I'm a little behind on my bile so these two stories are not quite the cutting edge of the news that they were last week, but they are current enough to use as further examples of bad science and woolly thinking in the media. Or rather woolly thinking on what constitutes a meaningful study.
The first item is the Which? report on organic food. This was widely reported middle of last week. Which? concluded that there is no value in organic foods based on its testing of three foodstuffs which include potatoes and tomatoes, these being the two of the three which “prove” their case. The “proof” being that non-organic potatoes have more vitamin C than organic potatoes and that non-organic tomatoes taste better than organic ones. Which when stated this way does seem damning. Until you consider a few things. Most consumers who buy organic do so because of the reduction in pesticides and intensive farming methods which the organic movement believe are harmful to the environment in general. That is a completely different argument which I don't propose to get into here but it is one which Which? is not addressing. At the risk of a pun its not comparing apples with apples.
The principle behind the organic movement is that people buy organic because they think they are saving the planet. Vitamin C content has nothing to do with it.
The next thing you have to ask is how were the varieties selected? Were they the same strains and were they grown in a comparative manner? Some types of potato may naturally contain more vitamin C than others anyway and the difference is in a completely different reason than organic vs. not. I'm not sure vitamin C levels in potatoes is really part of the deal anyway. I've read a fair number of people say we get too much vitamin C anyway, the excess just passes right through you. If you are concerned about your vitamin C levels then rather than mess about which potatoes you eat you could always try an orange or something...
As for the “tastes better” argument – this is matter of opinion and will have all manner of variation based on age, personal preference, ethnic background and whatever. Personally I like Cadbury chocolate better than Green & Blacks. So is dairy milk “the best” or even “better” chocolate? Probably not. But I'm sure I could get a taste test panel together which proves it. This was just another meaningless report in a sea of “diversion” news articles to take your mind off the conflict in Libya or the death toll in Christchurch.
The one which really got my goat was an article on Radio 4 in which the correspondent rolled out an allegation that IT had failed to reduce paper in the modern business. There was much scoffing over “the paperless office” and so forth. Now you can pick on the organic vegetables all you like but you start on “progress” and “IT innovation” and such in your thinly veiled pro-Ludd agenda and I am raised in ire.
You see what they had done was to take a 10 year viewpoint and say that because paper consumption in the UK has increased something like 1% in that time that the IT industry has failed to make an impact on paper consumption. Again on the face of it this seems a statement which has a factual base. The thing which is the first concern is that the BBC think a 1% increase is a statistically relevant increase. For the most part that is “margin of error” for an unchanged volume.
Next thing is that they are not talking about the paper used in offices, nor even “industry” or the whole commercial sector. That is all use of paper including as a packaging material and magazines and even toilet paper. So in packaging we have moved away from polystyrene and polypropylene and all those nasty materials and now most packaging is some form of recycled paper based stuff. Now consider the fact that the population of the UK has grown, and probably by significantly more than 1% over ten years. That's an increase in the noses to blow, bottoms to wipe, and an increase in the number of items in packaging to be bought. Even nappies are made from paper based product. So I don't have the real numbers to hand, and I would venture to suggest that the people at the BBC who produced that programme didn't either so my opinion is as valid as theirs!
My opinion is that the facts support the fact that if paper consumption in the UK has gone up by a mere 1% in the last decade and that the uses for paper in the consumer market place have increased in real terms it must mean that paper consumption in the office environment has been reduced.
We don't have a paperless office. We don't have a waste-free world. I have to say I get 1000 times more junk email than I get junk in the real mail. The volume of catalogues and flyers and so forth I get is radically reduced. Most of my bills are online now (both for business and at home) so IT has reduced paper consumption.
Maybe we can do an assessment of how many journalists have based articles for print or radio on opinion and their own bias and presented this as fact using flawed logic, poor research and a total misunderstanding of the need for real research methods. I suspect the trend is upwards. Anyone got any figures? Made up ones will do. So long as it supports my hypothesis I'm not going to question them.
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