You’ve probably seen the headlines this week.
If you eat organic food you’re not only saving the planet and supporting your friendly neighbourhood farmer but you’re also reducing your risk of getting cancer by a spectacular 25 percent.
Yes, sir, I think I will have another organic pumpkin spice latte. It’s basically chemotherapy in a cup (without the vomiting and irritating hair loss, obviously).
This incredible news comes from a paper published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and is reported in every major news outlet on the planet. It’s based on a sample of approximately 10,000 French consumers over a seven year period.
Sure, organic food is sold at an astronomical markup, takes more land to yield less food, and is sprayed with a raft of pesticides no more safe than those used on ‘conventional’ food. But, this study would lead us to believe, that’s all worth it if organic food slashes everyone’s cancer risk by a quarter.
Well, as always, the headline that looked too good to be true turned out to be too good to be true. But not before the story had gone all over the world.
According to a short paragraph buried deep in the paper’s footnotes, the association between consumption of organic food and a lower risk did not hold for “younger adults,” all men (read that again: It does not apply to any men), people who had not gone to university and also had no family history of cancer, people who currently smoke as well as people who had never smoked, and people who already eat a healthy amount of non-organic fruit and vegetables.
So, who does that leave? One very specific group: overweight older women who went to college but once smoked.
Still, if you’re a 60 year old woman with a third level degree but who once smoked, and you currently wheeze and splutter away from the sight of a cucumber in favour of a double bacon cheeseburger, then switching to organic food will massively reduce your risk of cancer, right?
Well, not so fast.
For this very, very specific group, what is the actual reduction in risk of getting cancer?
The study authors claim that people in this group who consumed the most organic foods had a 25 percent lower cancer risk compared with those who ate the least.
Sounds pretty good. However, the study and breathless reporting fail to emphasize the real relevant fact — what it means for an individual’s absolute risk of getting cancer.
Dig into the details and you’ll find that for the group of older overweight female ex-smokers that eat the most organic food, the reduction in absolute risk is miniscule — around 0.6 percent.
Sure, if you’re one of these women, you might think even the smallest decrease in risk of getting cancer is not something to be sniffed at. And you might have a bit of extra cash because you no longer buy cigarettes. So 2kg of organic quinoa it is, yes?
Put down your purses there, ladies.
Of course, the paper doesn’t actually establish a causal relationship between eating organic food and cancer risk reduction at all. Not even for its tiny 0.6 percent reduction.
The study, likely nearly all studies of its kind, merely identified an ‘association’ between eating organic food and cancer incidence in this very, very specific subgroup of overweight female former smokers.
As the journal itself acknowledges, the health impact of organic food “is notoriously difficult to assess.”
This is because people who eat more organic food also tend to have higher incomes and all-round healthier lifestyles. There is huge self-selection bias.
The authors fully admit that they, therefore, cannot conclude that it isn’t one of these confounding factors which is causing the observed effect.
Hold on one minute, the discerning reader may be thinking: A study that finds a non-causal association showing a tiny decrease in absolute risk for a very small subset of overweight older women who used to smoke does not seem very important.
Why then has it generated screaming headlines in some of the biggest news outlets on the planet?
How did the study’s authors even find this obscure relationship?
What, in short, is going on?
These are all good questions.
On the issue of why newspapers reported on the study in the way they did, the short answer is because that is how it was presented to them, and most journalists do not have the time or expertise to analyse and tease out the finer points of every study that finds its way across their desk.
And another short answer is: Because they wanted to present it this way. It is in newspapers’ interests to drive readers, clicks, and traffic. Food stories always do this. After all, everyone eats. Even more than they have sex. And sex sells.
In truth, this study should have never made it past one news editor, nevermind made it on to the front page of some of the biggest newspapers in the world. Definitely not with the headlines it generated.
But the study’s authors said “promoting organic food consumption in the general population could be a promising preventive strategy against cancer.” This was the result reported by most news outlets.
Within 24 hours real scientists actually read the study and pointed out the serious flaws mentioned above. By then, of course, the news cycle had moved on. The people who want to promote organic food were happy and, importantly, the media outlets were happy.
This all might seem like victimless manipulation — of the media by activists and of consumers by the media.
But consider this. Accurate reporting of science matters acutely in our current political and popular environment. Bad science and breathless, uncritical reporting have very real consequences — just look at the current measles epidemic in Europe driven by parents who don’t trust science and are refusing to vaccinate their children.
There are other obvious dangers, too. Organisations such as the American Cancer Society have warned that activist scare tactics are driving consumers away from normal, healthy diets in pursuit of questionable, miniscule claimed benefits of going organic. It is wrong to push families to eschew perfectly healthy fruit and vegetables simply because they can’t afford the more expensive organic alternative.
This is a new class warfare of food activism. “Good” food just so happens to be very expensive, and anybody who can’t afford to feed their children organic blueberries at more than a hundred percent markup deserves a heaped serving of guilt and moral panic.
When we sacrifice science for activism to sell newspapers and drive clicks, we can’t be surprised at the very real and damaging impact on families’ health.
Conor McGlynn, Senior Account Executive, Red Flag
