Study questions the benefit of organic foods

Sometimes studies just miss the point.

Look no further than this recent report out of the UK, which proclaims that organically grown produce is nutritionally identical to produce grown by commercial farming methods.

The researchers reached this conclusion by reviewing the last 50 years of British studies on the topic of organic foods.

It's particularly galling to me that a past president of the American Dietetic Association and director of nutrition at a major university – someone who should know better – said that the report was "confirmation for consumers that if they choose conventionally grown foods or organic foods they will be meeting their traditional needs."

Talk about missing the point.

The crux of the organic movement is not that foods grown organically have more… it's that they have less – fewer chemicals such as pesticides and herbicides.

There are laws that govern what can and can't happen to organic foods. And many of the health benefits of organic foods come from the fact that they're untouched by the nasty man-made things that are used in commercial farming operations.

A recent study published in Environmental Perspectives found that kids who ate fruit grown conventionally actually had traces of pesticides in their urine – a frightening hint at just how many poisons are being spread all over the food we eat. When these same kids switched to organic fruits, the level of pesticides plummeted after just five days.

So is it any wonder that in the U.S. the organic foods business has grown by 20 percent every year since 1990? People are fed up with all the extra, unhealthy junk that comes with standard produce.

And you can't overlook the fact that this review focused on studies over a 50-year period. A lot has changed in the last half-century. There have been major changes in produce processing methods here in the states that make organic foods the hands-down nutritional winner.

The most notable of these is the FDA's expansion of the use of radiation for the treatment of produce. While this method helps to kill the bacteria associated with salmonella and E. coli, it also nukes the nutrition out of the food.

The last bastion against irradiation is organic foods, which by law cannot be subjected to any form of irradiation if they want to retain their organic status.

The fact that organic farms still function and have yet to be tied to the same kinds of mass food catastrophes shows that food doesn't have to be nuked to be safe.

Imagine that.

By Doctor William Campbell Douglas

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