Another reason why buying organic is submitting to a scam

P.D. Mangan writes at http://roguehealthandfitness.com,

What makes the case against paying more for organic food more damning is the fact that our natural, human diet is loaded with pesticides, natural ones. All those dietary phytochemicals in fruits and vegetables that are so good for us are composed largely of chemicals made by plants to defend themselves from predators. It may be surprising for some to learn that plants do not want to be eaten.

Animals defend themselves either by fight or by flight. Plants cannot flee, literally rooted to the ground as they are, so they fight using the only means possible: chemical warfare. Coffee plants don’t produce caffeine in order to satisfy human consumers; they do it to poison animals and insects that want to eat them. The sulforaphanes in cruciferous vegetables, the solanine in potatoes, the epicatechins in tea: none of those were put there for our benefit. The difference between an edible and an unedible plant lies merely in our ability to tolerate the toxins of an edible plant.

…conventional food doesn’t have enough pesticide residue to be of concern:

…Nearly all of the pesticide chemicals that humans are exposed to are natural, produced by the plants themselves, and the fact that there’s little if any difference between natural and synthetic pesticides can be seen in the fact that half of the natural pesticides tested caused cancer in rodents.

Furthermore, the quantity of natural pesticides that humans ingest daily is many orders of magnitude greater than the amount of synthetic pesticides.

…Science, real actual science, shows that virtually every plant food we eat contains large amounts of natural pesticides, some of which are known to cause cancer in lab animals.

The conclusion must be that organic food is a waste of money, and to the extent that some people and corporations profit from the ignorance of the public, and even feed that ignorance, a scam.

Read more here.