I recently got into some arguments with foodies I know on the merits (or lack thereof) of organic / local / free-range / etc. food, and this is a topic where I find it very difficult to find sources of information that I trust as reflective of some sort of expert consensus (insofar as one can be said to exist.) Does anyone have any recommendations for books or articles on nutrition/health that holds up under critical scrutiny? I trust a lot of you as filters on these issues.
There are lots of studies on the issue, and as usual most of them are bad and disagree with each other.
I tend to trust the one by the UK Food Standards Association because it’s big and government-funded. Mayo Clinic agrees. I think there are a few studies that show organic foods do have lower pesticide levels than normal, but nothing showing that it actually leads to health benefits. Pesticides can cause some health problems in farmers, but they’re receiving a bajillion times the dose of someone who just eats the occasional carrot. And some “organic pesticides” are just as bad as any synthetic ones. There’s also a higher risk of getting bacterial infections from organic food.
Tastewise, a lot of organics people cite some studies showing that organic apples and other fruit taste better than conventional—I can’t find the originals of these and there are equally questionable studies that say the opposite. Organic vegetables taste somewhere between the same and worse, even by organic peoples’ admission. There’s a pretty believable study showing conventional chicken tastes better than organic, and a more pop-sci study claiming the same thing about almost everything. I’ve seen some evidence that locally grown produce tastes better than imported, but that’s a different issue than organic vs. non-organic and you have to make sure people aren’t conflating them.
They do produce less environmental damage per unit land, but they produce much less food per unit land and so require more land to be devoted to agriculture. How exactly that works out in the end is complex economics that I can’t navigate.
My current belief is that organics have a few more nutrients here and there but not enough to matter, are probably less healthy overall when you consider infection risk, and taste is anywhere from no difference to worse except maybe on a few limited fruits.
Of course, “organic” covers a wide range. I tend not to be blown away by the organic veggies and fruit at Whole Foods. I’ve had extraordinarily good produce from my local (south Philadelphia) farmer’s markets.
The famous metaanalyses which has shown that vitamin supplementation is essentially useless, or possibly even harmful totally destroys the basic argument (“oh look, more vitamins!”—not that it’s usually even true) that organic is good for your health.
Yes. Even if PhilGoetz is correct that harmfulness was an artifact, there’s still essentially zero evidence for benefits of eating more vitamins than RDA.
My experience (admittedly, not double-blinded) is that the food from the farmer’s markets tends to be a lot tastier.
Three possibilities: confirmation bias at my end, the theory that local-organic-free range creates better food (and better food tastes better) is correct, and selection pressure—the only way they can get away with those prices is to sell food which tastes really good.
You should be extremely skeptical of any taste comparisions that are not blinded. One recent story carried out a blind taste comparison of Walmart and Whole Foods produce and found Walmart was preferred for some items. If the taste test had not been conducted blind you would likely have seen very different results.
This comparison doesn’t directly bear on your theory since both the Walmart and Whole Foods produce was local and organic in most cases but perceptions of the source are very significant in taste judgements.
Alternative theory: food from local sources (such as farmer’s markets) tastes better because it’s fresher, because it’s transported less and warehoused fewer times. This would imply that production methods, such as being organic or free range, have little or nothing to do with it. This is also pretty easy to test, if you have some visibility into supply chains.
In UK all supermarkets offer both “normal” and “organic” food. Isn’t it true wherever you live? You can use this to check if this makes any difference in taste, as both are most likely transported and stored the same.
That’s easy. If you have something very tasty, just store it in a fridge for an extra day, and try it again. I remember some experiments showing that meat got somewhat tastier around its labeled expiration date, which is the opposite result.
My extensive but not blinded at all testing suggests that cheapest brands of supermarket food usually taste far worse than more expensive brands, and quite a number of times fell below my edibility threshold.
My theory is this: it’s cheaper to produce bad-tasting food than well-tasting food—and then you can use market segmentation—poor people who cannot afford more expensive food will buy this, while majority of people will buy better tasting and more expensive food. Two price points earn you more money, and as better tasting food is more expensive to make competition cannot undercut you.
One thing I cannot explain is that this difference applies only to some kinds of food—cheap meat is really vile, but for example cheap eggs taste the same as expensive organic eggs, tea price has little to do with its taste, not to mention things like salt and sugar which simply have to taste the same by laws of chemistry.
You can buy fancy salts (mined from different places—there’s a lot of pink Tibetan salt around) these days. I’m not interested enough in salt to explore them, so I have no opinion about the taste.
I’ve found that the cheap eggs ($1/dozen) leave me feeling a little off if I eat them a couple of days in a row, but organic free range ($3.50 or more/dozen) don’t.
Your second possibility deserves elaboration—I believe a fair restatement is: factory farming methods are less responsive than local organic free-range methods to taste and quality (i.e. cannot control for it as effectively).
Is the methodology of the Amanda Knox test useful in this case? (I didn’t attempt the test or even read the posts, but it sounds like a similarly politicized problem.)
An Amanda-Knox-type situation would be one where the priors are extreme and there are obvious biases and probability-theoretic errors causing people to overestimate the strength of the evidence.
I think one would have to know a fair amount of biochemistry in order for food controversies to seem this way.
Although one might potentially be able to apply the heuristic “look at which side has the more generally impressive advocates”—which works spectacularly well in the Knox case—to an issue like this.
I thought Robin meant: Let the Less Wrong community sort through the information and see if there is a consensus arises on one side or the other. In this case no one has a “right answer” in mind, but we got a pretty conclusive, high confidence answer in the Knox case. Maybe we can do that here- we’d just need to put the time in (and have a well-defined question). Yes, there aren’t many biochemists among us. But we all seem remarkably comfortable reading through studies and evaluating scientific findings on grounds of statistics, source credibility etc. Also, my uninformed guess is that a lot of the science is just going to consist of statistical correlations without a lot of deep biochemistry.
I thought Robin meant: Let the Less Wrong community sort through the information and see if there is a consensus arises on one side or the other.
Oddly, no—although I think that would be a good exercise to carry out at intervals, I was imagining the theoretical solo game that each commenter played before bringing evidence to the community. Which has the difficulties that komponisto mentioned, of there not being prominent pro- and con- communities available, among other things.
It takes about an hour to familiarize yourself with all of the relevant information in the Knox case, I imagine it would take a lot longer in this case. It might still work though if enough people were willing to invest the time, especially since most people don’t already have rigid, well-formed opinions on the issue.
I recently got into some arguments with foodies I know on the merits (or lack thereof) of organic / local / free-range / etc. food, and this is a topic where I find it very difficult to find sources of information that I trust as reflective of some sort of expert consensus (insofar as one can be said to exist.) Does anyone have any recommendations for books or articles on nutrition/health that holds up under critical scrutiny? I trust a lot of you as filters on these issues.
There are lots of studies on the issue, and as usual most of them are bad and disagree with each other.
I tend to trust the one by the UK Food Standards Association because it’s big and government-funded. Mayo Clinic agrees. I think there are a few studies that show organic foods do have lower pesticide levels than normal, but nothing showing that it actually leads to health benefits. Pesticides can cause some health problems in farmers, but they’re receiving a bajillion times the dose of someone who just eats the occasional carrot. And some “organic pesticides” are just as bad as any synthetic ones. There’s also a higher risk of getting bacterial infections from organic food.
Tastewise, a lot of organics people cite some studies showing that organic apples and other fruit taste better than conventional—I can’t find the originals of these and there are equally questionable studies that say the opposite. Organic vegetables taste somewhere between the same and worse, even by organic peoples’ admission. There’s a pretty believable study showing conventional chicken tastes better than organic, and a more pop-sci study claiming the same thing about almost everything. I’ve seen some evidence that locally grown produce tastes better than imported, but that’s a different issue than organic vs. non-organic and you have to make sure people aren’t conflating them.
They do produce less environmental damage per unit land, but they produce much less food per unit land and so require more land to be devoted to agriculture. How exactly that works out in the end is complex economics that I can’t navigate.
My current belief is that organics have a few more nutrients here and there but not enough to matter, are probably less healthy overall when you consider infection risk, and taste is anywhere from no difference to worse except maybe on a few limited fruits.
Of course, “organic” covers a wide range. I tend not to be blown away by the organic veggies and fruit at Whole Foods. I’ve had extraordinarily good produce from my local (south Philadelphia) farmer’s markets.
The famous metaanalyses which has shown that vitamin supplementation is essentially useless, or possibly even harmful totally destroys the basic argument (“oh look, more vitamins!”—not that it’s usually even true) that organic is good for your health.
It might still be tastier. Or not.
Do you mean these metaanalyses?
Yes. Even if PhilGoetz is correct that harmfulness was an artifact, there’s still essentially zero evidence for benefits of eating more vitamins than RDA.
I thought Vitamin D was an exception.
My experience (admittedly, not double-blinded) is that the food from the farmer’s markets tends to be a lot tastier.
Three possibilities: confirmation bias at my end, the theory that local-organic-free range creates better food (and better food tastes better) is correct, and selection pressure—the only way they can get away with those prices is to sell food which tastes really good.
You should be extremely skeptical of any taste comparisions that are not blinded. One recent story carried out a blind taste comparison of Walmart and Whole Foods produce and found Walmart was preferred for some items. If the taste test had not been conducted blind you would likely have seen very different results.
This comparison doesn’t directly bear on your theory since both the Walmart and Whole Foods produce was local and organic in most cases but perceptions of the source are very significant in taste judgements.
Alternative theory: food from local sources (such as farmer’s markets) tastes better because it’s fresher, because it’s transported less and warehoused fewer times. This would imply that production methods, such as being organic or free range, have little or nothing to do with it. This is also pretty easy to test, if you have some visibility into supply chains.
In UK all supermarkets offer both “normal” and “organic” food. Isn’t it true wherever you live? You can use this to check if this makes any difference in taste, as both are most likely transported and stored the same.
I want to test a different hypothesis—whether extreme freshness is necessary for excellent flavor.
That’s easy. If you have something very tasty, just store it in a fridge for an extra day, and try it again. I remember some experiments showing that meat got somewhat tastier around its labeled expiration date, which is the opposite result.
Plausible, but hard to test—how would I get conventionally raised food which is as fresh as what I can get in farmer’s markets?
I’d say that the frozen meat is also tastier, and it’s (I hope) no fresher than what I can get at Trader Joe’s.
My extensive but not blinded at all testing suggests that cheapest brands of supermarket food usually taste far worse than more expensive brands, and quite a number of times fell below my edibility threshold.
My theory is this: it’s cheaper to produce bad-tasting food than well-tasting food—and then you can use market segmentation—poor people who cannot afford more expensive food will buy this, while majority of people will buy better tasting and more expensive food. Two price points earn you more money, and as better tasting food is more expensive to make competition cannot undercut you.
One thing I cannot explain is that this difference applies only to some kinds of food—cheap meat is really vile, but for example cheap eggs taste the same as expensive organic eggs, tea price has little to do with its taste, not to mention things like salt and sugar which simply have to taste the same by laws of chemistry.
You can buy fancy salts (mined from different places—there’s a lot of pink Tibetan salt around) these days. I’m not interested enough in salt to explore them, so I have no opinion about the taste.
I’ve found that the cheap eggs ($1/dozen) leave me feeling a little off if I eat them a couple of days in a row, but organic free range ($3.50 or more/dozen) don’t.
Your second possibility deserves elaboration—I believe a fair restatement is: factory farming methods are less responsive than local organic free-range methods to taste and quality (i.e. cannot control for it as effectively).
Is the methodology of the Amanda Knox test useful in this case? (I didn’t attempt the test or even read the posts, but it sounds like a similarly politicized problem.)
An Amanda-Knox-type situation would be one where the priors are extreme and there are obvious biases and probability-theoretic errors causing people to overestimate the strength of the evidence.
I think one would have to know a fair amount of biochemistry in order for food controversies to seem this way.
Although one might potentially be able to apply the heuristic “look at which side has the more generally impressive advocates”—which works spectacularly well in the Knox case—to an issue like this.
I thought Robin meant: Let the Less Wrong community sort through the information and see if there is a consensus arises on one side or the other. In this case no one has a “right answer” in mind, but we got a pretty conclusive, high confidence answer in the Knox case. Maybe we can do that here- we’d just need to put the time in (and have a well-defined question). Yes, there aren’t many biochemists among us. But we all seem remarkably comfortable reading through studies and evaluating scientific findings on grounds of statistics, source credibility etc. Also, my uninformed guess is that a lot of the science is just going to consist of statistical correlations without a lot of deep biochemistry.
Oddly, no—although I think that would be a good exercise to carry out at intervals, I was imagining the theoretical solo game that each commenter played before bringing evidence to the community. Which has the difficulties that komponisto mentioned, of there not being prominent pro- and con- communities available, among other things.
I’m thinking:
Define the claim/s precisely.
Come up with a short list of pro and con sources
Individual stage: anyone who wants to participate goes through the sources and does some addition research as they feel necessary.
Each individual posts their own probability estimates for the claims.
Communal stage: Disagreements are ironed out, sources shared, arguing and beliefs revised.
Reflection: What, if anything, have we agreed on. It would be a lot harder than the Knox case but it is probably doable.
Yes, that’s it. I don’t think enough time has passed to get around to another such exercise, however.
It takes about an hour to familiarize yourself with all of the relevant information in the Knox case, I imagine it would take a lot longer in this case. It might still work though if enough people were willing to invest the time, especially since most people don’t already have rigid, well-formed opinions on the issue.