Oh look, lots of people are Wrong On The Internet today 1. This study was observational 2. The absolute risk difference (WHICH THEY REPORT) was tiny 3. The "organic" group were healthier in lots of wayspic.twitter.com/Cz6oq6p6uR
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To their credit, the authors did try to control for this in the analysis, but it's still something that is likely to influence their results
Another big issue is that people who ate more organic food were MUCH healthier on every metric than people who didn't Again, the authors controlled for the factors they know about, but residual confounding is very likely herepic.twitter.com/Ziznlwd8RV
And then we come to the absolute risk difference, which as I mentioned was TINYpic.twitter.com/YHtjtCPwU8
Remember the Daily Mail? Reporting that 86% reduction in "blood cancer risk"? Firstly, they got it wrong. The odds ratio was 0.24, so the reduction was 76% The absolute reduction there was less than 0.1%! (Also for stats-y people, the 95% CI was 0.04-0.66!)pic.twitter.com/ev8zMOYIuH
In fact, if you want to look at individual cancers - rather than the trend for all cancer - organic food was NOT associated with MOST cancers (red = associated, green = not)pic.twitter.com/glVLPbJoIM
We could just as easily write a story about how organic food does nothing for breast, prostate, colorectal, and skin cancers, but that's a much less interesting headline
Firstly, there are actually already bigger, arguable better studies on the topic that have found the opposite result!pic.twitter.com/xve7GKuxSi
Secondly, THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH PESTICIDES This study didn't look at pesticides at all. We have no idea if organic consumption equates to reduced pesticide ingestion - especially considering that there is some evidence to suggest the opposite!
Thirdly, the absolute risk is tiny The "high organic" group ate MORE THAN 20x the organics of the "low organic" group, and they only saw a 0.6% reduction in risk That's a huge expenditure for a minuscule benefit, even if this study is correct
Finally, there's a good chance that these results are meaningless. The more factors the authors controlled for, the smaller the statistical difference There's a good chance that if you could control for everything, the result would disappear entirely
This study probably means very little to your life. Eating organic is ~probably~ better for the environment, but that's about it I've written about this beforehttps://medium.com/@gidmk/organic-food-isnt-better-for-your-health-93a35584639d …
Also, this isn't a criticism of the study, the actual research was pretty cool. I would say that the authors were a bit optimistic in their conclusion, but otherwise it was interesting epidemiological researchpic.twitter.com/LxIlXpe98s
Something I missed earlier - it's also worth noting that in most of the interesting subgroups the association totally disappearedpic.twitter.com/Iv2pvCDg2u
What this means is that organics are likely only useful in reducing the cancer risk of elderly women, which to me points to the results being likely down to statistical noise
If the effect disappears when you don't look at a single group of cancers - postmenopausal breast cancer - then it's more than likely it's not there at all
Also worth noting that the results are probably not generalizable, considering that this sample was heavily weighted towards highly-educated French women
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