As revealed last posting on this, the recent UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) report, comparing the nutritional levels of organic and conventional foods from 1958 to February 2008, actually left out every publication from before 1990.
In total, 2/3 of all the relevant peer reviewed research was rejected.
The logic given in the report is that in the 66% of rejected work, various failings in the peer review process were uncovered. The biggest single fault found was that no certification body was listed or inferred for the organic produce analysed (p 15).
In many cases this was because certification was in its infancy.
This is a very big and very important decision to make. Many state bodies, such as our own Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (DAFF), does not actually have a certification body.
DAFF is what is called the competent authority: it delegates to private inspection and certification bodies. However, it does not have private certification bodies inspect its own research centres.
Thus, any research done by DAFF would not have been included in this report, irrespective of which scientific journal it appeared in.
It is reasonable to assume that the same could also hold for at least some other state institutions across the world, who inevitably delegate authority to private certification bodies.
Often, the state does not see the need or value in inspections on its own research by these private bodies: after all, it delegates power to these bodies.
This certification issue is especially significant because in this rejected 66%, the findings are far more positive for organic than in the 34% considered at the quality level.
Interestingly, the report itself does actually list nutritional findings taken from an analysis of all 162 publications.
It is just that the official findings and conclusions, which suggest that there are no significant differences between organic and conventional in nutritional terms, come from their analysis of just 55 publications: i.e. the smaller 1/3 or 34%. For example, they claim:
�Organically produced crops were found to have significantly higher levels of sugars, magnesium, zinc, dry matter, phenolic compounds and flavonoids than conventionally crops� (p 17).
These significant differences were found when taking all 162 peer reviewed published papers into account.
When taking the narrower quality criteria, and considering just a maximum of 55, or 1/3, only three differences were found: Conventional crops were found to have more nitrogen, and organic crops more phosphorus and titratable acidity.
Based on the latter three findings from the smaller set of publications, the authors claim that no significant differences were to be found between organic and conventional nutritionally.
The same holds for livestock products: 3 out of ten significant differences were found between organic and conventional. However with the narrower selection criteria, which leaves out 2/3 of all published research, just one was found. The other two were rejected due to insufficient data.
Out of a possible 162, just 25 in total dealt with all livestock products: i.e. all meat and dairy products.
Incredibly, within these 25, it seems that hardly any were considered to actually have met the quality criteria: according to appendix 13, p.3, no more than 6 publications were at the required level for the authors.
To say that more research is needed sometimes just sounds like an appeal for funding: in this case, it seems fairly clear that this handful of livestock product papers, supposedly spanning five decades, is fairly paltry.
Professor Carlo Leifert co-ordinated the major EU Quality Low Input Food (QLIF) initiative, which involved 31 research and university institutes.
Leifert's own research, suggesting organic milk's nutritional superiority, appeared in April 2008 - technically 2 months too late for inclusion in the study.
He said: "I'm worried about the conclusions. The ballpark figures they have come up with are similar to ours. I don't understand why the FSA are not going away and saying, 'Right, there's something you can do on a farm to improve food.' But they are so blocked by not wanting to say positive things about organic farming."
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