Is organic food healthier than conventional?

The recent Stanford study has been duly making the rounds in the press. Despite the author's best intentions, there are now probably loads of folks running around telling each other that "organic isn't really healthier". Or wondering if it is worth the extra premium to buy organic. And to some degree, they are right!

http://med.stanford.edu/ism/2012/september/organic.html

Before we get all carried away, let's break this study down.

1) It is a meta-analysis review article, not a study with new findings. What they did was pull together about 237 previous studies, and attempt to synthesize findings. Of those, 17 involved actual human subjects being measured (for instance, for pesticide reside in urine). The other 220 studies were measuring various attributes of food, not its effects in humans. For instance, some of the studies looked at "bacterial contamination" whilst others assessed contents of vitamins and minerals.

2) The specific findings that stand out are these: a) "organic" food is not on average richer in vitamins and minerals than conventional counterparts, b) levels of microbial contamination are not necessarily lower in organic, c) organic foods lead to reduced pesticide exposure (which may even be under-estimated due to sampling methods).

What this just goes to show is that variation in farm management, and other on-farm and off-farm factors, override the significance of the "organic" label in determining the nutritional content of foods. I fully believe this to be true- and I thought so long before this particular headline. I've done Brix readings (a measure of sugars, amino acids, and other solutes in plant tissue-- thought to be a correlate of overall nutrient density, although this is a subject for a blog post in itself) on Cal-Organics salad mixes which scored so poorly as to be barely detectable. My refractometer was confirming my taste buds, that much of what is certified organic salad is really little better than water and cellulose nutritionally.

But here's the rub: reduced exposure to pesticides is still a great thing! We still know extremely little about how the long-term cumulative exposure to numerous different synthetic toxins affects vertebrates, particularly not for a human lifespan. The precautionary principle, and past track record of chemicals getting pulled from the market, suggests that we not risk it any more than is necessary.

Now, I don't have time to get into all the issues surrounding organic labeling. Let's just say it has pro's and con's. It is a provisionally useful label. Ideally, we'd like to know more about how a farm is run than whether it is certified organic-- other factors certainly are more important in predicting the healthfulness of the food that is produced. In fact, I personally take a nuanced approach to chemical fertilizers- I think they are sometimes useful, and not necessarily incompatible with sustainable soil management. The goal is a non-addictive use of fertilizing materials-- use them to secure abundant, healthy harvests, while still building organic matter long-term. Again, a future blog post in the works about practical soil fertility management and crop health and quality.

For now, don't buy into the headlines uncritically! This study is no justification for claiming that organic doesn't mean anything, and therefore isn't worth buying.