Aug 21, 2019 06:41 PM
https://www.acsh.org/news/2019/08/20/sci...acks-14234
INTRO: The headline is not exaggeration or hyperbole. Scientific American just ran an article claiming that vegetables are becoming like sugary snacks and are toxic. And that's not even the worst part. The article was given the ridiculous headline "Broccoli Is Dying. Corn Is Toxic. Long Live Microbiomes!" It was co-authored by a marine biologist and a retired English teacher. As one might expect from the headline, the article makes one outrageous, unscientific claim after another. The lies, distortions, and laugh-out-loud whoppers start early and often. Let's dissect them:
As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as “a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth” and poison is “a substance that promotes illness,” then “much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison.”
This is the first sentence. Yes, that's how this screed actually begins. Everything you eat is poison. How do we know? Because an organic food activist with no relevant scientific training or expertise says so.
Data going back to 1940, as reported by Eco Farming Daily, shows: “The level of every nutrient in almost every kind of food has fallen between 10 and 100 percent..."
Eco Farming Daily. Really? Let's try a peer-reviewed journal instead, like the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, which concluded in a March 2017 paper that "[c]omparisons of food composition data published decades apart are not reliable" because "changes in data sources, crop varieties, geographic origin, ripeness, sample size, sampling methods, laboratory analysis and statistical treatment affect reported nutrient levels."
In a Twitter thread, Dr. Elisabeth Bik commented that copper levels decreased (perhaps because copper isn't used as much as a fungicide, anymore), but other nutrient levels are probably similar over time.
Thank goodness for multivitamins...
No. Thank nobody for multivitamins, which are a scam. Healthy people who eat a relatively balanced diet do not need dietary supplements of any kind. Besides, they are poorly regulated, which means just about anything can be (and is) detected in them. (MORE)
INTRO: The headline is not exaggeration or hyperbole. Scientific American just ran an article claiming that vegetables are becoming like sugary snacks and are toxic. And that's not even the worst part. The article was given the ridiculous headline "Broccoli Is Dying. Corn Is Toxic. Long Live Microbiomes!" It was co-authored by a marine biologist and a retired English teacher. As one might expect from the headline, the article makes one outrageous, unscientific claim after another. The lies, distortions, and laugh-out-loud whoppers start early and often. Let's dissect them:
As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as “a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth” and poison is “a substance that promotes illness,” then “much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison.”
This is the first sentence. Yes, that's how this screed actually begins. Everything you eat is poison. How do we know? Because an organic food activist with no relevant scientific training or expertise says so.
Data going back to 1940, as reported by Eco Farming Daily, shows: “The level of every nutrient in almost every kind of food has fallen between 10 and 100 percent..."
Eco Farming Daily. Really? Let's try a peer-reviewed journal instead, like the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, which concluded in a March 2017 paper that "[c]omparisons of food composition data published decades apart are not reliable" because "changes in data sources, crop varieties, geographic origin, ripeness, sample size, sampling methods, laboratory analysis and statistical treatment affect reported nutrient levels."
In a Twitter thread, Dr. Elisabeth Bik commented that copper levels decreased (perhaps because copper isn't used as much as a fungicide, anymore), but other nutrient levels are probably similar over time.
Thank goodness for multivitamins...
No. Thank nobody for multivitamins, which are a scam. Healthy people who eat a relatively balanced diet do not need dietary supplements of any kind. Besides, they are poorly regulated, which means just about anything can be (and is) detected in them. (MORE)