5 ms·

It's hard to tell if we're eating better or just being duped in a new way. "Fat free" is bullshit, "Organic" is bullshit, "Gluten Free" is bullshit (unless you

It's hard to tell if we're eating better or just being duped in a new way. "Fat free" is bullshit, "Organic" is bullshit, "Gluten Free" is bullshit (unless you actually have celica's).

bad_user 11y ago
How is organic bullshit?
- msandford 11y ago
  Well "USDA Certified Organic" doesn't really mean what you would think it means. You'd think it means no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, and no fertilizer. That's precisely what nearly everyone thinks it means. http://lifehacker.com/5941881/what-does-organic-really-mean-and-should-i-buy-it http://lifehacker.com/5941881/what-does-organic-really-mean-... The reality is that "Organic" doesn't mean anywhere near what people think it does, sadly. It's fairly watered down. It's a bummer.
- awjr 11y ago
  Depends on if the bull eats grass from a pesticide-free pasture ;)
- jarito 11y ago
  There is no standard dictating what organic means. Many 'organic' products use processes and methods that most people would not recognize as organic. A consumer buying an organic product has little to no knowledge of whether the producer is being faithful to the concept. Add a huge price markup for organic products and many producers are incentivized to mark products organic even if they really aren't - and many are doing so. There are attempts to standardize, but none have the recognizability needed by the majority of the populace to make them effective.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- goodJobWalrus 11y ago
  Apart of other replies, there is also no evidence that is any better for than conventionally grown produce.
  - bad_user 11y ago
    I'm not from the US, but from Romania. My grandparents lived on the country-side, working the land and during the communists Romania did not have much access to the vast quantities of pesticides and fertilizer that the US was left with after WWII, due to a large surplus of ammonium nitrate and of various poison gases. Our animals were not fed and grown on cheap, subsidized corn and kept alive with antibiotics. Our diary products were not low fat. Our white flour was given for export. Etc, etc.. And guess what, after 1990, after the revolution, when we started importing food and adopting the "western diet", we ended up with the same shock like everybody else ... people getting fatter, increased rates of type II diabetes, increased rates of coronary artery disease, etc. And most importantly I think - our food is losing its taste, because vegetables grown with pesticides and artificial fertilizers have shallower root systems, grow faster and thus are unable to gather the same amount of nutrients as vegetables grown normally and in season. Same goes for animals, like cattle or pigs or chicken, raised on corn and kept alive with antibiotics. In regards to your statement, organic food is the conventional way to produce food, and note that I'm not talking about any standard, but about how people have been growing food before we discovered what fossil fuels are good for. There's actually plenty of evidence to go around, plenty of studies, showing links between the western diet and type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, with my father's PhD thesis being one, evidence that has been ignored because it flies in the face of the low-fat bullshit we've been fed, plus it goes against a multi-billion dollar industry. Artificial fertilizers are also known to be responsible for the destruction of our environment, leading to such effects as water pollution with nitrate or acidification of the soil.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      But 'organic' only covers a third of that. You can make horrible junk food with organic ingredients.
DarkTree 11y ago
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by saying organic is bullshit. Food isn't always about what you put in your body, but is also about how it affects the environment we live in, and in that sense, organic is definitely not "bullshit". However, I will say that the label of "all-natural" posted forefront and proud on products is misleading. All-natural does not equate to healthy, yet it seems many consumers believe this. Anecdotal of course.
- mc32 11y ago
  Organic isn't bullshit however, asking for organic worldwide exclusive of anything else, would let people starve. So, it's baby steps. We've learned to hybridize to improve yields and learned how to fertilize to improve yields. Both of these innovations have allowed to world to grow without widespread malnutrition (as we used to have). Now we have an opportunity to innovate farming methods to rely less on poisons while improving yields on traditional farming (non-modern farming). It's one of those things where it's difficult to impossible to achieve without the ugly stage (given the parameter of a world not starving to death in the meantime).
- hueving 11y ago
  Organic is bullshit from the perspective that it is just a luxury product that does not scale and therefore is completely unsustainable as a way of eating for the world population.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - cmurf 11y ago
    Well, if you're going to be realistic about it, humanity does not scale either. We need a negative growth rate to get it back to sustainable.
    - tptacek 11y ago
      People have been saying that for 50-60 years now, and history seems to have taken a bar bet to see how many different ways it can make those people end up sounding dumb. We're not going to have a negative growth rate, and we're going to feed everyone.
tomp 11y ago
It's only bullshit because the definitions aren't enforced by law. If "organic" meant what people expect it to mean (grown without artificial fertilizers/chemicals), it wouldn't be bullshit.
jkldotio 11y ago
Can people please stop calling gluten free a fad or "bullshit". The reactions to gluten are autoimmune not some simple thing only to do with the walls of the intestines. Classic intestinal Coeliac reactions while the most common are only one of the manifestations. We've known for ages that it can also cause problems with the skin (Duhring's disease, discovered in 1967 and also still not fully understood) and there is a growing body of work showing connections to the nervous system.[0] The bottom line is it's an autoimmune disease and we simply do not know the full extent of the interactions and effects when the immune system is going wrong so people like you, who don't know what you are talking about to the extent you can't even spell the name of what you are talking about properly, are the real purveyors of bullshit. That's to say nothing of the fact that even in your world where there are only people with classical Coeliac those people have to put up with the implication from the people mocking and sneering that they aren't genuine, and have to put up with waiters and waitresses who don't properly handle food or disclose its ingredients because they think it's a fad. [0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=20170845 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_ci...
- tptacek 11y ago
  On the other hand, as an article I read recently pointed out, there is a faddish "why not ask for gluten-free" component to the phenomenon, and while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) just because it's a trendy thing to ask for. The concern then is that restaurants will stop accommodating (because they simply can't afford to) altogether, and people with serious health issues will just have to eat elsewhere, which sucks.
  - jkldotio 11y ago
    I know a Coeliac who is diagnosed properly - with the genetic test showing the relevant genes, then a blood test showing the antibodies and then finally a biopsy showing damage to the gut - and they are older and travel quite a lot. The change over the last decade has been wonderfully beneficial for them. I've seen that observation repeated many times online as well, pleasure at having so many more options than just a few years ago. It's not just about restaurants either, I don't remember there being a gluten free section in the supermarket growing but now they are everywhere (Australia). I've never seen a comment suggesting the other way. Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations. This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt. It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".

It's hard to tell if we're eating better or just being duped in a new way. "Fat free" is bullshit, "Organic" is bullshit, "Gluten Free" is bullshit (unless you actually have celica's).

bad_user 11y ago

How is organic bullshit?

msandford 11y ago
Well "USDA Certified Organic" doesn't really mean what you would think it means. You'd think it means no pesticides, no herbicides, no fungicides, and no fertilizer. That's precisely what nearly everyone thinks it means. http://lifehacker.com/5941881/what-does-organic-really-mean-and-should-i-buy-it http://lifehacker.com/5941881/what-does-organic-really-mean-... The reality is that "Organic" doesn't mean anywhere near what people think it does, sadly. It's fairly watered down. It's a bummer.
awjr 11y ago
Depends on if the bull eats grass from a pesticide-free pasture ;)
jarito 11y ago
There is no standard dictating what organic means. Many 'organic' products use processes and methods that most people would not recognize as organic. A consumer buying an organic product has little to no knowledge of whether the producer is being faithful to the concept. Add a huge price markup for organic products and many producers are incentivized to mark products organic even if they really aren't - and many are doing so. There are attempts to standardize, but none have the recognizability needed by the majority of the populace to make them effective.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
goodJobWalrus 11y ago
Apart of other replies, there is also no evidence that is any better for than conventionally grown produce.
- bad_user 11y ago
  I'm not from the US, but from Romania. My grandparents lived on the country-side, working the land and during the communists Romania did not have much access to the vast quantities of pesticides and fertilizer that the US was left with after WWII, due to a large surplus of ammonium nitrate and of various poison gases. Our animals were not fed and grown on cheap, subsidized corn and kept alive with antibiotics. Our diary products were not low fat. Our white flour was given for export. Etc, etc.. And guess what, after 1990, after the revolution, when we started importing food and adopting the "western diet", we ended up with the same shock like everybody else ... people getting fatter, increased rates of type II diabetes, increased rates of coronary artery disease, etc. And most importantly I think - our food is losing its taste, because vegetables grown with pesticides and artificial fertilizers have shallower root systems, grow faster and thus are unable to gather the same amount of nutrients as vegetables grown normally and in season. Same goes for animals, like cattle or pigs or chicken, raised on corn and kept alive with antibiotics. In regards to your statement, organic food is the conventional way to produce food, and note that I'm not talking about any standard, but about how people have been growing food before we discovered what fossil fuels are good for. There's actually plenty of evidence to go around, plenty of studies, showing links between the western diet and type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity, cancer, with my father's PhD thesis being one, evidence that has been ignored because it flies in the face of the low-fat bullshit we've been fed, plus it goes against a multi-billion dollar industry. Artificial fertilizers are also known to be responsible for the destruction of our environment, leading to such effects as water pollution with nitrate or acidification of the soil.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    But 'organic' only covers a third of that. You can make horrible junk food with organic ingredients.

DarkTree 11y ago

I think you're doing yourself a disservice by saying organic is bullshit. Food isn't always about what you put in your body, but is also about how it affects the environment we live in, and in that sense, organic is definitely not "bullshit". However, I will say that the label of "all-natural" posted forefront and proud on products is misleading. All-natural does not equate to healthy, yet it seems many consumers believe this. Anecdotal of course.

mc32 11y ago
Organic isn't bullshit however, asking for organic worldwide exclusive of anything else, would let people starve. So, it's baby steps. We've learned to hybridize to improve yields and learned how to fertilize to improve yields. Both of these innovations have allowed to world to grow without widespread malnutrition (as we used to have). Now we have an opportunity to innovate farming methods to rely less on poisons while improving yields on traditional farming (non-modern farming). It's one of those things where it's difficult to impossible to achieve without the ugly stage (given the parameter of a world not starving to death in the meantime).
hueving 11y ago
Organic is bullshit from the perspective that it is just a luxury product that does not scale and therefore is completely unsustainable as a way of eating for the world population.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- cmurf 11y ago
  Well, if you're going to be realistic about it, humanity does not scale either. We need a negative growth rate to get it back to sustainable.
  - tptacek 11y ago
    People have been saying that for 50-60 years now, and history seems to have taken a bar bet to see how many different ways it can make those people end up sounding dumb. We're not going to have a negative growth rate, and we're going to feed everyone.

tomp 11y ago

It's only bullshit because the definitions aren't enforced by law. If "organic" meant what people expect it to mean (grown without artificial fertilizers/chemicals), it wouldn't be bullshit.

jkldotio 11y ago

Can people please stop calling gluten free a fad or "bullshit". The reactions to gluten are autoimmune not some simple thing only to do with the walls of the intestines. Classic intestinal Coeliac reactions while the most common are only one of the manifestations. We've known for ages that it can also cause problems with the skin (Duhring's disease, discovered in 1967 and also still not fully understood) and there is a growing body of work showing connections to the nervous system.[0] The bottom line is it's an autoimmune disease and we simply do not know the full extent of the interactions and effects when the immune system is going wrong so people like you, who don't know what you are talking about to the extent you can't even spell the name of what you are talking about properly, are the real purveyors of bullshit. That's to say nothing of the fact that even in your world where there are only people with classical Coeliac those people have to put up with the implication from the people mocking and sneering that they aren't genuine, and have to put up with waiters and waitresses who don't properly handle food or disclose its ingredients because they think it's a fad. [0]http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_citedin&from_uid=20170845 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?linkname=pubmed_pubmed_ci...

tptacek 11y ago
On the other hand, as an article I read recently pointed out, there is a faddish "why not ask for gluten-free" component to the phenomenon, and while full-service restaurants can often (and at great inconvenience) accommodate the small part of the population that has true and significant reactions to ingredients, they're not equipped to handle a huge percentage of their customers asking for changes (which will often require them to use totally separate prep, storage, and mise en place) just because it's a trendy thing to ask for. The concern then is that restaurants will stop accommodating (because they simply can't afford to) altogether, and people with serious health issues will just have to eat elsewhere, which sucks.
- jkldotio 11y ago
  I know a Coeliac who is diagnosed properly - with the genetic test showing the relevant genes, then a blood test showing the antibodies and then finally a biopsy showing damage to the gut - and they are older and travel quite a lot. The change over the last decade has been wonderfully beneficial for them. I've seen that observation repeated many times online as well, pleasure at having so many more options than just a few years ago. It's not just about restaurants either, I don't remember there being a gluten free section in the supermarket growing but now they are everywhere (Australia). I've never seen a comment suggesting the other way. Huge numbers of people have problems with modern diets, you can see it if you dig into any report on work absenteeism. It makes perfect sense if you reason evolutionarily that there would be a far greater number of "low level" allergies/problems than "high level" ones like those that cause people to go into anaphylaxis from nuts or shellfish. If allergies that can kill you quickly from fairly common things exist, i.e. not everyone suffering from them has died, then it would be suprising if lower level allergies to even rarer things were less prevalent. That's to say nothing of how little we actually understand our gut flora, i.e. not an allergy but just an unsuitability at that present moment, and how diverse it is across populations. This faux-masculine "just toughen up and eat your veggies and that thing that's making you not feel well" hides behind a mask of intellectual superiority. It sneers down its nose at people who are trying to improve their health and pretends changing your diet to alleviate symptoms of various kinds is exactly the same as homeopathy. I think it's bled over from the criticism of fad diets for weight loss that pretend to get around the laws of thermodynamics, but diets can address health in many more ways than just weight loss so not all diets should be grouped together as somehow intellectual bankrupt. It's absurd in the case of gluten where there are numerous non-classical symptoms associated with it and the only rational scientific response is to keep funding university research at the randomised double-blind peer reviewed research level. While we wait for the researchers to exhaust that research area, which will likely take decades given how, difficult it is to do studies on diet that are totally blind it will probably come through greater research into genetics and the immune system, people suffering symptoms should not be castigated for experimenting in a non-blind way on themselves. Of course that's subject to placebo and all the rest, but it's not remotely near anything like "my fad diet can defy the laws of physics".