Beware – pseudoscience!
Lobbyists of "organic food" have again made their way into decent media
Alexandra "Renoire" Alekseeva, XX2 century
The well-known French news portal Le Monde has the headline "The use of bioproducts significantly reduces the risk of cancer." "XX2 century" got acquainted with the research on which the article in Le Monde is based, and came to the conclusion that its quality leaves much to be desired.
"On October 22, an article appeared in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, which cites data confirming that pesticides cause cancer," Le Monde said in an article.
Let's see what kind of article it is. Within the framework of NutriNet-Santé (as the study was called), healthy individuals of all ages on the Internet were asked from May 2009 to November 2016 to report on what they ate. Three days were chosen each week, when participants had to report how much and what (which categories of food) they ate it. The average age of the subjects was 44.2 years with a standard deviation of 14.5 years, that is, there was no sampling by age. More women than men participated in the study, 78% and 22%, respectively (according to the authors, this is because women are more concerned about their health).
"Among 68,946 study participants, cancer was detected in 1,340 cases, breast cancer was most common – 459 cases, 180 cases of prostate cancer, 135 cases of skin cancer, 99 cases of colorectal cancer, 47 non-Hodgkin's lymphomas and 15 other lymphomas. Priority consumption of "organic" food was associated with a reduced risk of cancer," the article reports.
The authors pretend that they have taken into account all the "buts". For example, they write that a healthy lifestyle, a balanced diet and a high income were positively associated with the use of "organic" food. They further say that those who ate chaotically, but also "organic" food, also showed a reduced risk of cancer. "So our conclusions are correct!" – the researchers conclude.
Even more egregious seems to be the paragraph where it appears that obese people who do not eat farm products grown without pesticides are more likely to get cancer. "Probably, fat people are more susceptible to pesticides," the authors suggest.
The authors attempt to analyze the results they obtained. "It's possible that eating pesticides damages DNA," they say. "It seems that pesticides are similar in structure to estrogens, so perhaps we are seeing an increased risk of breast cancer."
Even an inexperienced reader will understand that all this is far-fetched. People with higher incomes who can afford to buy "bio-products" will also be those who can afford healthy food in principle. In addition, they can afford to go to the gym and not work on schedule a day or two later, etc.
As for obesity, it's basically an unhealthy thing, and there are types of cancer of different tissues associated with obesity. Breast cancer was more common in the sample due to the fact that there are many more women than men in it. And finally, the authors do not say anywhere what percentage of the sample consists of people who adhere to "bio-nutrition". Most likely, there were fewer of these people than non-adherents, and no far-reaching conclusions could be drawn from them.
Bad research is not uncommon. It happens less often that they are published in good scientific journals, such as the journal JAMA Internal Medicine (in 2017, it was ranked 5th in the ranking of medical journals among Western scientific publishers). Also, this study, within the framework of which, by the way, several more articles were published about the impact of "biopish" on health, was partially funded by the French state, which is even more sad. As a result, Le Monde newspaper, a very widely read resource in France, wrote about the study.
The article (Baudry et al., Association of Frequency of Organic Food Consumption With Cancer Risk – VM) is freely available, and the conclusions state that "additional research is needed to verify the reliability of the results, but for now we recommend everyone to stick to a diet with a predominance of organic products." If it doesn't harm people and science, then what is it?
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