Eating organic food doesn't lower your overall risk of cancer, study says

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
Well, you're the one bringing it up. Why don't you try giving a coherent and consistent definition of what's "natural" and what isn't? Do cows "naturally" live in barns? Do they "naturally" eat grass that was planted by man? At what point does "natural" become artificial?

I just gave you a coherent and consistent definition that you either failed to comprehend or failed to accept which is none of my affair. I stated natural is that which pertains to nature. If all you have to contribute is what appears to me to be rather irrelevant and foolish questions I think ill pass as I really do have considerably better things to do than remonstrate with someone who is merely contentious for contentiousness sake. I find quite banal to be honest.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
feeding meat to cows is a transgression of nature, cows dont eat meat, they eat grass, just sayin. Putting Nile Perch in the Victoria lake is a transgression of nature, Nile Perch dont belong in the Victoria lake, just sayin.

cows eating meat is not what happens in nature, sure. And I think cows being fed meat is generally a bad idea; NOT because it is unnatural i.e. NOT because it doesn't happen in nature which is totally irrelevant to whether we SHOULD do it, but rather because of the potential of things like BSE etc.

But none of that in anyway logically implies that cows eating meat is a "transgression" of nature for, although there exists examples of things that are unwise or even immoral to do that just coincidentally happen to be "unnatural", they are not unwise or immoral BECAUSE they are unnatural! And there is still no premise nor evidence for the existence of some kind of mystical or mysterious 'rules' in nature that you seem to think exist that are such that they are either immoral to break just because to do so is unnatural.

If you refute this, then just tell me what is this premise or evidence for the existence of such moral 'rules'?
(note that many of the things you do is unnatural such as using the internet etc. Is that a "transgression of nature"? )

if you don't refute this, then, logically, there should not exist any "transgression" of nature else in what sense is it a "transgression" if no special rules have been broken?
(this doesn't condone in any way unwise dubious practices of, say, feed meat to caws, because there are plenty of other reasons to reject such practices but these other reasons are rationally based )

Originally posted by humy
cows eating meat is not what happens in nature, sure. And I think cows being fed meat is generally a bad idea; NOT because it is unnatural i.e. NOT because it doesn't happen in nature which is totally irrelevant to whether we SHOULD do it, but rather because of the potential of things like BSE etc.

But none of that in anyway logically implies that cows eati ...[text shortened]... of other reasons to reject such practices but these other reasons are rationally based )

I dont think there are any mystical rules. All one needs to do is make an observation of the natural world and it becomes rather self evident that feeding cows meat is unnatural and a bad idea and to do so transgresses what is natural. Why there should be any ambiguity about this I cannot say, it seems rather clear to me and is entirely based upon the scientific method for it relies upon that which can be established empirically.

The morality of transgressing nature is something else and is not only a very broad subject but a very long discussion as well.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
I dont think there are any mystical rules. All one needs to do is make an observation of the natural world and it becomes rather self evident that feeding cows meat is unnatural and a bad idea and to do so transgresses what is natural. Why there should be any ambiguity about this I cannot say, it seems rather clear to me and is entirely based upon t ...[text shortened]... ature is something else and is not only a very broad subject but a very long discussion as well.

Good. So what kind of rules are being broken by this “transgression of nature”? Can you give just any one example of such a rule and explain how you know this moral rule exists?

self evident that feeding cows meat is unnatural

correct.

and a bad idea

correct. But why do you think it is a bad idea BECAUSE it is unnatural? -The two things are unrelated.
Drink-driving is unnatural -so its a bad idea BECAUSE it is unnatural?
If so, then, logically, driving a car without drinking is also a bad idea!

and to do so transgresses what is natural.

does “transgresses what is natural” mean to you “transgression of nature”?
If not, you are now making a different claim and it is the original claim I am criticizing.
If yes, I just asked for either the EVIDENCE or PREMISE for the existence of rules that, if broken, would be a “transgression of nature” -so please give this EVIDENCE/PREMISE because you haven't so far but rather just keep repeating the same exertions without stating the premise.
-Do you agree that, for a claim or belief to be rationally based, it MUST have a premise? yes or no? If yes, if you cannot give a premise to your claim (as appears the case here ) , it is not rationally based.

Originally posted by humy
Good. So what kind of rules are being broken by this “transgression of nature”? Can you give just any one example of such a rule and explain how you know this moral rule exists?

self evident that feeding cows meat is unnatural

correct.

and a bad idea

correct. But why do you think it is a bad idea BECAUSE it is unn ...[text shortened]... ou cannot give a premise to your claim (as appears the case here ) , it is not rationally based.

You appear to me to be not making very much sense, what is it about 'I dont hold that there are any mystical rules', that you dont understand? One can determine through empiricism whether something is natural or unnatural and whether something is a good idea or a bad idea remains a matter of conjecture until establish by empirics. Why this should be difficult to understand I cannot say.

I have already given the example of cows and their dietary requirements and its therefore simply untrue that I have provided no example. You feed cows meat, they get sick and die. You have established through empiricism that feeding cows meat is both unnatural and a transgression of nature and a very bad idea. Again why this should be difficult to understand, I cannot say. Now if you know this and yet continue to do so then it becomes a matter of morality. Why you keep making allusions to rationality and logic is quite intriguing for everything I have stated pertains to the scientific method whereas you yourself seem to be given to some rather flowery reasoning.

I suspect that cows are not natural to start with, in that they are the product of domestication and breeding over countless generations of farming. Cows, pigs, hens, horses, dogs, sheep, goats,... Nor am I quite sure that eating the quantities of meat that we now do, as a result of farming such animals, is entirely natural, in the sense that that is not how we evolved and there is evidence that excessive meat eating is not working out very well for us. However, even if we choose to believe that beef is the food of the gods, the increasing demand for meat, especially across Asia, has begun to make it clear to more observers than ever that meat production is a very wasteful use of good farming land, which is no longer imagined to be in infinite supply. To know what is natural in respect of the land, it is helpful to know that the Amazon rainforest was in the past quite well managed by human societies and then left to grow wild, perhaps when Europeans decimated the native peoples though disease and violence and enslavement. So it was not always quite so wild. Then again, China was once heavily forested and immense areas were cleared for human settlement over the past three thousand years or so. Northern Europe - certainly what is now Germany - was transformed more recently from a huge region of forest and marshland through deforestation, large scale drainage and land reclamation schemes and settlement. It is helpful to appreciate how radically humans have transformed such immense areas in order to recognize that what remains is unlikely to last.

But whatever we may want to consider to be natural or otherwise, the thing that possibly matters more is the nature of factory type technologies in food processing over the past century. And the thing that is most striking is that our scientists have been demonstrably telling massive lies in order to shield the food industry from questioning. The most important lies concerned the role of fat in food as a cause of ill health. As the scientists developed fat free foods, they replaced the fat with a concoction of alternatives that has been devastating, directly causing obesity, diabetes and heart disease to escalate exponentially. The major single contribution has been American corn syrup and American politicians have forecefully protected the food industry from scrutiny, for example by demanding the suppression of WHO reports and guidance on the health risks of sugar in our diet.

I well recall the early days of the BSE disaster. We were treated to scenes of cows that could hardly walk, wobbling about the farm yards, and being told they were safe to eat. We even had a government minister who arranged a press conference at which he fed a beef burger to his own daughter to assure us all that this was safe. Pretty nasty stuff we all felt as we watched in horror. Call me naive and unscientific, but I cannot feel comfortable about farm animals being allowed to reach such evident poor and unhealthy condition prior to being offered as food. As for the conditions that other animals are held in, it can be beyond disgusting. We get a sanitized account of the lives of our animals and assured that our farmers love and care for them. Some do. Many don't. The big factory farmers certainly don't and they supply our supermarkets and our food processors.

It is a tautology to insist that everything we consume has a chemical composition and thus contains chemicals. It also finally starts to insult our intelligence as consumers. The food industry and the corrupt scientists it employs have lost our confidence and are finally being exposed as charlatans and proponents of crap science and crap food.

Interesting thought by the way. Margaret Thatcher was a chemist and worked for a food company before turning her hand to politics. Apparently she was part of a team that invented a type of ice cream that can be dispensed in convenient squirts. Obviously I will never touch that stuff again as long as I live.

The article linked below covers a lot of good ground here and has the title that Why almost everything you've been told about unhealthy foods is wrong. It concludes with the simple point that ought to sum it all up from here on. Avoid processed food. It is always nasty and often harmful.

http://gu.com/p/3nmte

......After examining 72 academic studies involving more than 600,000 participants, the study, funded by the foundation, found that saturated fat consumption was not associated with coronary disease risk. This assessment echoed a review in 2010 that concluded "there is no convincing evidence that saturated fat causes heart disease".

...Neither could the foundation's research team find any evidence for the familiar assertion that trips off the tongue of margarine manufacturers and apostles of government health advice, that eating polyunsaturated fat offers heart protection. In fact, lead researcher Dr Rajiv Chowdhury spoke of the need for an urgent health check on the standard healthy eating script...

...Stick "low fat" on the label and you can sell people any old rubbish. Low fat religion spawned legions of processed foods, products with ramped up levels of sugar, and equally dubious sweet substitutes, to compensate for the inevitable loss of taste when fat is removed. The anti-saturated fat dogma gave manufacturers the perfect excuse to wean us off real foods that had sustained us for centuries, now portrayed as natural born killers, on to more lucrative, nutrient-light processed products, stiff with additives and cheap fillers...

.....what has been missing from this noble effort is the awareness that excessive salt is a problem of processed food. High salt is essential to that larger-than-life processed food taste. Without salt, and a sub-set of assorted chemical flavour enhancers, processed foods would be exposed for what they are: products that have lost their natural savour and nutritional integrity. Salt-free cornflakes, for instance, would be well nigh inedible. No one would want to buy them because they would see that they are a heap of nutritional uselessness. But where is the evidence that salt added as normal seasoning to home cooked food constitutes a health risk?

With salt, as with sugar, the public health establishment is too cowardly to take on the powerful processed food companies and their lobbyists by drawing a distinction between home-prepared food cooked from scratch and industrial convenience food.

The crucial phrase "avoid processed food" appears nowhere in government nutritional guidelines, yet this is the most concise way to sum up in practical terms what is wholesome and healthy to eat.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
You appear to me to be not making very much sense, what is it about 'I dont hold that there are any mystical rules', that you dont understand? One can determine through empiricism whether something is natural or unnatural and whether something is a good idea or a bad idea remains a matter of conjecture until establish by empirics. Why this should be ...[text shortened]... to the scientific method whereas you yourself seem to be given to some rather flowery reasoning.

You will like this paragraph from the article mentioned in my other post:

we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farmed, heavily processed equivalent that contains a cocktail of chemical additives, preservatives and so on. Meanwhile, no government authority has bothered to tell us that lamb, beef and game from free-range, grass-fed animals is a top source of conjugated linoleic acid, the micronutrient that reduces our risk of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

My bold.
We must accept the quibbles about calling our preferred foods "natural." Even so, in common, everyday use I consider the term makes complete sense. In exchange, I make no bones about calling all processed food poisonous and the food scientists behind the food industry a lying bunch of crooks. Knowing that Margaret Thatcher was a food scientist confirms my point pretty decisively.

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
I just gave you a coherent and consistent definition that you either failed to comprehend or failed to accept which is none of my affair. I stated natural is that which pertains to nature. If all you have to contribute is what appears to me to be rather irrelevant and foolish questions I think ill pass as I really do have considerably better things ...[text shortened]... th someone who is merely contentious for contentiousness sake. I find quite banal to be honest.

When does something "pertain to nature"?

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
You appear to me to be not making very much sense, what is it about 'I dont hold that there are any mystical rules', that you dont understand? One can determine through empiricism whether something is natural or unnatural and whether something is a good idea or a bad idea remains a matter of conjecture until establish by empirics. Why this should be ...[text shortened]... to the scientific method whereas you yourself seem to be given to some rather flowery reasoning.

'I dont hold that there are any mystical rules',

-and I understood that just fine and responded to that with;
“Good. So what kind of rules are being broken by this “transgression of nature”? Can you give just any one example of such a rule and explain how you know this moral rule exists? “

perhaps you can now state actually trying to answer a simple question? -unless you are now admiring you have no answer?

You have established through empiricism that feeding cows meat is both unnatural and a transgression of nature and a very bad idea.

No, you don't undestand basic logic;

1, I presume it is "unnatural" to feed cows meat by definition of "unnatural" and therefore NO empirical observation required to "establish" that!

2, It is 'bad' because of things like BSE that kills cows.

It obviously doesn't logically follow from 1 and 2 that it is a “transgression of nature” because that would imply some kind of 'moral rule' of nature has been broken. You obviously have no idea of how simple deductive logic works. You cannot go from something being 'bad' (because it kills cows for example ) to there existing some kind of 'moral rule' of nature because one is not logically deducible from the other. There is no logical contradiction in some action being bad and immoral but NOT because it is breaking some 'moral rule' of nature but rather because it is just simply a bad thing to do. Therefore, the hypotheses that there exists a moral rule of nature is an unnecessary hypothesis that doesn't help explain anything and therefore should be shaved off by Occam’s razor.
And, if there is no 'moral rule' of nature, in what sense can you have “transgression of nature” if no such moral rule of nature is being broken? Logically, to have some kind of “transgression” of anything, by the definition of the word “transgression” (and with the meaning you are using the word for here ) , you must break some kind of 'rule'!

Morality is purely a human construct (unless some animals also have the concept ) that we form in our minds and which is essential to guide our behavior to make it socially acceptable. Morality is therefore not something that is 'out there' in nature i.e. existing outside ourselves and independently of our minds and there is no logical reason to believe otherwise.
Very hypothetically, if there was no concept of morally right or wrong in any mind, there would exist no morally right or wrong and therefore no morality even if there still was some very constructive and also very destructive social behavior.

Originally posted by finnegan
You will like this paragraph from the article mentioned in my other post:

[quote] we have also been instructed to restrict our intake of red meat. But crucial facts have been lost in this simplistic red-hazed debate. The weak epidemiological evidence that appears to implicate red meat does not separate well-reared, unprocessed meat from the factory farm ...[text shortened]... crooks. Knowing that Margaret Thatcher was a food scientist confirms my point pretty decisively.

yes this elements have been known for some time and I thank you Finnegan for portraying them so clearly although I must admit I was quite unaware of the political aspect. Only this week the health secretary made the astonishing claim that over the last thirty years the British have become a nation where two thirds are obese, the result as you correctly highlight of substituting naturally occurring elements in food with sugars.

Originally posted by humy

'I dont hold that there are any mystical rules',

-and I understood that just fine and responded to that with;
“Good. So what kind of rules are being broken by this “transgression of nature”? Can you give just any one example of such a rule and explain how you know this moral rule exists? “

perhaps you can now state actually trying to ans ...[text shortened]... of anything, by the definition of the word “transgression”, you must break some kind of 'rule'!

Sir I have a chess rating of 1825, how is that you are now saying that I have no understanding of deductive logic when chess is essentially based upon a cerebral process of logic? The statement itself is therefore hardly logical and all one needs to do is to make an appeal to empirics and its seen to be unfounded, never the less, let us look at what you are saying and try to unravel its mysteries.

I thought I answered or at least alluded to this question in my last text, that being the relationship between morality and a transgression of nature for it appears to me that you are intent on attributing some meaning to it that is not explicitly mentioned in the text. You see a transgression of nature or what is natural may take place and the perpetrator may be ignorant and thus no moral transgression can be attributed to him or her.

For example if you have a large garden centre and you unerringly fertilise your plants with a contaminated batch of chemical fertilisers and they all die then a transgression of what is natural has occurred (its not natural for plants to be treated with hazardous chemical containments, they dont like it, its a bad idea, it does not occur in the natural world) but as you were ignorant there can be no moral transgression attributed to you. If however you experience this trauma and yet continue to use the same chemical batch on other plants and they also die then not only has a transgression of nature occurred but it becomes an issue of morality for you have knowingly and wilfully contaminated those plants. The import of this is that since there is no necessity for any moral rule to exist in nature itself for a transgression of nature to have occurred, nor any logical contradiction implied or imagined, morality only enters it in relation to human action. From this we can readily determine that there may be a transgression of nature but no moral element, there may be both a transgression of nature and a moral element the latter depending upon culpability for there are not a few stupid people who act in ignorance and who refuse to learn from their mistakes or who knowingly transgress what is natural.

This stance is not only logical, consistent, rational and entirely reasonable its empirically established and relies upon the scientific method for its validation. I hope that it answers your question fully, for I have provided both reason and illustration and cannot make my position any clearer than it is at present.

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
When does something "pertain to nature"?

when its natural

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
when its natural

When is something natural?

Originally posted by KazetNagorra
When is something natural?

when it pertains to nature

Originally posted by robbie carrobie
Sir I have a chess rating of 1825, how is that you are now saying that I have no understanding of deductive logic when chess is essentially based upon a cerebral process of logic? The statement itself is therefore hardly logical and all one needs to do is to make an appeal to empirics and its seen to be unfounded, never the less, let us look at what ...[text shortened]... ided both reason and illustration and cannot make my position any clearer than it is at present.

you just repeat the same logical flaws.