not prove, nor were
> they ever intended to prove, that organic food is nutritively superior.
> Now, what I have just presented to you is pretty much what I
> presented, a couple of weeks ago, to a California conference called "The
> Next Generation of Legal, Regulatory, and Marketing Issues Facing the
> Organic Products Industry." I regret to have to report that the
> conference provided me with even further evidence--which I didn't really
> need--that hope dies hard. Two different people at that conference asked
> me after they had heard my speech whether I had seen a recent organic
> foods study from Chicago, and when I assured them I had not, one of them
> provided me with a copy.
> The study is published under the heading "Commentary" in the Journal
> of Applied Nutrition. It consists of two pages of text and three pages of
> graphs, and it deals with the problem of too many variables by simply
> acknowledging--and then ignoring--all of them. Bob Smith, the author
> begins by asking: "What is needed for the consumer interested in
> nutrition?" Consumers "go to a store and must choose between two potatoes
> or two pears. One is organic, one commercial [I assume he means
> conventional]. Each is about the same size and looks like the same
> variety. . ."
> Then he asks, "Do the foods labelled 'organic' have geater nutritive
> concentration whether from soil factors, use of chemical fertilizers,
> harvesting times, or from post harvest differences in handling?" (So he
> has just dismissed three factors other than growing method--native soil
> quality, harvesting times, post-harvest differences in handling--that
> could affect the nutritients in this produce.) In other words, going into
> this study the fruits, vegetables, and grains he is about to examine may
> be compositionally different for any of a number of reasons having nothing
> to do with whether or not they were produced organically.
> Smith behaved like one of the consumers he describes. He (or his
> representatives) went to several stores in the Western suburbs of Chicago
> and bought "apples, pears, potatoes and corn. . . choosing specimens of
> similar variety and size. Organic whole wheat flour and wheat berries
> were obtained from catalogs and markets in the Chicago area." These foods
> were taken to a lab and "tested" for their content of 26 minerals. The
> results--presented in the paper as graphs showing percentages by which
> organic and commercial foods of the same type differed from each
> other--show that in almost every case the organic foods appear to contain
> more minerals than the conventional foods.
> I am not an expert on techniques of food anaylsis, so I will content
> myself with commenting only on what was not done by the author's own
> admission. First the author apparently made no effort to make certain
> that the samples were exactly the same variety--a very relevant fact since
> varieties can differ markedly in their nutritive content. Second, the
> samples were not analyzed on a dry weight basis--the standard method of
> doing such analyses. This means that if the conventional produce was more
> watery, as some studies show that it may be, there would naturally be a
> lower concentration of minerals in any weight of sample used. Third an
> exceedingly crude method was used to extract the minerals which may or may
> not have been appropriate to all of them.
> But all these technical problems fall into irrelevance compared to
> the presentation of the "results." The author presents no numerical data
> on the amounts of each mineral found, since by his own admission "the
> matrix effect caused by different viscosity, acidity, and residue in the
> ashed specimen of each food type must be studied to produce accurate
> numerical results." In this study, the foods were not ashed, and, as the
> author remarks "the matrices were not studied so numerical results are not
> reported." In other words, he did not do the analyses that would have
> been necessary to produce what he himself calls "accurate numerical
> results."
> So the "results" are presented in bar graphs showing the percentage
> by which a given vegetable grown organically differed in its content of
> particular minerals from the same vegetable grown conventionally. I have
> no idea how you calculate a percentage unless you start with numerical
> results! And if the numerical results aren't good enough to be presented,
> why does putting them in a graph make them better? And if we don't have
> numerical results, what does it mean to say that his sample of organic
> sweet corn had 80% more aluminum and 1800% more calcium than his sample of
> conventional sweet corn?
> But one must also insist--even if these graphs were accurate that
> without numbers, they are meaningless. Eighteen hundred percent of what?
> According to government figures, a cup of sweet corn kernels has about 5
> mg of calcium. Eighteen hundred percent of that is 90 mg. The
> recommended daily allowance for calcium is 800 to 1200. A pint of skim
> milk has about 600 mg. So in practical terms the differences--between
> even huge numbers--may be relatively trivial. But one cannot judge that
> without knowing what the numbers are.
> Does this study allow you to say that organic foods are more
> nutritious than conventional foods? No. Does it allow you to say that
> some foods grown organically might have more of certain nutrients than
> conventional foods? Probably. But I wouldn't want to hang my hat on it.
> Now the title of my speech asks whether focussing on the nutritive
> value of organic is even the right question. Since I don't think it is, I
> want, in closing, to Ask two questions that suggest why emphasis on the
> numbers may actually be dangerous in the real world.
> Given the modern opportunities for what I have come to call
> information pollution, I wonder whether it makes sense to try to sell
> people on eating organic food by focussing on comparative numbers rather
> than focussing on the environmental reasons why organic production is
> better for people in lots of ways. Numbers can and will be increasingly
> untrustworthy as we enter more deeply into the virtual world of Internet
> in which factoids race about through the electrons, to be endlessly
> repeated among true believers.
> As both the examples I have given earlier demonstrate, it's
> altogether too easy for people to latch onto some scrap of paper that
> seems to confirm what they want to believe, a scrap of paper that would be
> dismissed with contempt by any scientist worth his keep. As Katherine
> DiMatteo, executive director of the Organic Trade Association has written,
> "How many times have we reached out and grabbed onto the newest
> evidence--no matter how minor, poorly substantiated or altered--that
> organic may be nutritionally better?" DiMatteo, Katherine. Letter:
> Defining the Organic ImageThe Organic Report, June 1995, pg 3
> I also wonder why we would really want to use up any of our energy
> on numbers that can so readily be modified to reflect nothing about the
> original produce. A recent description of one very successful juice
> company done for potential investors, notes their organic sourcing of
> fruits and vegetables, their emphasis on "Nourishing the body whole," and
> a new juice introduced in August of 1994 with women in mind. (Odwalla,
> Equity Brief. Franklin Research's Insight, June 15, 1995.) "The
> ingredients are fresh apricot, apple, orange, cranberry and raspberry
> juices plus added calcium, iron and B-vitamins." When most people can
> (and do) take vitamins and minerals in pills, and when it is so easy to
> fortify everything with nutrients, shouldn't we hope that people will
> choose organic foods on grounds more reliable than whether they contain a
> little more carotene or zinc?
> The National Organic Standard Board is at present working hard to
> develop a set of national standards that will define define foods as
> organic. Some of the things I heard at the organic conference in
> California suggest to me that If we focus on the issue of nutrient
> superiority, we may well find ourselves with standards that allow
> processors of "organic" foods to add nutrients that they think will sell
> their products.
> It's possible that we could do valid and reliable studies that would
> show that organic methods produced foods higher in nutrients. But, for
> all the reasons stated above, I'm not personally convinced that such
> studies would be worth the money and effort it would take to do them--not
> when there are so many other good reasons to support organic production.
> Surely the more important things to know and teach are that organic
> production conserves natural resources, solves rather than creates
> environmental problems, and reduces the pollution of air, water, soil, . .
> . and food. Surely those of us also concerned with social justice and
> with maintaining a regional food production capacity should focus more on
> these environmental and human issues than on the really more trivial one
> of whether a given piece of produce contains a few more or a few less
> nutrients.
>
> Was the healthful longevity of Scott and Helen Nearing due to their
> organic produce, their vegetarian diet, their family tree, or the fact
> that they built stone walls as a pastime? Or all of these things. I have
> staked my life on the conviction that the organic food I grow in my garden
> will keep me healthier than the food I could buy at the supermarket. But
> even if I die tomorrow, I'd still opt to eat this way because I think that
> practicing lovingly tending or making it possible for others to loving
> tend a piece of this ravaged planet is worth doing.
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