The MAHA Report’s Stance on Carbs: Sound Science or Food Fearmongering?
Plus, more on organic food, and the links: Tylenol and autism, Covid vaccine changes, and more.
Welcome to another installment of the Rethinking Wellness link roundup! Twice a month I share a small selection of links from around the internet that are relevant to the conversations we have here, along with some quick takes and occasional deeper dives for paid subscribers.
This week’s first quick take is a follow-up on my recent organic-food piece, and it’s free for all subscribers. The second take/dive is about the portions of the MAHA Report that recommend low-carb dieting.
Links
Here are some pieces that got me thinking in the past few weeks. I found value in all of these, but links are not endorsements of every single detail in the piece or everything the writer ever wrote.
The Day Our Government Told Mothers They Caused Their Children’s Autism (Unbiased Science)
Covid-19 vaccine changes: What it means for you (Katelyn Jetelina)
Cinnamon For Diabetes And Vitamin D For COVID-19: The painfully slow process of scientific correction (Health Nerd)
Can researchers stop AI making up citations? (Nature)
Wellness influencers never let a tragedy go unmonetized (Derek Beres)
In Case You Missed It
Takes/Dives: More on Organics, and Unpacking the MAHA Report’s Stance on Carbs
Organic Farming’s Effects on Workers and Neighbors
In response to this week’s piece on organic food, a subscriber wrote:
Environmental anxiety was definitely deeply entwined in my orthorexia. Thank you for this! One more facet that didn’t get explored: is conventional safe for agricultural workers or communities near farming?
Thank you for this question! I meant to add something about these impacts, but my brain isn’t firing on all cylinders right now, for reasons I’ll discuss in my next solo episode.
It’s true that organic farms are less likely to spray pesticides than their conventional counterparts, and pesticide exposure has been linked to some detrimental outcomes in farmworkers and agricultural communities (though the correlations aren’t as clear-cut as many organic-agriculture advocates claim). As I wrote in an earlier piece about the pesticide glyphosate (which is widely used in conventional agriculture), a 2018 study of more than 54,000 pesticide applicators found that although glyphosate use wasn’t associated with cancer overall, participants in the highest quartile of exposure did have an increased risk of one type of cancer (acute myeloid leukemia) compared with those who’d never used glyphosate. A 2017 study in a major farming area found that agricultural pesticide exposure in pregnant women was linked to a significant increase in adverse birth outcomes, but only among women with the very highest levels of exposure (the top 5th percentile and above). The increased risk was about on par with what we see at lower levels of exposure to air pollution and extreme heat.
These findings are concerning and definitely warrant further investigation.
But organic agriculture may not necessarily reduce pesticide exposure for workers or neighboring communities as much as you’d expect. For example, a 2024 study of about 14,000 farm fields in a major food-producing area of California found that organic farming actually leads to higher pesticide use in neighboring conventional fields—likely because organic fields harbor more pests that inevitably spread to the surrounding areas. This slight but significant increased pesticide use could potentially affect both the conventional farmworkers who are directly applying the chemicals and the neighboring organic farmers and communities, thanks to pesticide drift. The 2024 study found that these “spillover” effects could be mitigated by clustering organic farms together, but it’s unclear how widespread that practice is—let alone how the average consumer of organic foods could easily identify which brands use clustered fields.
What’s more, a 2021 study by some of the same authors found that organic farms that did employ (organic-approved) pesticides used an average of 27 percent fewer “high acute human toxicity” products than conventional farms. That reduction is significant, but obviously many organic farms still use pesticides that are considered potentially toxic to humans (such as workers) at high levels of exposure—it’s not as if their use is zero, the way some organic advocates imply.
So at this point, it’s not clear to me that buying organic will necessarily prevent farmworker or community exposure to potentially harmful pesticides in a straightforward way. Like many things in the organic-vs.-conventional debate, it’s more complicated and involves more tradeoffs than you might imagine.
The MAHA Report’s Stance on Carbs: Sound Science or Food Fearmongering?
Christy, will you please discuss RFK Jr.’s MAHA report(s), specifically the portions that recommend ketogenic dieting and carbohydrate restriction? As someone in eating disorder recovery, seeing our nation’s top health agencies embrace blatant restriction and (in my opinion) disordered eating behaviors and recommend them as a panacea was troubling, to say the least. Thank you.