Organic Foods - Real Health Benefits Or Premium Pricing Tool?
You’ll have had difficulty avoiding the headlines in recent weeks: the Food Standards Agency published a report claiming that there is no nutritional benefit to be gained from eating organic produce and the media picked up the story and ran with it. But should you take this news at face value? Is FSA’s official stance wrong or have you been paying over the odds for a fancy label on the packaging of your food? Or perhaps their information is simply being misreported? Discover the facts and clear up the confusion – read The Centre For Integrated Health’s Guide to Organic.
What counts as organic?
To qualify for organic status, farmers must adhere to strict limits on artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Instead of using these, pests and diseases are controlled using wildlife. For example, clover is grown to boost nitrogen in the soil in place of fertilisers. In the case of livestock, high standards of animal husbandry must be adhered to and all poultry must be free-range. Drugs, antibiotics and wormers are allowed only in emergencies and genetically modified animal feed is banned. This is all monitored by – and producers are licensed by – The Soil Association.
Historically, this is how food has been produced – there was no need for the differentiation indicated by the Organic label because largely without intensive industrial methods and artificial chemicals. Only in the later part of the 20th century did farmers start regularly using new, and often untested, synthetic chemicals to increase crop yields. In the 1980s, as public interest grew over animal welfare and the use of chemicals, demand grew for a return to a more ecological style of farming. Since then, “organic food” production has increased by about 20% a year – a rate of growth way ahead of the rest of the food industry. In the past five years sales of organic food in Britain almost doubled, from less than £900m in 2003 to about £2 billion last year (although they are believed to have dipped in the recession).
The FSA
The Food Standards Agency was set up by the Government in the year 2000 as an independent department with the objective of protecting public health and the consumer’s interests in food. The first chairman, Sir John Krebs, was supportive of the biotechnology lobby and clearly keen to promote GM as the future of farming. On the day that it was announced that he would become the first head of the FSA, Krebs endorsed GM food in a radio interview, saying all GM products approved for sale in the UK ‘were as safe as their non-GM counterparts’. He then appeared on BBC TV in August 2000, stating that consumers who were buying organic food were “not getting value for money, in my opinion and in the opinion of the FSA, if they think they are buying extra nutritional quality or extra nutritional safety, because we don’t have the evidence.” A month later, the chief executive of the Irish counterpart agency, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (Dr Patrick Wall), dismissed Kreb’s views as extreme and reminded people to buy organic food because it was more ‘environmentally friendly, more wholesome, and better produced’.
In March 2002, Krebs was again criticized over the organic food issue, this time by John Paterson (a biochemist at Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary), for having attacked organic agriculture “on the basis of very little information”.
Krebs also aligned himself with the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), which gets part of its funding from large food companies as well as front organisations for the drinks and pharmaceutical industries. When the science correspondent for Channel 4 News contacted Sir John to query the appropriacy of his involvement with an organisation that had such links, Sir John denied any knowledge of the SIRC’s links and refused to make any comment to camera.
One early review of the FSA’s work, by the Labour peer Baroness Brenda Dean, warned there was a risk of the Agency losing its ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigour’ in its support for GM crops and its opposition to organic production. The departure of Sir John Krebs in 2005 did not bring any change in policy.
The Study
With this in mind, let’s look at the study in question. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) published a report, claiming that a comprehensive review of scientific evidence had shown that people who believe organic food — which, on average, costs 60% more than ordinary food — is healthier are wasting their money. “There is no evidence of additional health benefits from eating organic food,” declared Gill Fine, the FSA’s director of dietary health.
Led by Alan Dangour (a public health nutritionist from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), researchers sifted through some 50 years of studies into organic food, analysing nutritional reviews of fruit, vegetables, dairy products and meat. However, Dangour’s analysis was narrower in scope than it first appears. No new material was used – it was purely a review of existing material. Of 162 relevant studies identified, only 55 were deemed to be of “satisfactory quality”. And while the 55 studies did show that organic food had higher levels of acidity and phosphorous, and conventional food had more nitrates, Dangour concluded that these results were irrelevant.
The FSA’s report only looked at the weakest part of the case for organics – that they have better nutritional content. Even though this is the case, Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association, said: “I’ve read the report and the devil is in the detail. The detail clearly shows there are real differences in nutrition.”
The research recorded that organic vegetables had 53.7% more beta-carotene — which is believed to help protect against heart disease and cancer — as well as 38.4% more flavonoids, 12.7% more proteins and 11.3% more zinc. These records have been ignored by the FSA on the grounds that they are not relevant, due to the overall level of statistical error in the research. Melchett retorts that Dangour selected unreliable reports. “They included ‘shopping basket’ studies, which are very variable and unreliable,” said Melchett. “If you include such studies, you get lots of variation, allowing you to declare the whole thing statistically insignificant. It is supposed to be a report, not an opinion piece. But it is designed in a way that almost guarantees they are able to claim there is no difference.”
One significant study that Dangour excluded from his report is an EU-funded four-year study by Carlo Leifert, professor of ecological agriculture at Newcastle University. Leifert’s paper, which was peer-reviewed, found that organic milk contained 60% more antioxidants and healthy fatty acids than normal milk. Results from his crop studies suggest vitamin levels are up to a fifth higher in organic tomatoes, wheat and onions.
Leifert’s study, which ended in May this year, involved 31 research and university institutes, also found that while nutritionally desirable compounds, such as antioxidants and vitamins, were higher in organic crops, levels of nutritionally undesirable compounds such as toxic chemicals, mycotoxins and metals such as cadmium and nickel, were lower in organic crops.
Last week Leifert claimed that the FSA study was misleading, stating that “they have ignored all the recent literature as well as new primary research which shows the heath advantages of organic,” he said. “They admit in their own research that some compounds are 50% higher in organic. How can you call that a non-significance?”
So what should we make of this?!
Hopefully the facts contained in this article go some way toward clearing the issue. In the face of the soaring popularity of organic produce – and a general increase in public interest in health and the environment – the food industry, along with pharmaceutical and big biotechnology companies, has been fighting harder than ever to convince the public that mass-produced, chemically-assisted and intensively-farmed products are just as good as organic foods. They would have been delighted by the generally lazy and irresponsible reporting by the media, which portrayed organic foods as a fad among neurotic consumers, propagated by greedy, cynical marketers.
The FSA’s study looked purely at the nutritional content of organic foods; and even then it had to sneak its way out of evidence that was contrary to its cause. While all of the points raised in this article that address the FSA’s “findings” indicate that organic food is probably still the wisest choice when possible, none of the other important reasons that people eat organic food have been addressed. Simon Wright, a food consultant for Organic Fair Plus, says that one of the main reasons that people buy organic is because of concern over chemicals and long-term health. “It’s a cocktail effect,” he said. “A variety of pesticides and other chemicals are applied at legal levels but interacting in a way that’s impossible to predict.” There are studies that have shown that these chemicals have an effect on people but there is no clarity on the full long-term impact. Nobody wants to fund research. It should also be noted that another key reason that people choose organic food is that it is more sustainable and more environmentally responsible.
Science is still catching up – especially when it comes to the study of the impact of recent technological developments. It does not have all the answers, yet we must make decisions. The industry that creates processed and GM food aims to manipulate nature in ways that usually target a particular simple objective like ‘yield per acre’. Often we will sense by taste or intuition that a food is not working well for us, yet it will be much later that science recognises that in targeting that particular simple objective, we may have lost something important.
If instead we choose to use farming methods that work as much in harmony with nature as possible, we are most likely to have food that tastes good, is well suited to our bodies and gives us a sustainable agriculture. As often when the media reports that – “The latest studies show that…” – it’s best to ignore them and continue with the basic intuitive time-tested principles of healthy living. Which means, in this case, to err on the side of caution when it comes to adding chemicals to our food and drink.