Researchers at Kansas State University released the results of a study this week which found that cattle fed on organic feed don't have significantly lower levels of e coli in their systems than cattle fed on "conventional" diets.
This information seemed to me to be at odds with a fact I'd read years ago in a New York Times editorial by Nina Planck, which stated that if cattle are fed grass--rather than corn--for just the last 5 days of their lives, the incidence of e coli diminishes one thousand fold.
Faced with these 2 conflicting pieces of information, I took a closer look. It seems that the Kansas researchers studied cattle eating organic feed, but the articles I found didn't specify that they were eating grass. If the dangerous, modern e coli bug thrives in the unnaturally acidic environment created in the cow's stomach from eating a diet of grain, rather than grass, it would probably be present whether or not the grain they were fed was organic.
I'm certainly reading between the lines here and making assumptions. It would be easy to conclude that you can't trust anything you read because so many studies are funded by companies with agendas and profit motives. But I think these studies do provide valuable information, you just have to take a closer look and get past the hype.
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