@TTdd16 , Thank you for those links. It’s disheartening that the New York Times couldn’t do their due diligence before publishing such an inflammatory piece. I hadn’t heard of medium.com before, look forward to exploring more of their material.
World population is approaching 8 billion, anything that lowers sperm count is a good thing.
I would like to see the actual scientific publication… Peer reviewed, please.
@roethlisburger:
I think you need to reread my posts , I think you missed the point. Organic versus non organic is about things like chemical additives we ingest and more importantly, the insecticides and pesticides and the like they use in growing non organic crops and what they do to the people eating them. You won’t be ingesting Glyphosate if you eat organic produce, for example.
Obesity has nothing to do with organic versus non organic, there are plenty of packaged “organic” foods out there that can cause obesity, eating organic french fries (super size) with a huge grass fed beef burger with an organic roll is gonna cause problems if you eat that kind of thing regularly. The only thing you might have is an organic roll might actually contain simply flour, water and salt, rather than having it stuffed with all kinds of chemical additives and high fructose corn syrup. I brought up obesity to talk about the overall quality of the food out there, and my point was that chemical insecticides and herbicides are part of a larger issue, that our food supply and how we eat is fouled up. Yeah, obesity existed in the 1970’s, but the percent of people either obese or overweight has skyrocketed, and diabetes type II has soared and worse, is rapidly increasing in kids, which you didn’t see in the 1970’s. There have always been people who are obese or overweight, that isn’t in dispute, but take a look at the percent of people who are obese, and more importantly, take a look at type II diabetes and how big that is, the treatment of type II diabetes is last I checked a 500 billion dollar industry by itself roughly (ever notice all those commercials for diabetes testers, drugs that help treat diabetes (type II I might add, not 1) and the like? The problem to me is very similar, the industrialized food industry is huge and their related businesses (for example, chemical companies like Monsanto, Dow, etc), the agribusinesses (ADM, Cargill) who make a fortune out of high fructose corn syrup and dirt cheap (subsidized) corn and soy that is used to create other dirt cheap (and not healthy) foods. One program I was watching showed commercials from the 1950’s and on, that continually told people that in their busy lives, they had no time to cook and that has become a ‘truth’ widely accepted in our society, and if you look at a supermarket at the processed food in it, the amount has increased exponentially since the 1970’s, and fast food compared to where it was in the 1970’s has moved from being something most people saw as a treat, to being something regularly eaten, and the results are out there.
Yes, people have gotten more and more sedentary, but people we pretty sedentary in the 1970’s, by the 1970’s most people were not working jobs that involved physical labor and people already were couch potatoes…but the food itself changed, it became a lot more calorie dense, the calories in a typical fast food meal soared as the price cheapened, packaged foods became the order of the day…not to mention the quality of chicken and meat has declined as the price has gone down in real terms, the typical meat bought out there is higher in fat content, and lower in nutrients, than it was a couple of generations ago, in large part thanks to factory farming of animals and the use of antibiotics and hormones to make it grow faster and faster.
Actually, you might. If the organic field is next to a field where crops are grown using conventional techniques, it’s likely that some of the herbicide will drift over to the organic field and end up in the organic produce. The definition of “organic” in the United States relates to the substances used in production and handling, not the substances that actually end up in the product.
@marian:
True, that is one of the problems with organic produce, that some producers have both fields and they can claim organic produce even though it is right next to a field being sprayed, and could get it. Still, in that case the organic produce is likely going to have little or no glyphosate in it, lot less than the way they reputedly “drench” fields with that stuff in standard growing. Sadly, the standards for organic are about as tight as a 50 year old drum head, and those taking advantage of people’s surging interest in organic produce and such don’t particularly want any kind of close scrutiny. As much as I advocate for organic stuff, I also myself don’t always buy organic produce (there are certain things I buy organic or don’t buy at all, that tend to be heavy users of chemicals, or where the chemicals can’t be washed off), lot of times it simply isn’t available, or the price gets to a point where I can’t justify spending the money. I am just hoping that the work of people to try and serialize organic techniques where we don’t need to use all those chemicals comes to fruition, I know why guy doing it personally I would not bet against, kind of guy who got a bachelor’s in Chem Engineering with a 4.0 at MIT and never really cracked a book:). One of the pieces of conventional wisdom out there is you can’t get high enough yields from organically grown produce and such to make it economically cheap enough to be bought by people of all incomes, but that to me is a case of self created prophesy, because unlike conventional farming that has enjoyed over the years huge outlay on research on things like hardy plants/seeds (hybrid), the development of chemical fertilizers and insecticides/herbicides, very little to nothing has been spent on researching organic methods, not surprisingly, given how big an industry standard farming supports. I don’t expect that to change much, when you have the kind of money tied into standard farming, that equals a lot of political power.
I grew up in Michigan when the toxic PBB accident happened where most of the people in Michigan consumed beef or milk that had PBB in it . It’s been over 40 years and 9 out of 10 in Michigan STILL have high levels of PBB. Given that I think that even if you are eating small amounts of other chemical fertilizers like Glyphosate they will probably stay in your system for a long time.
PFOA is still a big problem too. It has been found in newborn babies.