Today we give a big shoutout to Hank Campbell, whose Science 2.0 blog is one of the most popular sites science sites, covering a wide variety of science and health issues.
Campbells s thought provoking piece, Organic Food Does Not Reduce Cancer Risk will really make you wonder if the organic lifestyle you may be adhering to makes any sense. Campbell s conclusion: No way.
He says, The premise is logical, at least for organic shoppers, if only [tangentially] valid scientifically. Poor diet has been correlated to increased cancer risk. And pesticides have been correlated to cancer risk. Basically, they see cancer and pesticides as a surrogate marker for each other so if there are fewer pesticides, it would mean less cancer. Unfortunately, rational people know that organic food actually does not have fewer pesticides, it instead uses toxic poison that can be found in nature.
ACSH s Dr. Josh Bloom says, if there are any areas where there is widespread confusion and misinformation it would be organic foods, pesticides and chemical toxicity/exposure. Campbell s piece explains these issues very clearly.
If organic food reduces cancer risk, a giant population of organic consumers should get less cancer over the long term:
A recent paper follow 623,080 middle-aged UK women who reported their consumption of organic food over a period of 9.3 years. That doesn't sound like a long time? In Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring", she claimed people sprayed DDT and got cancer and died a few months later so 9 years is plenty. 53,769 cases showed no meaningful difference in cancer incidence between organic food and normal food consumers. Organic food consumers even showed a small increased risk of breast cancer while they showed a reduction in the risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
ACSH S Dr. Gil Ross had this to add: Furthermore, those toxic pesticides the organic adherents think they re avoiding you know, the ones that the FDA and the EPA have evaluated up the kazoo and found safe, as did we recently are in fact neither toxic nor carcinogenic!
Powerful stuff. We strongly urge you to read his entire piece.