Lord Taverne
Main Page: Lord Taverne (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)Health: Organic Food
Lord Taverne Excerpts
Lord Taverne
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the analysis made of the health benefits of organic food recently published in the British Journal of Nutrition.
Lord Taverne (LD)
My Lords, health and agriculture are areas in which it is vital that we base policy on evidence. I regret to say that the Department of Health has not always been very good at this. Several times I have been told that the department is neutral between evidence-based medicine and complementary medicine. Against the advice of the Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies, it does not stop the National Health Service funding homeopathy. As the noble Lord, Lord Rees, has pointed out, if homeopathy worked other than as a placebo, many of the laws of science would have to be repealed. But the health department says it believes in patients’ choice, which suggests that if the patient chooses witchcraft, which also works as a placebo, the National Health Service should pay for witchcraft. Defra’s policy, on the other hand, has recently, on most issues, become more evidence-based. It is now firmly pro-GM and seems sceptical about the merits of organic farming—progress at last. I hope that Mr Paterson’s successor does not put the clock back.
Turning to the evidence about organic food and health, from its foundation the organic movement owed more to myth than evidence. Rudolf Steiner, one of its founding fathers, had crazy ideas such as planting according to phases of the moon, and Hitler, who declared the end of the age of reason, was completely sold on organic farming. That may be a bit of ancient history, and certainly the movement has evolved and promotes good practices because of its care about the quality of the soil. But not long ago, Mr Patrick Holden, the previous director of the Soil Association, told a House of Lords Select Committee that science was not yet sufficiently developed to appreciate the virtues of the organic approach—which could presumably be better detected by some sort of magic.
For some, the organic movement is still a kind of religion that is impervious to scientific evidence; for example, it perpetually proclaims the health benefits because organic food is “free of pesticides”. That is the main reason, according to polls, why the public are persuaded to buy it. The Soil Association still makes that claim but it has clearly never heard of Paracelsus, who taught long ago that,
“it all depends on the dose”.
The safety threshold for the use of artificial pesticides is so cautiously set that there is virtually no possibility of harm from their residues when we eat conventionally grown food. As the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, and others have pointed out, one cup of coffee contains more carcinogens than you would ingest from a whole year’s consumption of pesticide residues in fruit and vegetables. Of course, that should not stop you drinking coffee.
The organic movement has ignored the most elaborate and careful scientific study conducted so far on the nutrient content of organic foods. That was a study by Dr Alan Dangour for the Food Standards Agency. It found no extra health benefits from organically grown crops compared with those grown conventionally. Incidentally, he was violently abused for his report and even received death threats. Then in 2012 a detailed study done for the American College of Physicians came to the same conclusion.
However, the study published in the British Journal of Nutrition is the first serious study commissioned by the organic movement itself, and that has to be applauded. It was financed by the Sheepdrove Trust, which promotes organic farming, though of course that in itself does not invalidate its findings. Whether research is financed by Greenpeace or Monsanto is irrelevant if experiments can be reproduced and findings confirmed by independent expert scientists. The source of finance must always lead to careful scrutiny but in the end what matters is whether the results stand up.
The article in question is based on a large number of peer-reviewed papers. The trouble is that scrutiny by expert opinion has found that its conclusions are flawed. There are several serious defects. I will try to summarise the main ones as briefly as I can. First, it suffers from publication bias, placing greater reliance on results that support the authors’ thesis than those that contradict it. Several commentators have expressed regret that the authors of the study have mixed good-quality data with poor-quality data.
Secondly, the article refers to antioxidants in organically grown plants as if they are essential nutrients, which they are not, and it cites them as evidence of health benefits from organic crops, particularly for cancer protection. But the World Cancer Research Fund concluded in its systematic reviews that there is insufficient evidence to make these claims for antioxidants, although there is a clear relationship between the consumption of fruit and vegetables and a lower risk of cancer. Other highly rated studies have reached the same conclusion.
Thirdly, the article claims that organic vegetables are good for health because they contain lower levels of nitrates and nitrites. According to Professor Tom Sanders, head of nutritional sciences at King’s College, that is the opposite of the findings of more recent research, which show that nitrates in vegetables lower blood pressure because in the body they are converted to the vasodilator nitric oxide.
Fourthly, the article ignores the fact that pesticides are naturally present in plants. Many are toxic and carcinogenic. The production of natural pesticides is stimulated in response to attack by a pest or disease. The amounts of natural, possibly toxic, pesticides will thus be greater in unprotected crops that have been attacked—a situation that potentially applies to all organic crops. So if you are concerned about the pesticide content of your food, you should avoid organic products, especially fresh produce that is blemished or misshapen, which is likely to contain more potentially harmful natural pesticides than crops that have been protected by synthetic pesticides.
However, most concerns about pesticide residues are unjustified. As the National Farmers’ Union has pointed out, there is no reason to choose between organic and conventionally grown food on health grounds. But I would add one qualification. Organic food costs more, so that those with modest means who feel they ought to buy it for health reasons may spend less on fruit and vegetables. Why does organic food cost more? It is not because organic farmers exploit the public, but because the yield of organic crops is lower; it is a less efficient use of land. The last thing the world needs is the less efficient use of good agricultural land. As the noted environmentalist James Lovelock has observed, if the whole world converted to organic farming, we would feed around one-third of the world’s population.
Defra should make one important change of policy. It should stop spending more than £20 million a year on subsidising farmers to change to organic farming. Instead, the money should be spent on public research in plant science at our world-class institutes—the John Innes Centre, Rothamsted and the Scottish Crop Research Institute—for which £20 million would make a huge difference. It would be a far more beneficial use of public funds.
Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to wind up for the Opposition on this very interesting debate. I am conscious that many noble Lords in the next debate have great experience of the land and farming, and I wonder that they have not found the need to intervene. I always welcome debates in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Taverne. He is a rationalist—he has argued for many years in your Lordships’ House about the need for evidence-based policy—and a debunker of myths. I have to confess to him that at my home we have a fortnightly visit from an organic farmer in Herefordshire, delivering boxes of organic food to the urban dwellers of Birmingham. It is quite expensive but I feel quite good about it. I do not think that it is particularly to do with health; it is to do with the fact that it is rather nice to meet the farmer who has actually produced the food. I say to the noble Viscount that although Northumberland is rather a long way away, if he were to deliver boxes in Birmingham he would be sure of an equally warm welcome.
The noble Lord started with a view of the Department of Health that I took to be a mite critical. His perception was that the department is neutral on evidence-based medicine as opposed to alternative medicine. I am interested in the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, to that. My experience is that the Chief Medical Officer at the Department of Health works very hard to ensure that there is evidence, so I was quite surprised to hear what the noble Lord said. Surely the problem for the Department of Health is that alternative medicine is a fact of life. Many people want to receive it. As long as there is some regulation, I cannot see the problem with it. My question for the noble Baroness is whether the department has a policy on clinical commissioning groups commissioning alternative medicine for NHS patients. That is a relevant point on which to respond to the noble Lord.
As this is a Department of Health issue, the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, may recall that when the National Institute for Clinical Excellence was formed by the previous Government, in addition to being asked for pronouncements on which medicines or treatments were clinically and cost effective, NICE was also asked to look at treatments that had been found not to be cost effective and clinically effective. One has to face up to the fact that many treatments in health globally have not been proven to be effective. It would be good to know why NICE has made such little progress on advising the health service on which treatments it should phase out.
It is also interesting to debate pesticides. To a certain extent there is a parallel with the debate on the contribution of medicines. I am always struck that in the health service medicine is seen as a budget that always has to be contained and held back. There is a perception that increasing staffing and buying new medical equipment are good things, but that the drugs budget is always a matter of concern. If noble Lords look back 50 to 100 years, they will find that major advances in health outcomes have come from medicines. We need to be careful before we demonise the pharma industry and what it seeks to do.
The noble Lord, Lord Taverne, says that organic food and the claims for it should be seen as a kind of religion, impervious to scientific evidence. On the use of pesticides, he says that there is very little evidence of harm if they are used in small doses—although I think that the noble Baroness, Lady Miller, challenged him on that to a certain extent. We are not able to debate this as such because the noble Lord does not have a right to reply. However, while I fully accept his point that there is little or no evidence that the quality of food is improved if it is organic, he did not mention the environment. I would have put a question to him on that; perhaps I can tempt an intervention.
Lord Taverne
My final point was very much concerned with the environment: the last thing we want is a less efficient form of farming that makes inefficient use of good agricultural land, which is vital to the environment.