Some years ago I first ventured into a Whole Foods Supermarket and was dismayed by the lack of recognizable brands. These days I’ve come to avoid the big brands, as the only way a company can distribute a consistent product so widely is by putting the cheapest ingredients in the box. And that can’t be good.

Bull-Crap!

Organic food tastes better and makes me feel better.

I can leave an non-organic item around for weeks and it’s still unassailed by simple bacteria. If something as simple as a bacterium doesn’t want a piece of food, why should I?

Consider who was behind the study and you’ll understand that they’ve undoubtedly tainted the results.

If organic foods weren’t of such value, why then did Prince Charles push the Royal Family towards organic produce back in the 70’s?

It’s obvious that the Cargill’s, ADM’s, Monsanto’s and Franken-Food-Meisters are possibly behind this study and wish to confuse the issue to maintain their strangle-hold on the mind (and purses) of the masses. Stop trying to co-opt the food supply for your own cynical profits.

Try going into any ‘main stream’ super-market and compare the paltry display of insipid and lacking-of-life rows of chemically assisted food stuffs to the rows of beautiful organic produce found in an organic food store . You’ll find that the “so called conventional” products are lifeless!

Enough of this rant!

Bad big business!

I thank you for your erudite response but beg to differ (except for that bit about ‘fertiliser”). Having been inside corporations myself, I don’t assume everyone is corrupt. Actions speak for themselves, in this case the study’s conclusion is the action. If you believe there are benefits to organic food, you are at odds with the study’s authors who conclude:

…there is currently no evidence of a health benefit from consuming organic compared to conventionally produced foodstuffs.

Then they undermine the credibility of their own conclusion in the very next sentence:

It should be noted that this conclusion relates to the evidence base currently available on the nutrient content of foodstuffs, which contains limitations in the design and in the comparability of studies.

Essentially, they’ve admitted that the built in limitations of their study precluded an honest assessment of the health benefits of any food! At best the FSA/LSHTM study could conclude that a survey of selected published studies shows no major differences in the nutritional content of organic food versus conventionally grown food. That’s a very different statement from the extreme (and unscientific) one they made. Nonetheless, which statement could be safely assumed to make the headlines and thus shape public opinion?

So why would they publish the extreme statement they did? Just a case of sloppy conclusion making? Doubtful. One is forced to conclude that between the design of this survey and it’s subsequent conclusion, the results were preordained to help conventional food producers. Results such as these are routinely acquired via money injections and/or political pressure.

It may well be that Europe and the UK, is much less corrupted by their corporations. But should any corruption exist, this would be the sort of result to look for.

A large part of the benefits of organic food is reduced chemical contamination, and if the differences nutritionally were found to be slight, then I expect they are. But that is what the paper set out to examine, not whether organic food was worthy or better than unorganic food. You should reserve your ire for the BBC and other credulous journalists who did not read it objectively and who so commonly regurgitate stuff like this without context.

While we are on that subject of bias and thoughtless, uninformed writing in journalism, you undermine your credibility by so completely giving your article over to your prejudices, too. Assuming that anyone who has worked for a corporation is corrupted by it is a stretch. You also seem to think that this narrow assessment of organic food was designed to miss the point. A big assumption.

You also made a mistake by putting the sic next to, I presume, fertiliser. That is the English spelling, and it is their language, after all.

Your cultural bias is showing, too. Europe, including the UK, is much less corrupted by their corporations than the US. Assuming a paper produced by a government agency there has been shaped by corporate meddling is much less likely to be true than here in the good old USA.