As long as it receives sufficient media coverage, any publication highlighting the health benefits of organic food is met with a barrage of denigration and untruths. With the singular circumstance that this false information does not only circulate on social networks or in the press: it is sometimes learned societies or scientific institutions which produce or relay this misleading information. According to several researchers in nutrition and public health, the National Academy of Medicine, the French Academy of Agriculture (AAF) and the National Cancer Institute (INCa) have thus, each in their own way, participated in fueling the confusion on the subject.
In question, a French epidemiological study published in 2018 in JAMA Internal Medicinehaving followed 70,000 people for four and a half years, and highlighting a significant drop in lymphomas (- 75%) and postmenopausal breast cancer (- 34%) among the biggest consumers of organic products, compared to those who do not consume it. Just three days after publication, the AAF published a “viewpoint” from two of its members on its website, which criticized it.
“This text was a model of the techniques used by manufacturers to create doubt, with a pile of methodological criticisms bordering on bad faith, but which manage to give the illusion of a legitimate scientific discussionsays Serge Hercberg, one of the figures in nutritional epidemiology, and co-author of this study. We are obviously not hostile to debate, but it was clearly a desire to discredit rather than debate. » Questioned, the permanent secretary of the AAF recalls that the “points of view” of academicians, although disseminated by the learned society, are not formally endorsed by it.
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In April 2019, several months after the publication of the famous study, the National Academy of Medicine published a brief press release which “alert on the too rapid interpretation of epidemiological results”. The text argues that the groups compared (organic consumers and non-consumers) differ in other factors: “Consumption of fruits and vegetables, socio-economic level, physical activity… all [sont] capable of explaining a difference on their own. »
A criticism which suggests that the authors were negligent in not taking these confounding factors into account in their analysis. “It’s completely ridiculous.replies biochemist and nutritionist Denis Lairon, co-author of the attacked study. It is unthinkable that a magazine like JAMA Internal Medicineone of the most renowned and demanding, agrees to publish an epidemiological study which would not take into account these confounding factors! »
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