Are Organic Foods More Nutritious Than Conventional Foods?
August 22 2009
There is a widespread belief that organic automatically means more healthy or nutritious. So what do you really mean by organic food and is it really nutritious than conventional food?
What are organic foods?
Type of Production: Organic refers to the way of production which avoids or largely excludes the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, hormones, and antibiotics.It relies mainly on crop rotations, natural fertilizers, biological pest control, and better animal husbandry.
USDA Approval: In order to bear an organic label, the USDA (United States Dept. of Agriculture) has set some strict government guidelines based on how foods are grown, handled and processed.
Process Label: Organic is not a “label” of safety or health or being natural It is just a process label.
Are organic foods more nutritious?
Not More Nutritious:A recent (2009) systematic review – the biggest and most complete review even undertaken in this subject- looked over this issue and found no truth to the claim that organic foods are more nutritious than conventional foods.
And concluded that the differences that were detected in crops (nitrate & phosphorus) were biologically plausible and are unlikely to be of public health relevance.
Are organic foods more safer?
Lack of Evidence: The study above looked at only the nutritional side of the issues. But there is a complete lack of evidence to suggest that organic foods are safer because it contains less pesticides and insecticides.
A review which looked at safety aspect of organic foods conclude,” At our present state of knowledge, other factors rather than safety aspects seem to speak in favor of organic food.”
Conclusions
- If you are willing to paying more for organic foods because you think they are more “nutritious” than conventional foods, save the money.
- Contrary to the claims, there is no evidence to suggest that organic foods are safer and more healthier than conventional foods.
- If you are buying organic foods because you think they are kinder to the environment and taste better, you do have a point.
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Anoop | Fri June 17, 2011
You are just comparing apples to oranges. And the whole article is about if it is nutritious or not. The environmental problems are beyond the scope of the article.
The evils of conventional foods as you say” All the sudden I see the effects to people and environment (Obesity, Type II diabetes, toxins in the cord blood of newborns, Colony Collapse Disorder). The list is becoming endless with the more research done.”
If the above is the reason why you changed to organic, you may need better reading resources. It is pretty clear that there is no scientific evidence out there showing organic food is more SAFER than conventional foods. Of course organic foods have lower pesticides, hormones and such, but both these products have levels of these lower than the EPA guidelines. Will there be long term health consequences? Maybe, but that can be said about organic foods too. For example, the recent E coli infections in Germany was from a local organic farm.
Basically, you are just comparing conventional foods to ‘banned substances’ and hence we shouldn’t eat conventional foods.I thin it is one good example of how not to use an analogy.
