As long as it receives enough media coverage, any publication highlighting the health benefits of organic foods faces a barrage of denigration and falsehoods. With the particularity that this false information does not only circulate on social networks or in the press: sometimes it is scientific societies or scientific institutions that produce or transmit 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 contributed, each in their own way, to fueling confusion on the subject.
In question, a French epidemiological study published in 2018 in JAMA Internal Medicineafter having followed 70,000 people for four and a half years, and highlighting a significant decrease in lymphomas (- 75%) and postmenopausal breast cancer (- 34%) among the largest consumers of organic products, compared to those who They don’t consume them. Just three days after the publication, the AAF posted on its website a “point of view” from two of its members, which criticized it.
“This text was a model of the techniques used by manufacturers to create doubts, with a lot of methodological criticism that borders on bad faith, but manages to give the illusion of a legitimate scientific discussion.says Serge Hercberg, one of the figures of 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 academics, although disseminated by the scientific society, are not formally supported by it.
In April 2019, several months after the famous study was published, the National Academy of Medicine issued a brief press release in which “warning about too rapid interpretation of epidemiological results”. The text maintains that the compared groups (organic consumers and non-consumers) differ in other factors: “Consumption of fruits and vegetables, socioeconomic level, physical activity… all [sont] capable of explaining a difference on their own. »
A criticism that suggests that the authors were negligent in not taking these confounding factors into account in their analysis. “It’s completely ridiculous.responds biochemist and nutritionist Denis Lairon, co-author of the attacked study. It is unthinkable that a magazine like JAMA Internal Medicineone of the most famous and demanding, agrees to publish an epidemiological study that does not take these confounding factors into account. »
You have 54.43% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
