I’m beginning to see these parallel lists as odious. Or should I say tiered lists … organic for the privileged, conventional for everyone else.

Here’s Dr. Weil steering us away from conventionally raised fruits and vegetables. Actually, he’s more forthright than that, he says we shouldn’t buy them:

Are You Eating the Dirty Dozen?
Certain foods that are not organically grown may have more pesticide residue than others. Called the “Dirty Dozen,” find out what vegetables and fruits they are – and avoid buying them when conventionally grown.

Eating fresh produce is the best way to obtain the nutrients that support optimum health, but the pesticides used on many crops remain a major health concern. By choosing organic foods, you can reap the health benefits of fruits and vegetables without exposing yourself and your family to potentially harmful chemicals. Pesticides present real health risks, particularly to children and those with health concerns. The toxicity most commonly associated with pesticides in animal studies include disruptions in the normal functioning of the nervous and endocrine systems, as well as increased risks of cancer.

As part of my support of the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and their recently updated Shopper’s Guide, I am presenting the newest “Dirty Dozen” list – produce you should buy only in organically grown form. According to EWG, common growing practices make the crops listed below the most likely to contain higher pesticide residues:

Apples
Strawberries
Grapes
Celery
Peaches
Spinach
Sweet bell peppers
Nectarines (imported)
Cucumbers
Cherry tomatoes
Snap peas (imported)
Potatoes

Plus these which may contain organophosphate insecticides, which EWG characterizes as “highly toxic” and of special concern:

Hot peppers
Blueberries (domestic)

What do people do when they can’t buy organic? Dr. Weil says we shouldn’t buy conventional. But what’s the alternative? Really … what do we buy instead? Dr. Weil? There are people who absolutely have no choice, people who receive their meals from care homes, schools, hospitals, prisons, or other institutions. There are free-living people who also don’t have a choice, people who live where organic foods aren’t sold, people who can’t afford the price differential, people who lack transportation.

As I have discovered, bread made from conventionally grown wheat can have more pesticide residues in it than washed produce. So can mustard. And what happens when we feed our livestock GMO corn and soy that has been heavily sprayed? Do the chemicals not deposit themselves in the flesh of the animal? As I’ve discovered, they do. It’s not just fresh produce we need to be concerned about, it’s all food.

I know I’m being idealistic saying this, but, here goes … We need to stop creating these niche organic markets (Just how organic is “organic” anyway? Organic Food Is Grown With Manure From Factory Farms, Synthetic Pesticides) We need to get these chemicals out of all food, everone’s food.

One method to reduce acrylamide is to brown food to the least acceptable level.

Someone told me I shouldn’t eat potatoes because they contain acrylamide.

Acrylamide is not an additive or environmental contaminant but a natural byproduct of a reaction between carbohydrates and proteins in food. Acrylamide forms when food is heated. Boiling does not appear to be as bad as roasting, frying, grilling, and other cooking methods that use higher heat. There is also a time factor, the longer the food is exposed to heat, the more acrylamide can form.

The IARC classifies acrylamide as a Group 2A carcinogen, or a “probable” carcinogen. (Recall that IARC just classified glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup as a Grade 2A carcinogen.)

The person who told me not to eat potatoes is right, in one regard at least. Roasted potatoes do contain acrylamide. But so do lots of other foods, including breads, bagels, cereals, crackers, pretzels, chocolate chip cookies (must be the chocolate), popcorn, corn chips, potato chips, roasted sweet potatoes, chicken nuggets and other breaded fried meats, roasted almonds, roasted peanuts, peanut butter, roasted sunflower seeds, chocolate, coffee, black olives (may be due to pasteurization for canning), prunes, prune juice, dried pears, cooked carrots, cooked onions.¹

Virtually any food that contains carbohydrate and protein has the potential to develop acrylamide when heated. You don’t even need much heat if you expose it for a long time, as in the case of dried fruits.

Humans have been consuming acrylamide for as long as they’ve been cooking their food. It probably hasn’t done more harm because our bodies can swiftly metabolize acrylimide and excrete it in urine. Glutathione, an antioxidant produced naturally by our cells, assists in this process. Certain spices including turmeric, cinnamon, and cardamom; vitamins C and E; and the mineral selenium can increase glutathione activity.

Acrylamide may be in our food, but it’s not much compared to:

Cigarette smoking is a major acrylamide source. It has been shown in one study to cause a three-fold greater increase in blood acrylamide levels than any dietary factor.

¹ FDA: Survey Data on Acrylamide in Food: Individual Food Products

Among women who had high cholesterol, those who took statins for 10 years or longer more than doubled their risk of breast cancer compared to those who didn’t:

Long-term Statin Use And Risk Of Ductal And Lobular Breast Cancer Among Women 55-74 Years Of Age, Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, September 2013

Why? They don’t know:

The biology underlying an association between statin use and breast cancer risk is uncertain.

However:

We observed that risks were highest among long-term current users suggesting that statins may act as promoters of breast carcinogenesis.

What about short term use?

This finding does not rule out the possibility that shorter term statin use may have no effect … on the development of breast cancer.

It’s probably not because the women had high cholesterol to begin with:

Our finding of a greater than 2-fold increased risk of breast cancer among current long-term statin users in analyses restricted to study participants reporting a history of high cholesterol is evidence that confounding by indication does not account for the excess of breast cancer cases among statin users.

If this association holds up, it’s a ticking time bomb:

Approximately a quarter of all United States women over the age of 45 report current use of one of the seven different statin drugs on the market today.

Below are some recent comments from Pope Francis on GMOs:¹

This one brings to the fore the paucity of independent research:

“GMOs is an issue which is complex, it must be approached with a sympathetic look at all its aspects, and this requires at least one more effort to finance several lines of independent and interdisciplinary research.”

Below, he says that human intervention may be creating more problems than it’s solving, “often in the service of finance and consumerism.”

Technology that is linked to finance, claims to be only solving problems … this solves a problem by creating others.

It creates a vicious circle in which the intervention of the human being to solve a problem often worsens the situation further. For example, many birds and insects die out as a result of toxic pesticides created by technology, they are useful to agriculture itself, and their disappearance will be compensated with another technological intervention that probably will bring new harmful effects.

Looking at the world we see that this level of human intervention, often in the service of finance and consumerism, actually causes the earth we live in to become less rich and beautiful, more and more limited and gray, while at the same time the development of technology and consumerism continues to advance without limits.

These were translated from Italian. I wish I knew Italian so I could pick through his full document. You can hear his study behind his words.

¹ Pope Francis Slams GMOs And Pesticides For Environmental And Social Damage, Sustainable Pulse, 16 June 2015

Organic soybean field in Michigan.

Does Certified Organic Farming Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions From Agricultural Production?, Agriculture and Human Values, June 2015

The answer to the question in the title of this study is, no, certified organic farming does not reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and it may increase them:

My analysis finds that the rise of certified organic production in the United States is not correlated with declines in greenhouse gas emissions derived specifically from agricultural production, and on the contrary is associated positively with overall agricultural greenhouse gas emissions.

I saw it on Quartz:
Organic Farming Is Actually Worse For Climate Change Than Conventional Farming, Quartz, 15 July 2015

[University of Oregon researcher Julius McGee] found that, counterintuitively, organic farming led to higher emissions of GHGs. This is happening, McGee says, because so much of today’s organic farming is done by corporate entities responding to consumer demands, not by activist farmers trying to counteract the impacts of conventional agriculture.

“The certified organic market has experienced a rise in corporate participation,” McGee writes, “which has facilitated the weakening of standards.”

Plus, he says, when organic processes are implemented at large conventional scales, the lower yields combined with the heavy use of machinery results in higher GHG emissions. And some organically grown crops, like tomatoes, simply make more GHGs than their conventional counterparts, and this is amplified when done en masse.

I can sure attest to the weakening of organic standards!

This isn’t what I expected. But it makes sense. If you have to use more machines, more physical means of farming, then you might increase GHG. Lower yields would mean more acreage or more farming cycles to get the same output, so there again, more GHG. One benefit with organic farming is that you might be spraying fewer chemicals, but again, as I saw, you might be spraying more too, just different kinds.

I think there may be externalities that he’s not accounting for. Production of synthetic fertilizer is an energy-consuming endeavor, and should increase GHG in the conventionally-farmed column. But he limited himself to “agricultural production.” And what about water? Which uses more water, organic or conventional?

This was the question in my original post about organics, the one where I found organic food is grown with manure from GMO-fed cows in factory farms and with synthetic pesticides. What happens when you scale up organic? How “organic” is industrial organic?

All of this is disturbing. I thought organic was so much better.

Diets low in protein, especially animal protein, have been shown to slow aging in humans.

You may have heard about the experiments on animals that show long-term, severe reduction of calories slows aging and makes them live longer. It also reduces their risks for cancer and diabetes. It would be a cheap and effective way to ensure a long, healthy life if it applied to humans too. But, who is going to severely restrict calories for the rest of their lives? It’s not easy. However…

One theory for why caloric restriction (CR) slows aging is that it lowers levels of the protein IGF-1 (insulin-like growth factor-1) in animals and in some human fasting studies. IGF-1 is an anabolic hormone; it promotes growth. It’s been shown to promote growth of cancer cells too. People who are born without a lot of IGF-1 or functioning receptors for IGF-1 are almost completely free of cancer and other maladies. But they don’t grow well.

The best of both worlds seems to be… having adequate IGF-1 around when we’re young, and reducing it as we age. Indeed, the study I just blogged gave evidence for that: 50-to-65-year-olds with lower IGF-1 had less cancer, less diabetes, and lived longer.

Do we have to severely restrict our calories to lower IGF-1? No, we can restrict just our protein, especially animal protein:

Long-Term Effects Of Calorie Or Protein Restriction On Serum IGF-1 And IGFBP-3 Concentration In Humans, Aging Cell, October 2008

This study describes 4 experiments. Here’s a quick-and-dirty summary:

• 1st: Compared a CR group (16% protein) to an exercise group (16% protein) for 1 year – Result: Same IGF-1, even though the CR group ate less and weighed less.
• 2nd: Compared a CR group (6 years, ~1800 kcal/day, 24% protein) to a Western Diet group (16% protein) – Result: Same IGF-1 (You would have thought the CR group who ate less and weighed less would have had lower IGF-1, wasn’t the case.)
• 3rd: Compared a CR group (24% protein) to vegan group (10% protein, 0.76 g/kg body weight) – Result: Vegans had lower IGF-1 even though they ate more, weighed more, and had more body fat.
• 4th: Had a high-protein CR group (24% protein) lower their protein (from 1.67 g/kg to 0.95 g/kg) – Result: Eating less protein lowered IGF-1.

So, in this group of experiments, humans who restricted their calories didn’t have lower IGF-1:

The findings from these [first] two studies demonstrate that 1 year and 6 years of CR do not reduce total and free IGF-1 levels in humans.

But if they ate less protein, they did lower IGF-1:

This short-term isocaloric reduction of protein intake [4th study] resulted in a 25% reduction in serum IGF-1 concentration … suggesting that the high protein intake was preventing a reduction in IGF-1 levels in response to CR.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, our findings demonstrate that, unlike in rodents, long-term severe CR does not reduce total and free IGF-1 levels in healthy humans if protein intake is high. In addition, our data suggest that chronic protein intake is more powerful than calorie intake in modulating circulating IGF-1 concentration in humans.

This is important because the median protein requirement of the healthy adult population is 0.65 g kg−1 per day and the reference daily intake (97.5th percentile) is 0.83 g kg−1 of body weight per day that is close to the protein intake of our vegan group in this study. In contrast, half of the US males are eating 40% or more protein (≥ 1.34 g kg−1 per day) than the reference daily intake, which is presently considered to be harmless and, according to public opinion and advocators of ‘low-carb’ diets, may even be beneficial.

More studies are necessary to understand the biological and clinical implications of a chronic high protein intake, especially in sedentary people with a positive family history for cancer.

In addition, more studies are needed to understand the effects of PR [protein restriction] and methionine restriction on metabolism, disease prevention and longevity in humans, because several studies in rodents have shown major beneficial effects.

Finally, these findings underscore the importance of dietary macronutrient intake in regulating metabolic events, and suggest that reduced protein intake may become an important component of anti-aging and anticancer dietary interventions, due to the importance of IGF-1 in the biology of aging and in the pathogenesis of many human tumors.

Did you see that bit of data where half of US males were eating 40% or more of their calories as protein? People in this country are convinced they need lots of protein. Advertisements ask, “Are you getting enough protein?” People ask vegetarians, “Where do you get your protein?” People who are still fairly young, say, up to 40 years old, can probably get away with eating more protein. Beyond that, they should consider that their extra growth hormone may be harming them, especially if there is a family history of cancer.

GMO corn field, Yellow Springs, Ohio. – Wikipedia

Interesting comparison between our financial system and an agricultural system that is increasingly reliant on GMOs:

Another ‘Too Big to Fail’ System in G.M.O.s, New York Times, 13 July 2015

The authors say that our financial system was fragile and unsustainable, which led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. They say that an agricultural system flush with GMOs has a similar unsustainability and may be even more dangerous because there is no way to bail it out if it fails.

They listed 5 fallacies (or weaknesses?) used in arguments against people who warned of financial collapse, and they applied those fallacies in arguments against people who raise a red flag over GMOs. Here were the GMO fallacies:

First, there has been a tendency to label anyone who dislikes G.M.O.s as anti-science. … The scholastic invocation of a “consensus” is [not a] valid scientific argument. … According to scientific practice, scientific consensus is used in telling us what theory is wrong; it cannot determine what is right.

Second, we are told that a modified tomato is not different from a naturally occurring tomato. That is wrong.

Third, the technological salvation argument we faced in finance is also present with G.M.O.s, which are intended to “save children by providing them with vitamin-enriched rice.” The argument’s flaw is obvious: In a complex system, we do not know the causal chain, and it is better to solve a problem by the simplest method, and one that is unlikely to cause a bigger problem.

Fourth, by leading to monoculture — which is the same in finance, where all risks became systemic — G.M.O.s threaten more than they can potentially help. Ireland’s population was decimated by the effect of monoculture during the potato famine.

And finally, there’s no Plan B:

Fifth, and what is most worrisome, is that the risk of G.M.O.s are more severe than those of finance. They can lead to complex chains of unpredictable changes in the ecosystem, while the methods of risk management with G.M.O.s — unlike finance, where some effort was made — are not even primitive.

The G.M.O. experiment, carried out in real time and with our entire food and ecological system as its laboratory, is perhaps the greatest case of human hubris ever. It creates yet another systemic, “too big too fail” enterprise — but one for which no bailouts will be possible when it fails.

They single out GMOs, but I’m coming to see the real risk is an agricultural system increasingly dependent upon chemicals. That would place GMOs as a subset of risk, since they invite the use of chemicals.