Are Organic Foods Really Healthier?

2024 Author: Jasmine Walkman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 08:29

As a large number of Canadians, Jennifer Cavour regularly buys organic food. She buys organic tomatoes, lettuce, apples and many other things. And the 31-year-old Toronto editor pays dearly for them: $ 2.99 for organic cauliflower compared to the traditionally grown version, which costs just 99 cents. The motive for more costs for organic products? It is better for you, it is healthier and you will not get all these pesticides that are found in other fruits and vegetables.

Organic food is still a niche market, accounting for just over two percent of food sold. According to Consumer Reports, consumers buy on average about 50% more than conventionally grown foods. But organic food is more visible today than ever, with Canada's largest supermarket chains already offering specialized organic sectors.

The reason for the growing popularity of organic foods?

Like Cavour, most Canadians say they buy organic products because they are healthier, according to a study by ACNielsen. But are they right?

Eighty-five percent of organic food sold in Canada is grown in the United States. Wherever it is grown, no food, whether organic or conventional, can be sold in Canada unless it meets Canadian standards for legal pesticides and residue limits. As Paul Duchesne of Health Canada says, our main interest is to ensure that both foods are safe to eat.

Organic foods are marketed in accordance with Canada's National Standard for Organic Farming, principles that support production and management practices that contribute to the quality and sustainability of the environment and ensure the ethical treatment of livestock. One of the main differences is that organic products are not sprayed with synthetic pesticides.

Yet the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) says the term organic is not synonymous with pesticide-free. Several large studies in the United States have found traces of synthetic pesticides in 25% of organic foods (no such large studies have been done on organic food in Canada, but the CFIA found that ten percent of all Canadian crops - conventional and organic - have pesticide residues).

Some of these residues found in organic food may be due to uncontrolled contamination, said Andy Hammermeister of the Center for Organic Farming in Canada at the College of Agriculture in Nova Scotia in Truro. This could be the result of wind spraying synthetic pesticides on crops before the use of synthetic pesticides on the ground, old or used sprayers, etc. But it is not always by chance that pesticides get into organic foods.

Most people do not realize that organic farmers have the right to use a wide range of natural non-synthetic chemicals, says Alex Avery, director of research and education at the Center for Global Nutrition. Many conventional farmers, meanwhile, actually use fewer pesticides. In Ontario, for example, pesticide use has dropped by a total of 50 to 60 percent since 1983, according to the Ontario Department of Agriculture.

And just because pesticides are natural doesn't mean they aren't toxic. Natural rotenone, found in a number of plants, causes Parkinson's symptoms when injected into rats. Pyrethrum derived from dried chrysanthemums has been classified by the US Environmental Protection Agency as having suspected evidence of carcinogenicity. About humans, Avery says: natural poisons pose the same theoretical but distant dangers as synthetic ones.

But consumers should not be alarmed by pesticide residues, natural or synthetic, abandoned by both organic and traditionally grown produce. Most importantly, most of them are destroyed from the farm to your basket - in the process of pruning, delivery and washing. According to Christine Byrne, director of the Center for Consumer Research at the University of California, Davis, washing itself removes 70 to 99 percent of pesticide residues. In fact, we are exposed to an average of only about 0.9 milligrams of synthetic pesticides per day.

Compare this to our daily consumption of built-in pesticides, which all plants produce naturally: about 1,500 milligrams a day. And the proportion of pesticides in nature that cause cancer in rodents is the same as in synthetic pesticides, says Bruce Ames, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley.

And what is left after processing and washing?

According to Peter McLeod, executive director of plant protection chemistry at CropLife Canada, the safety margins of pesticide testing are huge. First harmless dose - the largest amount that can be taken without side effects. Pesticides are then approved in amounts that ensure that no one receives more than one hundredth to one thousandth of that harmless dose, based on the worst case scenario of maximum exposure from all possible sources, McLeod explains.

Such rigorous testing means that very few pesticides have ever reached approval: after an average of nine years of testing, only one active ingredient of a pesticide is finally approved by every 140,000.

Much more dangerous than pesticides is E. coli, which according to a study by the University of Minnesota, published in the Journal of Food Safety in 2004, is more common in organic products than in conventional ones. The study looked at 32 organic and eight conventional farms. The total presence of E. coli in the tested organic products was found to be approximately six times higher than in traditional fruits and vegetables. And unlike pesticides, washing does not eliminate the threat of E. coli.

So when calculating your grocery budget and trying to decide whether to spend more on organic products, think about it. Both the UK Food Standards Agency and its counterpart in France have found no evidence of greater safety or nutrients in organic food.

In fact, the UK advertising industry gives these guidelines to organic food sellers. If they cannot show convincing evidence that organic food is healthier, safer or tastes better than traditionally produced food, they should not make these claims. If you buy organic because you think it's better for you, you may be losing money.