A rather bizarre report has just surfaced in the news suggesting that vegetables grown non-organically taste better and have more nutrients than their organic counterparts.
Having made such a sweeping statement, the small print then mentions, as if in passing, that it was a small-scale trial and involved only 3 vegetables.
Worryingly this report comes from the apparently trustworthy British consumer magazine, Which.
According to Emma Hockridge, head of policy at the Soil Association, who insisted the findings were not significant and described the Which? research as “irresponsible”:
“This is an unscientific study of an extremely limited sample of vegetables”.
I would like to know who was behind this report and exactly how the vegetables were grown, both ‘organically’ and ‘non-organically’, before even considering this as an honest comparison, because quite frankly this counters all other known information about the greater nutritional value of organically grown produce.
It is well known how studies can be ‘skewed’ in favour of the biased view of the person initiating and reporting the results of such a study and therefore I have to wonder what is behind such a report.
Without wishing to promote what may seem to be a cynical view, this seems, however, to be an appropriate point to remind you that Codex Alimentarius will be implemented shortly. If you are not aware of Codex and what it means, please refer to our blog entry on this topic, The Silent Stalker of Your Health Freedom, as it contains links to a video you can watch and to reports you can download.
As I mentioned in that blog, this piece of legislation will take away our right to choose organic food and so what better way to support this legislation, than to tell us that organic food is not more nutritious than inorganic food after all.
There is a significant point that needs to be made, which is that the health of the soil itself is key to the nutritional value of the produce.
The nutrients in the earth generally have been depleted over the course of the past century or so due to a variety of reasons, toxic chemical overload being probably the most pernicious. Therefore it is of vital importance that the soil in which plants are grown is maintained or fed with all the ingredients it requires, natural ingredients of course not chemicals, in order for optimum nutrients to be present when the plants produce their fruits.
There are far too many unanswered questions about this report to consider it noteworthy, but the weight of the evidence in favour of more naturally grown produce being better for us nutritionally far outweighs any evidence to the contrary.
And the more nutrients the produce contains, the better it is for our health.