Is certified food better for you

CLIMATE change, air and groundwater pollution, dwindling potable water supplies, forest degradation and loss of biodiversity are the challenges of our generation.

Alongside a burgeoning world population, this seems to compel industrial agriculture to persist along the path of monoculture production, artificially supported by chemical and genetic engineering.

Yet increasingly, consumers express a growing distrust in the food produced by these systems, with land dedicated to organic food growing to 69.8 million hectares globally at the end of 2017[ 1] in response to growing demand.

Quality assurance

Irrespective of the certifier or organic label involved, people all over the world buy certified organic produce because it says ‘Certified Organic’ and represents a credible internationally recognised quality assurance program (Kiss M, Kun A 2015[ 2]). Growth in consumption is driven by consumers who are motivated to buy organic because they believe in the health and environmental benefits, which is supported by access, price, control over food choice, safety and status (Nandi et al 2016[ 3], Anisimov T 2016[ 4]).

Each purchase is a leap of faith that a certified organic label represents cleaner safer food that is better for you and produced in an environmentally sustainable and socially responsible manner.

But is organic food better for you?

Does producing food using production systems designed to imitate ecological processes and avoid synthetic pesticides, fertilisers, antibiotics or growth hormones, irradiation and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have real health benefits?

A growing body of evidence is leading many researchers to conclude that foods produced organically have benefits

for human health. Whilst further research is required to determine the underlying factors such as lifestyle a 2018 French study[ 5] involving nearly 69,000 participants who reported on their dietary intake, concluded that a higher intake of organic food was associated with a reduced risk of cancer of the breast, skin, prostate, lymph and colon.

The authors of a 2016 study[ 6] concluded that organic farming delivers equally or more nutritious foods that contain less or no pesticide residues and provide greater social benefits than their conventional counterparts.

Significant differences

Results of meta-analyses[ 7] during 2014, that looked at the composition of organic and conventional meat reported for the first time that there are significant and nutritionally meaningful composition differences between organic and non-organic meat.

A 2014 meta-analyses[ 8] of 343 peer-reviewed publications found that concentrations of a range of antioxidants such as polyphenolics[ 9] were between 28 per cent and 85 per cent higher in organic crops and organic crop-based foods.

The study also found that the frequency of pesticide residues was four- times-higher in conventional crops and contained significantly higher concentrations of the toxic metal cadmium, than organic foods.

Back in 2012, researchers at Stanford University[ 10] found a lack of strong evidence that organic food was better for human health, but they also found that the risk of antibiotics resistance in three or more bacteria was 33 per cent higher in conventional than in organic chicken and pork; and the consumption of organic foods can reduce the risk of pesticide exposure.

There is still much work to be done to quantify the extent to which organic food production and consumption may affect human health; however, the growing body of research points to a positive future for organic agriculture.