Why Scientists Are Attacking an Esteemed Pediatric Organization

Toxicologists, dietitians, and pediatricians are criticizing a new report urging parents to shop organic. PLUS: Latest news & trends!

Photo by Khamkhor on Unsplash

Immunologist and microbiologist Andrea Love, Ph.D., felt compelled to record an “emergency episode” of her Unbiased Science podcast.

It was right around New Year’s, but Love was inundated with messages from concerned listeners—most of them parents and pediatricians. They all had the same question: Is it safe to feed my family conventional fruits and vegetables?

As I recently reported, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) flagship journal Pediatrics published a paper warning parents about genetically modified organism (GMO) based foods and conventional pesticides. The paper suggested unknown long-term impacts on children’s health and urged more research and transparency in food labeling.

But toxicologists, environmental chemists, and dietitians I spoke to all said the same thing: it’s not based in science. It’s bullshit. (Some went so far as to publicly call for a retraction.) The paper’s findings do not reflect the current body of evidence, and it ignores decades of research attesting to the safety of genetically modified foods. There hasn't been a single credible paper showing any form of harm, said Andrew Bartholomaeus, Ph.D., a toxicologist with expertise in GMOs.

This report, according to various scientists I interviewed, was pure fear-mongering. “This is going to cause public health harm,” Love told me, emphasizing issues like chemophobia and food anxiety.

There’s so much manufactured alarm surrounding GMOs and conventional pesticides, but little education about what trace amounts of pesticide residue actually means. It is a miniscule amount. To give an example, a 150-pound adult could consume more than 8,000 conventionally grown nectarines in one day without any ill effects even if they contained the highest pesticide residue recorded by the USDA. (For more fun facts, do test out the Pesticide Residue Calculator!)

Despite fears over demonized GMOs, 45% of American adults don't even know that all food contains DNA. (Or that organic farming also uses pesticides, albeit more “naturally” sourced.) 

Love says the AAP’s report suffers from a citation bias—cherry-picked studies, misinterpretation of data, and sources that ignore more recent and robust research. She also noted that experts in this field of research were not co-authors of this study. It was written by three pediatricians.

“This is being positioned as a clinical report when in reality, it's an opinion piece,” says Love. (You can read my report about criticisms of the paper here.)

The kicker, of course, is what the AAP suggests to newly concerned parents: Buy organic. (*Elle Woods voice* What, like it’s hard?)

To date, there is insufficient evidence supporting the idea that organic is superior in health benefits. A 2012 Stanford University meta-analysis study of 237 existing studies compared organic to non-organic food, only to conclude that, overall, they “showed no evidence of differences in nutrition-related health outcomes.”

I have a whole section on organic in my book The Gospel of Wellness. While I won’t get into all the data and arguments here (buy the book for that!), I will note that such elitist advice as “just buy organic” is often counterproductive (which is concerning considering half of American children don’t eat a single daily vegetable):  

Here’s what sometimes happens with some lower-income shoppers: nervous and confused about pesticides—and too cash-strapped to afford pricier organic— they end up skipping the produce aisle altogether. A 2016 study of five hundred low-income shoppers’ habits indicated that some planned to consume fewer fruits and vegetables after being alerted of pesticide residue concerns such as the crudely named Dirty Dozen. 

Sylvia Klinger, a registered dietitian and the founder of Hispanic Food Communications, has witnessed decreased consumption of conventional fruits and vegetables within lower-income Hispanic communities. “I see the fear,” she told me, noting that they can’t afford organic alternatives. “We forget that almost half of the U.S. population is financially struggling.” 

In one Facebook group for natural parenting, a moderator asked moms who eat 90 to 100 percent organic to share how much they spend each week. Quite a few were forthcoming about the challenges of trying to live their best Goop life:

“Ugh, I want to eat like that but I just cannot afford it!”

“I want to do better for my family food-wise, but geez, the prices are crazy!”

“We don’t buy all organic because of this . . . We can’t afford it. So we do half and half. The kids’ stuff is mostly organic and then we eat the cheap gonna-give-you-heart-disease stuff.” 

“People are worried that they're somehow doing something wrong, that they're being bad parents, that [conventional food] is causing health issues, when in reality that's not the case,” says Love.

I also delved into why organic has become so big, and why so many people—especially parents—are drawn to it. One tidbit:

We might assume certain things about organic because there’s a lot baked (so to speak) into our views of food. When NPR ran a report on the Stanford study, they got so many complaints (“prompted a powerful reaction,” is how they put it) that they had to run another segment just to address the backlash. In an attempt to calm down listeners, they interviewed NPR’s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam, who is also the host and creator of the Hidden Brain podcast. He said something that applies to many of the things we buy or do: strong emotional values are tied up with organic food. It has come to represent so many other things—anti-industrialization, good parenting, nature, spirituality—that might not have anything to do with these studies’ findings.

“There are these tensions between what we want organic to be at a psychological level, and what it actually does at a practical level,” says Vedantam. “And the science is very good at telling us at the practical level what’s going on. But sometimes, that could feel like the science is attacking our values.”