Personal Project: How Healthy is Organic Food?

As I've been going through this project, I have to ask myself whether eating more organic food has made me any healthier. Realistically, given that this has only been going on since the beginning of the semester, I've probably not improved my health a substantial amount. I'm guessing it takes a lot longer than a few months to make a lasting impact. Nevertheless, let's pretend it's five years in the future and I've been eating all organic food for the whole time. Is this fictional, futuristic me any more healthy than the old me?

Then answer, it seems, is maybe, maybe not. There's a lot of conflicting evidence out there on the health benefits of organic food. It seems pretty clear that organic food is better for the environment, but whether it is better for an actual person's health is open to debate. This fact sheet put together in 2004 by the British government, for instance, notes that organic produce may actually have more of certain micronutrients (such as calcium, iron, and vitamin C). The question is, however, are the differences really that dramatic? WebMD says no. It says that the differences are negligible, and research is still ongoing. This is largely what I found in some literature reviews that specifically looked at the issue of the health benefits of eating organic food.

Okay, so what about pesticides and other bad stuff that is sprayed on our food? We've known at least since Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring that such substances are bad news. The problem is, we don't know for sure how much harm is caused people if they spend a lifetime consuming very small amounts of pesticides and other chemicals. One study I read concluded that, by and large, our produce contains levels of pesticides well below what the government deems is safe. Presumably, this means that eating conventional food would not result in a significantly higher risk of getting cancer, for instance, than one would have from eating organic food. There are some foods that take up pesticides at a higher rate than others. Apples are one of them, which makes me happy I've been buying all organic apples lately (because I eat a lot of them).

Meat may be a bit of a different story. Here the issue is antibiotics and hormones. Meat produced conventionally is filled with hormones and antibiotics. Our use of hormones in meat, however, is beginning to be connected to antibiotic resistance, which is when strains of bacteria that are not affected by antibiotics start crowding out the strains that are affected. The more we feed antibiotics to the animals we eat, the more we risk the bacteria we're trying to kill becoming resistant to our antibiotics. We're seeing more and more outbreaks of things like E. coli lately, and it seems that they can usually be traced back to meat. If you extend this idea out in the long term, conventional meat is definitely less healthy than organic meat that is not given hormones or antibiotics.

As the evidence I've seen shows, the issue is pretty complicated. To some extent, it seems that the choice to eat organic as opposed to conventional food is as much a lifestyle choice of what's considered acceptable risks than anything. So far, there doesn't seem to be a consensus that significant evidence exists in favor of organics on this issue, but there is some evidence that organic food is marginally better for you then conventional. Whether it's worth the additional money to you to buy it...well, that's up to you, I guess.