Is organic food worth it?

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:18 New research

01:44 What does ‘organic’ actually mean?

03:30 Long-term health effects

05:02 My online PT Certification course

05:57 The environment

06:53 Animal welfare

07:44 Conclusion

Transcript:

Organic food tends to be a lot pricier than conventional food, but it’s also widely believed to be a lot healthier. So is it worth it and should you buy organic? That’s what a new scientific review of 147 studies sought to find out.

They compared the objective nutritional characteristics and the toxic residue content of organic food versus conventional foods. Overall, the researchers found that “Most of the comparative analysis showed no significant difference between organic and conventional foods. Therefore, the results herein show no generalizable superiority of organic over conventional foods.” A pretty damning conclusion. Overall, I would say organic foods tend to be a little bit more nutritious, but if you look at the actual results it is clear that, in some cases, conventional foods actually tend to contain more nutrients and the only substantial consistent difference which favors organic food is for vitamin C.

Now, vitamin C is very important and it receives a lot of attention, but vitamin C really isn’t that big of a deal if your diet is remotely healthy. Any diet that’s pretty good, if you get your fruits, your veggies, or even if you eat carnivore and you eat organ meats, is not that difficult to consume enough vitamin C. Vitamin C is also found in tons of supplements, multivitamins, and other products that make it very easy to consume enough vitamin C without having to buy organic food specifically for that reason. Similarly, when we look at toxic residue content the results vary significantly per type of toxic residue that we’re looking at and per type of food. Overall, there’s no clear trend of superiority for organic foods being safer, leading the researchers to conclude that: “The belief that organic food is a safer alternative is not supported by science.”

At this point it’s probably good to clarify what does “organic” actually mean? There’s actually not a very concrete definition for what “organic” is, but the most universal criterion is that the food is prepared without synthetic or artificial hormones, pesticides, fertilizers, or genetically modified organisms. However, this doesn’t mean that the food is prepared without use of any pesticides. Organic food preparation methods typically still use pesticides, they’re just organic pesticides. “Organic” doesn’t mean much in terms of what the animal ate. It means that the animal ate “organic” food, but if the animal ate a diet that was simply not appropriate for the animal at all then it’s great that it was “organic”, but it was still just crap. It’s like when you eat organic crap it’s still crap.

Moreover, “organic” does not actually always mean 100% organic. So companies have a lot of leeway with what they can call “organic” and the definitions of what “organic” exactly is very across countries and organizations. So when you buy something that is “organic” you can generally rest assured that no synthetic pesticides were used in the process of making it, but it doesn’t mean all that much in terms of the soil quality, what the animal ate or the actual intrinsic attributes of what you’re eating. And importantly, many of these other factors can be a lot more important. Like I said, it’s much more important what the animal ate or what type of soil a plant was grown in than whether it was organically prepared. So overall, the researchers concluded: “Therefore, if a belief in the nutritional superiority of organic foods over conventional foods is established among consumers, such a belief can only be grounded in subjective knowledge.” That’s basically science speak for facts over feelings.

Now, I would say to this conclusion is a little bit premature based specifically on this analysis, because this analysis only looked at the objective attributes of the food. It didn’t look at long term health outcomes. However, if the food is not objectively different in terms of what it has, what it contains, then it’s also hard to mechanistically see why it would be healthier to begin with. And indeed, if we look at the longer term research on the health outcomes for organic versus conventional food we don’t see a very clear superiority of organic food. Most of the longer term studies, although we don’t have that many, they don’t find significant differences that are like – meaningfully different health outcomes. Now, we also wouldn’t really expect that because the studies are relatively short and usually they only incorporate some organic food as part of the diets, not like a complete shift from 0% to 100% organic.

However, the almost complete lack of evidence for the superiority of organic food in the studies that we have does make it difficult to see how there would be some larger positive health effects in longer studies, for example. I would say, though, that if we look at observational research, the benefits of organic food are a lot more clear. So if we look at people that eat organic food versus people that eat conventional food, then people that eat organic food tend to be a lot healthier in multiple ways. However, this research is confounded by numerous factors. People that eat organic foods they are typically wealthier, they care more about their health in general, they have a ton of different attributes and lifestyle differences that make them healthier, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with them eating organic food. So that’s a clear case of a correlation, not necessarily establishing causation.

Health benefits aside, another potential reason to buy organic is that it’s better for the environment. Indeed, most people believe that organic food is a lot better for the environment. And indeed, there are some studies to show that per unit area organic food production methods are better for the environment than conventional ones. However, a recent review concluded that conventional and organic food preparation efforts on average in total have similar environmental impacts because while organic food production methods tend to be a little bit better per area, they are also less productive. That’s also why the food is more expensive. You cannot use the best fertilizers, you cannot use the best pesticides and some of these things, to the extent that they are safe, they just increase crop yield, meaning that you need less land to produce a certain amount of crop or grain or whatever. So the reduced productivity basically completely offsets the positive environmental effects of organic food production and on average, like per unit of what you buy, you’re not actually helping the environment much, if at all, by buying organic food.

Another potential reason to buy organic is animal welfare. Generally speaking, organically prepared animal foods mean that the animals in question had somewhat higher well-being. However, the standards vary a lot per country and most of the criteria to be labeled “organic” aren’t all that impressive. It means that the animal in question might have had access to an outdoor area of sorts, of some size, potentially unbeknownst to the animal in question. So yes, it’s better than the animal being completely caged and just being extremely poorly treated, but it doesn’t mean a whole lot. If you’re buying food specifically with the aim of promoting animal welfare there are a lot of other certifications and standards that are probably a lot better for this. I haven’t thoroughly researched all certifications, but some of the ones that seem a lot more promising are “Animal Welfare Approved” and “Certified Humane”.

In conclusion, it’s objectively hard to justify having to buy organic food for health benefits, the environmental impact, or animal welfare. And none of these benefits are very significant because organic food just means that it’s prepared without synthetic or artificial additives, but it still uses pesticides, it requires more land usage to produce a similar amount of food and the nutritional and toxic residue differences between organic and conventional food are marginal at best and don’t have a clear trend in favor of organic superiority, except for vitamin C. So organic food arguably constitutes a status symbol more than an objectively sound investment. For the budget conscious consumer it’s probably not worth it to fork over a lot of additional money to get similar food. Of course, to each their own. So I hope this video helps you make more informed decisions. If you like this type of Evidence-Based content, I’d be honored if you like and subscribe.