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If you shop organic, you may be paying a pretty penny these days. That’s a key finding in a new report by LendingTree that analyzed pricing data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The report noted that while inflation has resulted in price increases in many conventional food items over the past year, the hikes for their organic equivalents have often been more significant. Consider: Organic strawberries have more than tripled in price, increasing by 224.4%, while conventional ones have seen a more measured (though not insignificant) price hike of 22.6%. And organic vine-ripe tomatoes have doubled in price, while...

Many consumers are committed to organic products for reasons that are more emotional than logical. They frequently define their purchasing choices in terms of what they consider to be “wholesome and natural,” which often translates to the absence of “synthetic” inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides. For some, the prohibition on “genetically modified” crops (however they might be defined) is another consideration. Sometimes, they assume that in some vague way, organic agricultural practices are better for the planet. In short, on their dinner table they want something like the farm of the idealized “Old McDonald” children’s tune that many of...

Activists have convinced Americans that "organic" food is better -- healthier, better-tasting, life-extending. As a result, poor parents feel guilty if they can't afford to pay $7 for organic eggs. This misinformation is spread by people like Alexis Baden-Mayer, political director of the Organic Consumers Association. She says organic food is clearly better: "The nutrition is a huge difference." But it isn't. Studies find little difference. If you still want to pay more for what's called "organic," that's your right. But what's outrageous is that this group of scientifically illiterate people convinced the government to force all of us to...

New research to be presented at this year's European Congress of Clinical Microbiology & Infectious Diseases (ECCMID) in Lisbon, Portugal (23-26 April), suggests that disease-causing amoebas that live on organic leafy vegetables can shelter human pathogens like Pseudomonas, Salmonella, and Helicobacter and are a potential risk to public health. The study is by Dr. Yolanda Moreno and colleagues from Universitat Politècnica de València in Spain. Foodborne illness from consuming contaminated fresh produce is common and can have serious effects on human health, especially when eaten raw. There is a growing demand for organically grown fruit and vegetables as people strive...

Ethical food does not matter to most Britons, a survey has revealed, showing that half of people say they do not care where their food comes from. Almost half of people (48 percent) surveyed said they would not necessarily stop buying products from a company if they discovered it was acting unethically, when surveyed by consumer research company Mintel. Of the 15,000 UK shoppers who were questioned, only a quarter (24 percent) said that the range of ethical products on offer influenced which shops they visited. More than half of UK consumers say that organic food is too expensive to...

im Crawford was rushing to load crates of freshly picked organic tomatoes onto trucks heading for an urban farmers market when he noticed the federal agent. A tense conversation followed as the visitor to his farm — an inspector from the Food and Drug Administration — warned him that some organic-growing techniques he had honed over four decades could soon be outlawed. "This is my badge. These are the fines. This is what is hanging over your head, and we want you to know that," Crawford says the official told him. Crawford's popular farm may seem a curious place for...

Now, farmers are discovering that the FDA's proposed rules would curtail many techniques that are common among organic growers, including spreading house-made fertilizers, tilling cropland with grazing animals, and irrigating from open creeks. Suddenly, from small family operations nestled in the foothills of Appalachia to the sophisticated organic-grower networks that serve Los Angeles and San Francisco, the farms that celebrity chefs and food-conscious consumers jostle to buy from are facing an unexpected adversary. They're fighting back. Even though full enforcement of the rules is still years away, they are warning customers that some farms would have to close. "They are...

Government officials do some really crazy things in the name of law enforcement.I recently wrote about an armed raid on an animal shelter in order to execute a baby deer.That was paramilitary overkill (pun intended), though it probably didn’t waste as many tax dollars as the regulatory overkill of the year-long sting operation by the Food and Drug Administration against an Amish farm for the horrible crime of selling unpasteurized milk to consenting adults who prefer unpasteurized milk.And let’s not forget Robert Norlander, the thuggish, dumpster-diving IRS agent, who sought to ruin the life of an innocent man because…well, for...

Scientists in Denmark have compared how organic and non-organic diets affect dietary mineral uptake in humans, focusing on copper and zinc. They found that there is no difference between the two diets when it comes to uptake and how the minerals are processed in the body.Copper and zinc are two essential trace elements with unknown availability in organic verses non-organic diets. Alicja Budek Mark and colleagues at the University of Denmark investigated the content of these elements in non-organic versus all-organic diets fed to 20 men over 12 days. And Mark’s team assessed the in vivo absorption of zinc and...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Patient after patient asked: Is eating organic food, which costs more, really better for me? Unsure, Stanford University doctors dug through reams of research to find out -- and concluded there's little evidence that going organic is much healthier, citing only a few differences involving pesticides and antibiotics. Eating organic fruits and vegetables can lower exposure to pesticides, including for children -- but the amount measured from conventionally grown produce was within safety limits, the researchers reported Monday. Nor did the organic foods prove more nutritious...

Organic food 'not any healthier' Eating organic food will not make you healthier, according to researchers at Stanford University, although it could cut your exposure to pesticides. They looked at more than 200 studies of the content and associated health gains of organic and non-organic foods. Overall, there was no discernable difference between the nutritional content, although the organic food was 30% less likely to contain pesticides. Critics say the work is inconclusive and call for more studies. The research, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, looked at 17 studies comparing people who ate organic with those who...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Organic produce and meat typically isn't any better for you than conventional varieties when it comes to vitamin and nutrient content, according to a new review of the evidence. But organic options may live up to their billing of lowering exposure to pesticide residue and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, researchers from Stanford University and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System found. "People choose to buy organic foods for many different reasons. One of them is perceived health benefits," said Dr. Crystal Smith-Spangler, who led the new study. "Our patients, our families ask about, ‘Well, are...

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT "Does Organic Food Turn People into Jerks?" What do you think, folks? When I think of organic food, I think of vegetarians. I think of militant vegetarians. Now, a liberal vegetarian is not content to just eat his vegetables. You have to, too. A conservative vegetarian will eat his vegetables and leave you alone. A liberal vegetarian will eat his and then demand that you only eat vegetables, too. And this is one of the big differences between liberals and conservatives across the board -- whatever it is, whatever the left-right issue is. If a liberal doesn't want...

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the “lame duck” Congress, another law was passed that didn’t quite get the same media coverage as the Bush tax extension “package,” the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and the new START treaty. The Food Safety Modernization Act was not steeped in the same level of popular controversy as these other pieces of legislation. Nevertheless, its passage may affect our daily lives even more than these, and in a rather stealth manner. Yes, the week before Christmas, the 111th Congress of the United States gave Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services...

There are two reliable ways of telling if you have won an argument. The first is if your disputants switch from discussion of the facts to accusations about motives; the second, more obviously, is if they descend to mere abuse. Alan Dangour, a nutritionist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, should therefore feel he has had an encouragingly uncomfortable week. He is the author of a peer-reviewed meta-study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that concluded, from 50 years of scientific evidence, that so-called “organic” food was no healthier than conventionally farmed products. By the end...

The FSA ignored pesticides, the main health issue, in its report on organic food, says Geoffrey Lean.What's with the Food Standards Agency and organic food? It just can't leave it alone. Not, of course, in the sense of wanting to wolf it down, but in trying to persuade the us not to do so. The agency says it stands for "safer food". But while it has a mixed record on additives that cause hyperactivity, toxic dyes, illegal GM foods, or pesticides, it has, from the start, campaigned against organic food, which no one claims to be dangerous. Indeed, in 2005,...

Organic food gives no health benefits to consumers, according to research for the Food Standards Agency published today. Shoppers pay more for organic fruit, vegetables, chicken, beef and milk but the food gives no nutritional enhancement to people’s diet. The watchdog stopped short of advising consumers that buying organic produce was a waste of money but its message was clear: choosing to eat organic food will make no important difference to a person’s overall health. Eating a healthy balanced diet is the only important thing, the report concluded. The research — the first and biggest study undertaken of scientific papers...

Systematic review of literature over 50 years finds no evidence for superior nutritional content of organic produceThere is no evidence that organically produced foods are nutritionally superior to conventionally produced foodstuffs, according to a study published today in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Consumers appear willing to pay higher prices for organic foods based on their perceived health and nutrition benefits, and the global organic food market was estimated in 2007 to be worth £29 billion (£2 billion in the UK alone). Some previous reviews have concluded that organically produced food has a superior nutrient composition to conventional food,...

The goal seems to be nothing short of eradicating American farms and self-sustainability. Even DEMOCRATS are opposing the Obama Energy Bill. Climate change legislation will be utterly devastating for American farmers. Rep. Leonard Boswell (D-IA) of the House Agriculture Committee says that not only will he not vote for it, but no one else on his committee will support it either. The bill would increase the cost of everything that farmers depend on, such as diesel fuel, gasoline, fertilizers, pesticides, and a host of other things. It would raise taxes on energy by $846 billion over the next ten years....

The national outbreak of salmonella in products with peanuts has been particularly unsettling for shoppers []who think organic food is safer. The plants in Texas and Georgia that were sending out contaminated peanut butter and ground peanut products had something else besides rodent infestation, mold and bird droppings. They also had federal organic certification. “Why is organic peanut butter better than Jif?” said Ms. Devlin-Sample, a nurse practitioner from Pelham, N.Y. “I have no idea. If we’re getting salmonella from peanut butter, all bets are off.” Although the rules governing organic food require health inspections and pest-management plans, organic certification...