4M

My mom made the mistake of using the “email to a pal” feature from aarp.org’s website to send me an article about whether organic food is worth the price premium, etc.

Here’s the article she sent me:
Some nice but misguided lady talking about whether elderly people should cough up the extra buck or two to buy food that doesn’t kill us and our planet

And here’s my admittedly lengthy reply:

—– Original Message —–
From: me
To: my mom
Sent: Tuesday, May 16, 2006 9:35 PM
Subject: Re: An Article From www.aarp.org

Interesting article, and I’m glad every time I see information about organic products in mainstream media outlets, but I take exception to this particular statement:

Whether you’re getting more vitamins? The differences are small. I don’t think it’s a big nutrition issue, I think it’s an environmental issue. It’s a small nutritional issue.

It’s certainly true that growing foods organically is a lesser burden on the environment than so-called “conventionally grown” food. I put that phrase in quotes because we all know that growing foods using crop rotation, healthy soil, beneficial insects and sensible farming practices predates the use of artificial chemicals including pesticides, herbicides and fungicides by … oh, a few centuries … But I digress. Numerous recent studies have shown that eliminating the use of these harmful chemicals and growing food in a more sustainable way does have actual health benefits. Here are links to just a few of those studies:

Organically grown foods higher in cancer-fighting chemicals than
conventionally grown foods

On average, conventional produce has only 83 percent of the nutrients of organic produce.
… there are significantly more of several nutrients in organic crops. These include: 27% more vitamin C, 21.1% more iron, 29.3% more magnesium, and 13.6% more phosphorus.

Official food composition tables, including data compiled by the US Department of Agriculture, reveal that since the 1940s the mineral levels in fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy have declined substantially in conventional foods. Combine this with earlier (pre-ripened) picking, longer storage, and more processing of crops, and it’s not surprising that we may be getting fewer nutrients in our food than we were 60 years ago.

And … specifically related to certain milk-drinking children we both know and love (cough! BRANDON cough!), there is some evidence that the widespread use of recombinant bovine growth hormone rBGH may be dangerous. This genetically engineered chemical is manufactured by Monsanto, the folks who brought us Agent Orange and PCBs, and sold to the dairy industry to artificially increase milk production. It has been banned in every civilized nation in the world except the US. Organic milk doesn’t have it. Is it worth the $6/gallon I pay for it? Absolutely.

What’s in your milk?
rGBH in milk

Some pretty scary bullet points:

• rBGH makes cows sick. Monsanto has been forced to admit to about 20 veterinary health risks on its Posilac label including mastitis and udder inflammation.
• rBGH milk is contaminated by pus from mastitis induced by rBGH, and antibiotics used to treat the mastitis.
• rBGH milk is contaminated by the GE hormone which can be absorbed through the gut and induce immunological effects.
• rBGH milk is chemically and nutritionally very different from natural milk.
• rBGH milk is supercharged with high levels of a natural growth factor (IGF-1), excess levels of which have been incriminated as major causes of breast, colon, and prostate cancers.
• rBGH factory farms pose a major threat to the viability of small dairy farms. Thus, rBGH
  enriches Monsanto while posing risks but no benefits to the entire U.S. population.

More info about rGBH and why you should eat meat and dairy products from organic, local, small scale farms in the form of an entertaining video based upon The Matrix films

To which my mom replied,

“Geez, I’m sorry I brought it up.”

Well, Mom, you should be.
~m

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 1:16 pm and is filed under Rants & Raves, Life in Marisaland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.