All posts by E.A. Thackaberry
People eat organic food for many reasons. Some people think it’s healthier. Some say it’s safer. Some just like the way it tastes. One of the most common reasons is to avoid pesticides. But is there any evidence for these ideas about organic food? Are any of these things actually true? UYBFS has the answers! Let’s start with the facts about what the term “organic” really means, in a legal sense, in the United States.
- What does “organic” mean? For crops to be advertised as “organic,” they must be grown without the use of most (but not all!) synthetic pesticides, they may not contain GMOs, and no artificial methods may be used for ripening or sterilization. Pesticides derived from natural sources are allowed on GMO crops. For meat, “organic” means the animal was fed 100% organic food and was not routinely administered hormones or antibiotics.
- For multi-ingredient food, there are three “levels” of organic certification in the United States. 100% Organic means that the product is made form 100% organic ingredients. Organic means that at least 95% of the ingredients are organic. It’s a safe bet that the other 5% contains non-organic ingredients, because if it didn’t the company would have tried for the “100% organic” label. Finally, Made with Organic Ingredients means that at least 70% of the ingredients are organic. Again, the rest are likely not.
Pop quiz! The USDA “organic” label means that 95% of the ingredients are organic, and the non-GMO label means that the remaining 5% are not GMO. However, this remaining 5% is not necessarily organic.
OK, now that we have basics covered, one benefit you’ll often hear is that organic food is “safer” or “pesticide-free”. Unfortunately, this is not true. Damn you facts! Always busting up our preconceived notions! Here are the facts:
Welcome to Ask a Scientist, where we answer questions from our readers on a wide range of scientific topics. Got a scientific question? Drop us an line.
It seems like a lot of celebrities are promoting detox diets. Do they work? Which ones are the safest and most effective? – M.H. Queens, NY.
Great question! These are all over the internet. Before we get into the diets and supplements themselves, let’s talk about “toxins” and how your body gets rid of them. Click here for a basic explanation of what a toxin is.
What toxins are these diets and supplements targeting? Many health blogs will classify toxins as “endotoxins”, which they say are waste products made in your body, and “exotoxins”, which they define as toxins that make their way into your body in your food you eat, the water you drink, or the air you breathe. In the parlance of science, both of these definitions are wrong – an endotoxin is a very specific and dangerous toxin produced by gram-negative bacteria, and an exotoxin is a toxin released by bacteria, often as a defense mechanism. The proper terms for each are metabolic waste products and xenobiotics, respectively. A xenobiotic is something that is foreign to the body, though it may or not be toxic.
Welcome to Bad Science on the Internet! Here, we highlight some of the crazy and sometime dangerous stuff people post online, and then give you the facts.
The bad science: There is a viral post making the rounds on Facebook claiming that mixing tomatoes and cucumbers together is “not beneficial to your health”. Several people have asked me about this – thanks, Maureen H!
What do they claim? I’m going to quote the entirety of their argument, because it’s funnier this way:
“Tomatoes and cucumbers have different digestion time and mixing them can cause health complications. The bad food combination can trigger digestive problems such as stomach ache, gas, nausea and bloating. Cucumbers also contain a substance that destroys vitamin C in tomatoes. So it is more beneficial to our health to eat cucumbers without any additions.”
This is actually all over the internet! I found another site that claims this combination could kill you! They make no mention of how this could kill you, but they do say that you should never eat a watermelon with another kind of melon, because “these fruits were meant to be eaten alone, not in combination with any other fruit”. As if the watermelon plant’s feelings might be hurt if you mixed the flesh of it’s fruit that that of another species. That’s melon racism, and it’s not cool.
I like clean water. I suspect you do too. There are a lot of things that could end up in drinking water, and there is a tremendous amount of engineering, testing, and government oversight that goes into making sure that you and I can drink the water coming out of the faucets across this country. Of all the things that could end up in water, lead is currently on most people’s minds, because of what has happened in Flint, MI, where dangerous levels of lead and other contaminants have made the local water undrinkable since 2014.
The Flint water crisis is a horrific example of government corruption, environmental racism, and a total disregard for public safety. It is especially chilling because it involves one of the most basic resources that we all take for granted: water. Since the crisis began in 2014, Flint residents have suffered from chemical burns, Legionnaires Disease, and, most famously, lead poisoning – and as of this writing they still don’t have clean drinking water coming from their taps.
All of this is why the recent advertisement from PUR seems so cynical, cruelly manipulative, and shockingly misleading. PUR is attempting to profit off a humanitarian crisis using the very reasonable fear of water insecurity, while ignoring the very basic science that renders its claims absurd.
So let’s get to the facts.
It seems like there are dozens of types of doctors these days. What is a “real” doctor? What type of training do they have? Can they prescribe you medicine or even give you useful medical advice based on reality? Here’s a run-down of your options.
Medical Doctor (M.D.)
Requirements: Four years of medical school, plus 3-7 years of residency. Residency is time spent working under more experienced physicians after medical school.
M.D.’s are medical doctors trained in allopathic (or modern science-based) medicine. They have the ability to write prescriptions, perform surgeries, etc.
Verdict: Definitely “real” doctors.
GMOs have a bad name. This is a fact. The reaction of many people to the term “GMO” is negative. That negative reaction likely stems from several vague concerns: that of humans recklessly altering that which is “natural,” or of the potential to damage “natural” biodiversity, or the loss of freedom of choice that comes with unknowingly ingesting GMO food. However, the most common, and most serious concern of all is that of safety. How could we possibly know that GMOs are safe? There are diseases out there that seem to be increasing in prevalence and we don’t know what causes them – could it be the relatively recent introduction of GMOs?
Science can help with the questions of alteration of “natural” organisms and biodiversity, though these are questions we will not try to answer in this post. The question of freedom of choice, or consent, or “right to know” is strictly an ethical one. The one question here that science is most equipped to answer is one about safety. That is because we have developed very sophisticated methods for hazard identification and risk assessment over the years (and after learning some very hard lessons in the past), and because the government regulatory agencies around the world have dictated, right from the start of the GMO revolution, that new products need to be scientifically proven to be safe. Today, we will look objectively and scientifically at the available data to answer this most basic of questions.
Are GMO foods safe?
