Study finds organic food no more nutritive than non-organic

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/09/03/us-organic-food-idUSBRE8820M920120903

by carbocation • 14 years ago

25 68 14 years ago

arn• 14 years ago

Bad title. Misleading.

I can't say I ever thought that organic food would have higher levels of vitamins than their non organic counterpart. And, of course, article says they have similar levels of specific vitamins.

Organic does apparently have less pesticides (also per article) -- which is what I thought was one of the major motivations to go organic, not "more vitamins"

Variance6• 14 years ago

Perhaps for you, but I anecdotally find that many people who buy organic tend to think that it's also more healthy in terms of vitamins. There's a tendency to think that organic has a "higher nutrition density" because of the naturalistic fallacy, in that natural == better; people think that any modification to plant products only spreads out or even decreases that nutrition.

In terms of pesticides, though, years of scientific study have been used to clear the pesticides used on our foods. People who think that pesticides are somehow unhealthy are also not scientifically justified. Organics are also "no healthier" than non-organics in terms of pesticides as well, since pesticides are found to have no health impact.

jackfoxy• 14 years ago

>...pesticides are found to have no health impact

I assume you meant something more like ...the level of pesticide residue found on foodstuffs at the retail level in the United States (assuming no accidents, negligence, or sabotage) are found to have no health impact. Basically I agree with what you are saying.

smokeyj• 14 years ago

Organic foods for increased vitamins seems like an expensive alternative to vitamin supplements. But I feel like people who eat organic foods would rather not eat manufactured vitamin supplements, leaving the main benefit of organic food to be the fact that it's less processed and more "natural". I prefer to eat cows that don't eat cows, and chickens that don't eat chickens.

ericb3• 14 years ago

I would love to see links to human studies that prove pesticides have no effects on the human reproductive system. I assume, from your claims, you have some great controlled double blind studies to point me to?

encoderer5• 14 years ago

> pesticides are found to have no health impact

There was a time not too long ago when cigarettes were found to have no health impact.

We have only just begun to understand how to treat cancer with gene therapy.

It's paranoid to say that pesticides cause cancer. It's arrogant to say they absolutely don't. And I think it's reasonable to say that farming as close to the naturally evolved food chain as possible is a good thing.

I recognize that without today's increased yields we'd have a lot more starvation and hunger in this world. But it's not a binary choice. It's not hippy pastoral-era farming vs post-modern industrial farm. We can find a balance.

msutherl2• 14 years ago

People do it organic and especially local vegetables because they are more nutritious. But "more nutritious" doesn't mean "more vitamins". First of all, which vitamins? Surely they didn't test for every single vitamin found in all vegetables, not to mention other nutrients.

Second, it's dubious whether the nutrient theory of nutrition completely describes our body's relationship with food. Many people eat organic food because it eliminates the unknowns. We know that industrial farming has a negative effect on food quality, but the negative effect could be even larger than we are capable of measuring, so better to play it safe.

This echoes Europe's policy on GMOs, which is that if there is any risk of catastrophe, that risk is not worth taking. There is a name for this sort of policy, but I've forgotten the term and can't seem to find it.

Another reason that I personally avoid industrial agriculture is because it is fundamentally unsustainable: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/28/a-banker-bet.... I get all of my vegetables from a local farm mainly for this reason and another that comes from taking a sort of Marxist perspective on the issue. Industrial farming creates a lot of repetitive, unfulfilling jobs. I'd rather support people that live with and love their land, who get to engage with the challenge of optimizing all of the energy and nutrient flows in their farm. Running a farm can actually be a very interesting design/engineering problem.

ryandvm• 14 years ago

Actually, it's pretty well established that it's going to take industrial agriculture to feed the world's population in the coming years. Unfortunately it is organic farming that will ultimately turn out to be unsustainable.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=organic-far...

droithomme• 14 years ago

Title is not supported by facts discussed in article.

AndrewKemendo• 14 years ago

> But organic options may live up to their billing of lowering exposure to pesticide residue and antibiotic-resistant bacteria

That is the entire point of buying organic. I dont know anyone (sampling bias) that thinks organic has anything to do with nutrient content. That's what non-gmo is for*

* in some cases

Aloisius• 14 years ago

Who cares about healthier? Organic food, especially local organic food, simply tastes better. Probably not because it is grown without pesticides but rather because the farmer gives a damn.

jordanthoms2• 14 years ago

And yet, when double-blind tests are done the non-organic food usually does better.

ars6• 14 years ago

Link?

leoh• 14 years ago

This is total bullshit.

sitkack3• 14 years ago

Compare organic to non-organic carrots. Double blind yourself all you want, hands down organic carrots (things labeled as) are x10 better than the woody sticks they are compared to.

eskilianno• 14 years ago

By not using poisonous pesticides, organic farms are healthier for farm workers, for people drinking water near the farm, and for wild animals.

toomuchcoffee• 14 years ago

The title of the Reuters article is of course utterly misleading, in that it simple-mindedly equates "no difference in vitamin content" with "no healthier than." The key disambiguating sentence appears on the second paragraph of the article:

"Organic produce and meat typically isn't any better for you than conventional varieties when it comes to vitamin and nutrient content, according to a new review of the evidence.

"But organic options may live up to their billing of lowering exposure to pesticide residue and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, researchers from Stanford University and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System found."

Unfortunately they didn't bother to get the short URL to the original article right, so we can't go and find out what the authors of the original article were actually saying about the matter.

davidedicillo• 14 years ago

I think the point of organic food it isn't to get more (good) stuff, it's to get less (bad) stuff.

The fact that they have lower amounts of pesticides, chemicals and antibiotic-resistant bacteria makes organic food healthier (as in doesn't make your health worst).

VMG• 14 years ago

I'd estimate that the amount of bacteria on organic food is higher, not lower due to the lack of said pesticides and using dung as fertilizer.

See the 2011 E. Coli outbreak in Germany that killed 50 people, caused by organic sprout: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Germany_E._coli_O104:H4_ou...

sprocket3• 14 years ago

Just because food is grown in a non-organic/commercial system, doesn't necessarily mean it's grown without using manure as a fertilizer. There have been many cases of non-organic products being contaminated with E.Coli as well:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_North_American_E._coli_O157:H7_outbreaks

Pesticides also don't necessarily inhibit bacterial growth (though granted, they probably don't help it), so I don't buy into the assertion that their application is somehow sanitizing your food.

ars6• 14 years ago

Pesticides have no effect whatsoever on bacteria. And dung from plant fed animals is harmless.

And all bacteria is not equal, so it's doesn't matter how much there is - it matters what kind. Cheese is just full of bacteria, so are pickles, and yogurt. Food grown using antibiotics will have more of the dangerous resistant kind, rather than the beneficial kind.

With the sprouts it was not the organic that was the issue - it's simply that it's sprouts. Sprouts are wet, not cooked, and not washed. It's a perfect environment for bacteria if you are not careful.

I don't think non-organic sprouts even exists - they grow in less than a week, why would you put pesticides on it?

sitkack3• 14 years ago

The operative phrase is "antibiotic-resistant bacteria", bacteria is around us all the time, this is in-escapable, the antibiotic-resistant variety is what is bad.

hadron• 14 years ago

And I always thought the motivation behind eating organic food was it's less of a burden on nature. Is personal health really the only thing people are concerned about?

bryanlarsen• 14 years ago

Organic cereal crops generally yield at about 0-50% of the rate of conventional cereal crops. This means they need twice as many acres of land per bushel, twice as much fuel per acre, et cetera. In other words, it's much more of a burden on nature than conventional cereal crops.

And I really did mean to say 0 above -- organic cereal crops fail at a much higher rate than conventional crops. That's a lot of diesel fuel burned for no return.

ars6• 14 years ago

True, it's not an "all win for organic", but nature is more than just land. It's also soil, and animal life.

encoderer5• 14 years ago

Woah waoh, high yields aren't free. Fortifying that soil to produce those yields has a cost -- both economic and ecological. Synthetic-N is just the beginning.

And the "0-50%" sounds ballparkish to me. If you have any cites I'd love to take a look.

donaldc• 14 years ago

This is a meta-study, which looks at a couple hundred studies done on this. From the article:

Many of the studies didn't specify their standards for what constituted "organic" food..

I'd say this is a pretty serious limitation to both the studies in question, and, as a result, to this meta-study.

erikpukinskis• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, the "organic" label means less and less.

What I think is still true (although I have no data to back it up) is that farmers who actually conscientiously maintain their soil, in a way that maintains both the fungal colonies and the nutrient density, through natural means... that is, using proper crop rotation, nitrogen fixing cover crops, and manure addatives, but no chemical additives (which are allowed under organic farming, so long as they are "organic" chemicals).... those foods are more nutritive.

Organic/non-organic, like all certifications, doesn't measure exactly what you'd like it to. In the end, sustainable, healthy farming is a very complex thing, and the details matter. If you want to get really high quality produce, you really do have to educate yourself and talk to the people producing your food. There's no silver bullet.

forgottenpaswrd• 14 years ago

What I call organic is way more healthy and nutritive:

I call organic not only to those that are natural but also to food that I could trace, e.g eggs that start with 0 or 1 in Europe had expiration rate witch is a fixed date from the egg laying. The fruit from my friends house is picked the same day I visit them.

As a general rule the levels of antioxidants and vitamins in food decay exponentially with time and temperature. Some fruit is stored in cold and anaerobic rooms for months. It looks like fruit but had degraded. Fortunately it is easy to taste the difference(It taste like nothing).

Antibiotics and hormones in meat certainly affect humans for the bad. In USA(money is everything there) and some parts of Europe is totally out of control. I have friends that are doctors and had problems as microbes develop resistance to antibiotics, and they have to use much more aggressive ways to fight them. People die because the treatment is not as effective as it was in the past.

"Organic milk and chicken may also contain more omega-3 fatty acids" That is exactly what we want. Food has a tremendous unbalance between omega3 and omega6 because omega6 is so cheap to industrial manufacture so we have to consume natural fish(not farmed) or wild animals(like wild boar, deer or grass eating cow) to compensate.

I had seem tremendous abuses of synthetic pesticides in Spain, where I worked installing greenhouses. It too easy for some people to add too much to be sure they don't lose money. Some people continue using DDTs and other forbidden chemicals because it is effective.

Nothing to see here, just another PR article from the food industry to fool consumers.

anuraj• 14 years ago

Who claimed organic food has more nutrients. It has to be free of pesticides, hormones and other harmful chemicals and must taste natural.

eyko• 14 years ago

It doesn't even mention taste… give me free range ibérico ham over its caged cousins anyday.

pella• 14 years ago

Organic and conventionally grown broccoli ( 2012 Aug 30 )

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22936597

"... In addition, organic broccoli maintained higher concentrations of bioactive compounds (ascorbic acid and phenolics) and antioxidant potential during storage than conventional broccoli, with higher potential health beneficial effects."

mast• 14 years ago

It all comes down to people's perceptions. When they hear that something is organic or natural, many people assume it must be better for us, and if it is better, it must contain more nutrients.

Food company's like to use this to their advantage, and the terms have lost a lot of their meaning unless you know how the food is produced. I think this is a key point. An organic farm using improperly composted manure for fertilizer or contaminated water for irrigation may end up poisoning people with e-coli. On the other hand, grass fed, free range chickens produce the best eggs I've ever tasted. If the farmer happened to also give the chickens antibiotics, I don't know if that's really a bad thing.

The other big issue of course is cost. Food labeled organic is much more expensive. Many people just cannot justify the extra cost. When our son was small, we looked at giving him organic milk versus regular milk (http://foodconstrued.com/2010/09/got-milk/). We started with organic but eventually switched to regular.

Study finds organic food no more nutritive than non-organic

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