OF&G :: The Blog

We’re not sure how it happened, but some of us here missed the news that the National Institute of Agricultural Botany and The Arable Group had merged.

So, given that we missed the announcement last month, we thought it worthy of a mention here for anyone else who was too engrossed elsewhere to pick up on it!

It does seem to make sense for two leading bodies in agronomy and research to come together and realise the benefits of such a collaboration.

You can read more about it, including comments from the key players, here.

Somewhat strangely, the Food Standards Agency has felt the need to publicly dismiss the findings of a French study that called into question its own recently published and controversial report.

The FSA-funded research by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine made the claim that organic food was no more nutritious than non-organic. This has been disputed heavily by some heavyweight scientists around the world but, even so, led to some very damaging and misleading headlines about organic food.

Last week we highlighted here a French study that called the FSA/LSHTP findings into further question. That French report has since been highlighted by a number of media outlets and the FSA has come out fighting, claiming that the French used ‘diluted data’. Take a look at this piece by The Ecologist.

What seems immediately strange is that the FSA feels the need not only to defend its own report, but to attack the French one in the process. Why is a body that should be agnostic on such issues coming across as desperate to avoid having to officially recognise any empirical benefit to organic food and farming? Your thoughts on a postcard – or a comment below…

It has been a short number of years now since the first evidence appeared linking organic milk to measurable health benefits. Bits and pieces of studies have continued to trickle out since then, all pointing to positives.

Today we’ve come across a piece in Scotland’s Daily Record newspaper that, in essence, suggests more of the same – continued pointers to benefits. We couldn’t find the original science, or even an abstract for the study in question (I confess it wasn’t an exhaustive search, mind you!) but who are we to doubt the venerable Daily Record?

Anyway, the piece is worth a read and you can make up your own mind. It also references the Quality Low Input Food study, carried out at Newcastle University (and across Europe) under the guidance of Prof. Carlo Leifert, and which has presented some interim findings before the full publication, which is expected next year.

Incidentally, Prof. Leifert will be discussing this at our Selling Organics: What’s the Story? conference in London, on October 8. Get in quick if you’d like to be there.

There’s an interesting study on organic food, including nutrition, that seems to run counter to the report published a few weeks ago on behalf of the Food Standards Agency.

The French Agency for Food Safety (AFSSA) begs to differ with the findings that proved so controversial in this country.

You can view the report, led by Denis Lairon, by downloading the PDF document here. It’s language is pretty accessible even for us non-scientists and it makes for an interesting counterpoint to the findings of the UK ’study’ that the FSA will no doubt lean on for years to come.

The Independent today covers a very disappointing angle to the controversy surrounding the FSA organic report story.

I suppose we shouldn’t be overly surprised, but it seems that the report’s author, Dr Alan Dangour, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, has been inundated with abusive emails and messages.

While we’ve been among the first to criticise the way this study has been focused, the conclusions it came to and the way it has been badly reported, it’s extremely sad to see that people have to make it personal and hurl vitriol at Dr Dangour.

Whether you question his approach or, as some people have, his motivations, he is entitled to publish whatever he finds to be the results of his work. If we disagree, the answer is to have our own say and perhaps some debate. But there should always be respect for everyone’s position.

Fortunately, it seems from the report that Dr Dangour is fairly sanguine about the whole affair and not letting it rattle him too much.

[Click here for the Independent piece]

We will get off this topic soon – probably. But having just come across this article from The Organic Centre, in the US, it seemed to be well worth sharing. It appears to be the most scientific and thorough assessment of the controversial FSA-funded report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine that we have come across yet.

If the topic interests you, it’s well worth a read.

The din around last week’s FSA report on nutrition and organic food is almost deafening. Someone from every media outlet seems to be having their say on it, whether or not they have the faintest clue what they’re talking about.

Some (and you know who you are, because we’ve talked or emailed directly on the topic) are bothering to find out facts, but most are just falling back on tired opinion pieces that pick up from the awful headlines saying that organic food isn’t nutritionally beneficial. ‘Awful’ because they are utterly superficial.

There is a vast amount of “I told you so” braying noise from those looking for a reason to feel smug about something, while the trend seems to be to either ignore the real point of organic farming or to drop in a paragraph about welfare, wildlife, chemical restrictions, etc, then dismiss those things out of hand. We wouldn’t want to turn a rant into a balanced examination of the real circumstances, would we?

You could call this a whinge. Fine. Up to you. But it’s not a desperate ‘oh no, we’ve been found out’ whinge. It comes from disappointment in the shallowness of the commentary. Organic food is not sold on health or nutrition benefits. There may be some benefits. There may be some that people perceive or assume for themselves, but first and foremost organics is about the METHOD OF PRODUCTION.

I’ll say it again: METHOD OF PRODUCTION.

Without wanting to labour a point made in the previous posting, just because this research came to an odd conclusion that suited the naysayers and headline writers, doesn’t mean that there aren’t actually nutritional benefits to organic food.

Fortunately, there is some sanity out there, particularly it seems among the regional BBC stations who have been contacting us to invite someone to talk on their programmes, where the debate has been balanced and all angles considered. We’ve rather enjoyed the chance to set the record straight. This was rather different to their BBC TV News counterparts who did a taste test on their 10′clock programme (yes, a taste test – with two people – even though the report was about nutrition…….)

There are plenty of writers and editors out there who have made themselves look like idiots to anyone with half a brain who has paused to consider the real reasons for organic farming for more than a minute.

We could write this kind of piece pretty much any time organics is in the news. That would be pointless, of course, and pretty soon no-one would spare a second to read it. What’s different this time is the level of clamour. It’s everywhere, all over the world, even in the most obscure of journals that have little or no interest in food, farming or science most of the time.

There will be better science soon that will tell us a whole lot more. The problem is we probably won’t be in silly season, with acres of newsprint that needs filling with something (anything) and it won’t make the same screeching headlines.

Fortunately there is a glimmer of light; only an ancedotal one, granted, but it’s there all the same. And it’s this: real people, those who do their shopping each week, be it from the farm shop or the megastore, keep saying things like: “Well, it’s not news is it. I know why I buy organic food and it wasn’t for a few extra microgrammes of flavonoids.”

Thank goodness for real people who use their brains. That’s why this isn’t a disaster for organics, try as some might to make it so.

Once again the Food Standards Agency has managed to garner a boat load of silly season headlines for a report on organic food that tells us little but is likely to damage sales.

“No additional health benefits of organic food” is the gist of the coverage of this latest publication by the FSA. It’s the kind of headline that many people will take at face value – and that’s a huge shame.

The report is an analysis of a variety of studies from the last 50 years on organic food and nutrition. However, you could argue it’s flawed in a number of ways, not least because it deliberately ignores any study that doesn’t have an abstract in English. Given that a lot of work has been done by researchers outside of the UK, particularly elsewhere in Europe, this could lead to big holes in it.

In fact, look at the title: Comparison of putative health effects of organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs: a systematic review.

“Putative”. Take a look at this definition. It means “supposed”. So they’re comparing “supposed” health effects, not scientifically proven ones???

Now take a look at this from the report’s own executive summary:

In conclusion, because of the limited and highly variable data available, and concerns over the reliability of some reported findings, there is currently no evidence of a health benefit from consuming organic compared to conventionally produced foodstuffs.  It should be noted that this conclusion relates to the evidence base currently available on the nutrient content of foodstuffs, which contains limitations in the design and in the comparability of
studies.

So, what they’re saying is they have compared “limited and highly variable” data and they have concerns over the “reliability” of some of the findings. And there are “limitations” in the way some of those studies were designed and can be compared.

In addition, we’d say this report is somewhat unfairly jumping the gun. Very thorough research now being done will show some very clear nutritional benefits of organic food, maybe even by later this year. You can already read about some of the findings from the QLIF project here (in an article from 2007!). But of course by then the damage will have been done, if it hasn’t been already. As I write, this story is the ‘most emailed’ and second ‘most read’ on the BBC News website. That’s no doubt an awful lot of people getting this very negative message.

In essence the FSA has published a report that tells it nothing it hasn’t already said publicly. We can only hope it will find the funds to revisit this topic when we have heard from the very extensive, Europe-wide Quality Low Input Food study, currently under way and led by Carlo Leifert, at Newcastle University.

It’s not even that we’re being prickly and defensive for the sake of it here. If there are really no nutritional benefits to organic food (unlikely), and we can be told that as a fact, fine. But please, Powers-that-Be, don’t damage an already disproportionately credit crunch-affected sector with what can only be seen as a premature report based on, by the author’s own admission, unreliable data.

Organics does not sell itself on nutritional benefits. The key points of organic food and farming are that it has animal welfare at its heart, protects and enhances the finite resource that is our soil, doesn’t rely on chemical inputs or routine antibiotics for animals and has clearly proven benefits for wildlife. The FSA itself even says on its website:

“Eating organic food is one way to reduce consumption of pesticide residues and additives”

Of course we can argue until we’re blue in the face about the real benefits of organic food and farming. The truth is that the headlines alone will damage the livelihoods of hard working organic farmers and food producers. The FSA has an awful lot of power and responsibility in this respect. We wouldn’t ask it to sit on a report just because it was negative, but perhaps more thought should go into what it studies in the first place. Looking back at 50 years of data is going to skew anyone’s results. Science has moved on in just the last five years and will tell us more than we have ever known about organic food in the next couple of years. Perhaps they could have waited while a major project was completed?

Roll on the day that good, strong, scientific evidence emerges. It will.