The other parts of your argument I doubt many would disapprove of. More vegetables, eat less meat. But any argument that start's with 'freshly picked organic vegetables' screams prejudice and ignorance.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/should-you-go...
"While organic foods have fewer synthetic pesticides and fertilizers and are free of hormones and antibiotics, they don't appear to have a nutritional advantage over their conventional counterparts. "There've been a number of studies examining the macro- and micronutrient content, but whether organically or conventionally grown, the foods are really similar for vitamins, minerals, and carbohydrates," says McManus."
Trolling with science is still trolling FuckOffNeemo
And my mention of 'screaming' was used metaphorically. That is to say, your bias was evident from your posturing. Not that you or I were _literally_ screaming about one opinion or the other.
Ok, cheers.
> I'm pointing out scientific facts that are contrary to your opinion.
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. What you're pointing out is one article that contradicts my own lived experience (on which my opinion is founded.)
I love Science. I've got a copy of Linus Pauling's "Chemistry" on my desk that's I'm reading for fun. But a scientific study that shows that "Organic" food is no better than (let's call it) "Conventional" food in terms of nutrition and health? Friend, I just laugh.
To even get my attention such a study would have to have at least three groups: one eating only organically grown food, one eating conventionally grown food (same diet), and a control group that eats what everybody else eats. Then you'd have to keep it up for several generations!
Which brings me to my main scientific objection to conventional agriculture: it's new. We know, thanks to science, that the living system we are a part of is approximately 3.5 to 4 billion years old. The primary constituents of the system (microbes and viruses) have a life-cycle measured in hours. This system evolves. Along comes the naked ape sprinkling fixed nitrogen on his crops and patting himself on the back. One of the apes puts on a lab coat and gives the rest a thumbs up, "It's just as good!", while another sprays nerve toxin on the crops to kill the "pests". Meanwhile Gary in the back is starting to ask, "Hey, where are the bees?"
The word I'm looking for is "Hubris".
Now then, the pragmatic argument against modern conventional agriculture is that it's unnecessary. We now know, again thanks to science, that soil is not a passive receptacle or matrix for chemical nutrients. It's a living dynamic system comprised of tens of thousands of species on all scales from the virus to the mole, and that has more in common with a vast city than a pile of minerals. We know that micro-rhizome interconnects plants in huge networks that shuttle water, nutrients, and chemical signals (often involving the same molecules that occur in humans as neurotransmitters and hormones) between them. We've also learned that we ourselves host a "microbiome" and it's obvious that, in a healthy relationship with your local gardens, your microbiome is effectively an extension of the soil into your system. (And back out again. Feces are ~80% microbes.)
(As an aside, given the above it should not be surprising that it's possible to taste the difference between home-grown organic food and store-bought conventional food.)
The way to grow healthy food is to garden the soil, the plants grow themselves. You can't really control plant growth too well. It's easy, however, to improve the soil, which then affects the growth of the plants.
One amazing example of this is a project that was done in Jordan. Agriculture had been practiced on the site until salt had gotten so bad that nothing would grow there. It was a patch of barren salty desert. Using applied ecology ("Permaculture") they were able to establish a nascent ecosystem. Within two years it was producing figs. The soil regenerated, mushrooms appeared.
There's a short video about it, "Greening the Desert" with Geoff Lawton. "You can solve all your problems in a garden." as he says.
Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgF9BU4uYMU
Main page: https://permaculturenews.org/2007/03/01/greening-the-desert-...
The bottom line is, if you practice applied ecology you can grow all the food you need in a garden without any artificial inputs at all. It's cost effective and it will make you and the world around you healthy. It's also soundly scientific.
Thank you for your response however, it was very informative.
I only have one comment to make from the above:
I'm gonna have to go ahead and disagree with you there. What you're pointing out is one article that contradicts my own lived experience (on which my opinion is founded.)
For some one who's embedded and has a solid understanding of the scientific process, you're contradicting the scientific community here by saying your opinion and anecdotal evidence proves otherwise?
Let me say that, while I have huge respect for science and the Scientific Method, my faith in science is weakened as one departs from physics.
To be specific, before I could credit (believe in) a scientific paper purporting to show no appreciable difference between "organic" and "conventional" produce there are a lot of boxes I'd have to check off. For example, how long after they were picked were the vegetables tested?
I should add that, in this very non-hypothetical diet, you eat a lot of veggies. Five or six giant salads a day. Eat a whole cucumber like a banana. Once your microbiome adjusts it will tear though that stuff surprisingly well. You'll be dropping the deuce five times a day. (And they won't stink. That's a side-effect.)
You have so much energy you can run up mountains and you're always giggling because you feel so good. As your cells start to clean out the molecular junk in your system you'll age in reverse for a while.
You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal??
> six giant salads a day
Seems a lot?
> drop the deuce five times a day
Five times a day???
> age in reverse for a while
Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me.
> You say people should eat two or three steaks on one day or even in one meal??
No, although for some folks that wouldn't be a problem in the least. :-)
More like, fast Friday afternoon until Saturday morning. Have steak and eggs for breakfast, with potatoes if you like[1], Then a (bun-less) hamburger for lunch. Salads for dinner. Repeat Sunday.
But that's just an example.
Also, it doesn't have to be beef. Eat a whole chicken over the weekend.
I forgot to mention grubs and bugs, fantastic sources of protein if you can handle eating them. (I personally can't, but I just read about how cockroach farming is taking off in China. It's brilliant, apparently the company doing it is on track to consume all of China's kitchen scrap waste by 2020 or something crazy like that. The bugs grow in huge buildings surrounded by moats filled with carp to eat escapees. So wonderful and so gross!)
>> six giant salads a day
> Seems a lot?
Yes, it does. See below.
>> drop the deuce five times a day
> Five times a day???
Four or five, yep. Tidy human-size rabbit turds that barely stink. What's going on is you're biasing your microbiome to the organisms that feed on plants[2] rather than milk or bread.
The bulk of most plant matter that you're eating is water. The rest is largely fiber and "nutrients" which is a huge catch-all term in this context. In your gut the microbiome rapidly consumes the plant matter in a kind of internal "farm" and your cells actually eat the microbes. It's gross, but feces isn't "waste", it's a microbial culture, about 80% of it in fact. In a normal scenario feces is deposited on the ground and rapidly invaded by micro-rhizome which then begins to integrate the internal ecosystem of the "nuggets" with the ecosystem in the soil. Digestion isn't consumption. You take what you need, incubate the rest, and pass it along, having added your own contribution. From the microbes' POV none of us are at the apex.
With a large steady flow of nutrients and no milk or bread to gum up the works your system uses way less energy to pick and choose the molecules it needs. It's also much easier to dispose of waste molecules. Under a "normal" diet your cells literally get jammed up with too many of the wrong molecules. In severe cases there's nowhere to put them and you get e.g. cholesterol building up in the blood vessels. Take away the bad inputs and provide for the existing crap to leave easily, and that's what causes you to ...
>> age in reverse for a while
> Please back all this up with science, because it sounds like snake oil to me.
All of this stuff has science behind it. But I'm afraid you're gonna have to do your own homework. I'm busy. It's your health. It might sound cold, but uh, "evolution in action".
What I'm talking up here is a paradigm shift. The new paradigm is no less scientific and rigorous than the old one, it's just different.
Here's a decent introduction, with science: "The Soil Will Save Us" : "How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet" http://www.kristinohlson.com/books/soil-will-save-us
Start with that and follow th references. The science is happening.
As for my specific claim about aging in reverse, yes, I admit that's anecdotal. However, I maintain that the best way to check the veracity of that claim is to try it yourself. Get your biological markers recorded, try the diet for N months, and keep track of your "biological age" throughout. This is a study I'd love to perform on a large scale.
Let me emphasize the importance of freshly picked food! This requirement almost demands that your kitchen is within walking distance of a garden. Food has a half-life. An organically grown vegetable in the supermarket is only marginally better than one plucked fresh from the garden and eaten immediately. You simply haven't tasted e.g. corn or carrots otherwise.
[1] If the tummy likes, not the tongue.
[2] vegetables, fruits, nuts, etc. But not grain. Grains are emergency food, eating them as a staple feeds the "wrong" gut microbes.