Tag Archives: biofortified

Private nonprofit foundations & Public Health: Potential conflicts of interest in corporate links

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Corporate involvement in public health is a sensitive topic, but one I am largely against.  It is pretty clear that corporations usually get the benefit of bettering their brand image (which is often largely unhealthy processed products) at a low cost of sponsorship of health campaigns.  See plenty of great/unfortunate examples on blogs such as Food Politics, Weighty Matters, and Appetite For Profit, or my own criticisms of the ADA/Hershey partnership as a specific case.  Such relationships, Read more [...]

Neolithic European farmers came from the East?

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Noteworthy from PLoS Biology, a genetics paper published yesterday adds a lot to the debate on which population established European farming, suggesting that the farmers migrating from the Near East and Anatolia established farming in Europe rather than adoption by indigenous hunter-gatherers or interbreeding. The article summary: The transition from a hunter–gatherer existence to a sedentary farming-based lifestyle has had key consequences for human groups around the world and has profoundly Read more [...]

The organic halo alters food and exercise choices

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Nutrient-based claims on food labels are shown in some research to promote calorie underestimation.  This is often called the health halo effect; certain buzz words associated with what people consider healthy cause them to overgeneralize other attributes of a food, downplay the number of calories, and not pay as much attention to the nutrition facts panel. A couple recent studies by Schuldt and Schwarz (1) show this happens with the word "organic" on the label as well, with food and exercise. Read more [...]

Organic agriculture pest control through enemy evenness

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Recently I wrote about a study on organic vs synthetic pesticides on sustainability, which suggested that organic pesticides are not always more efficacious against pests nor as selective (not killing natural enemies of pests) than synthetic pesticides. Earlier this month a study was published on a related area: organic farming on natural enemy evenness.  Different farming techniques can alter the balance of the natural enemy species' and cause a reduction to only a select few species.  Existing Read more [...]

Organic pesticides aren’t necessarily more sustainable than synthetic

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It would seem illogical that organic compounds are all more sustainable than synthetics, or vice versa.  The term "organic" has a health halo, biasing many people toward believing organic growing techniques are best for the environment.  I've already covered analyses suggesting that there isn't enough evidence that suggests organic foods are better for your health, so is the higher cost justified by a lessened environmental impact?  Bahlai et al. just published a paper suggesting that the dichotomous Read more [...]

Organic vs. conventional food on health: not enough data

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You may recall last year's review by Dangour and colleagues that concluded, based on 162 studies (55 met the inclusion criteria), that "there is no evidence of a differencein nutrient quality between organically and conventionally producedfoodstuffs." This brought about much controversy on the web, as well as a rebuttal by Benbrook et al.  Media reporting complained about this research, such as that it did not examine potential contaminant use, health outcomes, or environmental effects further Read more [...]