Links With Your Coffee - Friday

Bt cotton farming revolutionizes women's employment in India: Study
What the hell were we thinking? (tip to Amy)
As you may already know, the Environmental Working Group is a 501(c)(3) NGO with the goal of protecting “kids from toxic chemicals in our food, water, air and the products we use every day”. One of their major efforts is the yearly Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides™.
EWG gives many many reasons why they think you should use the guide, specifying that you (the consumer) should eat organic or at least choose the Clean 15™ over the Dirty Dozen™:
Biological systems are extremely complex. This nugget of wisdom may seem trivial but it is a lesson the scientific and medical communities have been learning over and over again for a couple of centuries. Every time we think we understand a biological system we find there is a deeper level of complexity, or another layer of interactions we had not previously taken into consideration.
This is why we need high quality clinical trials to feel confident about the net health effects of any intervention. A treatment may make sense based upon our current understanding of human biology, but that’s not enough. We need to know what it actually does to people.
This is a lesson, however, that the supplement industry has not learned (and does not appear interested in learning).




