Organic Food No Healthier?
Friday, July 31, 2009
Tara Gidus, MS, RD, CSSD, LD/N
I have been bombarded with questions about this new study released yesterday about organic food being no healthier than conventionally grown produce. The study is in the September issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Organics have been growing in the marketplace at a very steady rate of about 20% for years. Are they worth the higher price tag?
This particular study was a review of scientific papers published in the past 50 years on nutritional quality of organic foods. They found that there was no statistically significant difference between organic and conventional produced foods in terms of nutritional value.
Many people were disappointed in this news, but remember that they just studied nutritional value. They did not address in this study the difference between pesticide and fertilizer residue, environmental impact, hormone levels, etc. When you make the decision of organic vs. conventional, there are many issues to consider.
If you want help making this decision, check out this link to the 12 "dirtiest" foods that tend to have the most pesticide residue and the 12 "cleanest" foods that have very little. Spend your organic dollars on the dirtiest and save your money on the cleanest.
The Organic Center has a different take on the study recently released and believes organic food does have higher nutritional quality, especially when talking about antioxidants. Read their response here. You can also link to their study from 2008 that found organic food with higher nutritional quality.
2 Comments:
At Sat Aug 01, 04:27:00 AM 2009,
Anonymous said…
This finding is something that I suspected all along, but did not have the wherewithal to go about to prove it.
At Wed Aug 05, 06:03:00 PM 2009,
Anonymous said…
I believe this study has some validity; however, I believe that some produce cannot and will not be grown on a mass produced market. Take purple haze carrots for instance. I have not, nor probably will not see a purple haze carrot sold at a local grocery store in my area. Therefore, I had the tenacidity to grow my own. It does taste the same as a normal carrot, but for this particular instance it is much more beneficial to grow my own as the mass market does not provide these. Not sure if the anthrocyanin produces that much more benefit then the normal beta-carotene found in this veggie, but it looks interesting on my salad. Anyway, cheers for this finding.
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