Leah:
Hello and welcome to the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. I’m Leah Higl and I’m here with my co-host Aidan Muir. And today we will be talking about our thoughts on organic versus non-organic food. So before we jump into things, we’re just going to start off with some definitions around what organic food is. So organic food is produced without a few things. So it’s produced without human-made pesticides, herbicides and fertilisers.
Organic farmers may use things like natural pesticides that have been approved for organic food production, but predominantly it is without those kind of pesticides and herbicides. In terms of animal agriculture, there is a lack of use of things like antibiotics and growth hormones. And then there’s also no use of radiation, which could be used to preserve food or get rid of things like disease or pests in crops. So that’s kind of just a little definition of what organic food is. So we’re gonna go through a few aspects, I suppose, in terms of the discussion of organic food versus non-organic food. And we’ll start with kind of looking at nutrients.
Aidan:
Yeah, I think we start with nutrients because although pesticides, I it’s probably the bigger topic.
Leah”
Yeah, like the safety around it.
Aidan:
Yeah, I think it’s going to be harder to get our heads around pesticides for a few reasons. It’s a little bit less clear cut than nutrients. There’s some interesting studies on nutrients with organic versus non-organic showing that, like there’s a 2014 systematic review that included 343 studies and it found that the antioxidant levels of organic produce was 19 to 69% higher than non-organic produce. And the obvious crazy thing about that it’s just 343 studies. Like this isn’t a small sample size. Like is this an anomaly? Is this like, it’s harder to say when you’ve got such a large sample size. Like that’s a pretty clear, consistent thing.
Although we will come back to some pros and cons of that study as well as the next review that we’ll look at as well is, it was a study of, it was a review of 67 studies looking at organic meat and they found it had slightly lower levels of saturated fat and higher levels of polyunsaturated fats including omega-3s. Once again, that’s 67 studies, huge amount of research. In that prior study as well I should mention that they also found some other differences in vitamins and minerals and stuff like that but nothing in particular stood out to me, which is why I want to focus on the antioxidants thing because it’s like it’s a clear measurable thing, which is why we’re starting with nutrients because as I said, pesticides not as clear and not as measurable with this one, we’ve literally got numbers being like 19 to 67 percent higher.
Leah:
Absolutely. So we’re going to get into analysing, I guess, aspects of those studies and potentially criticisms around them, things that we can kind of look at and go, I don’t know how important is this? So firstly, addressing the organic red meat or the organic meat aspect and talking about omega-3, that study was predominantly looking at red meat. And when we’re thinking about omega-3, we’re thinking, well, salmon and those oily fish tend to have a higher amount of omega-3 where the amount of omega-3 in your red meats chicken that kind of thing is already really really nothing. So whilst it is 47 percent higher in your organic produce does that really matter because it’s taking it from barely nothing to slightly more than barely nothing. Very low.
Aidan:
It’s still very low.
Leah:
So it’s still not a good source of omega-3 in comparison to things like salmon and other oily fish. So probably just isn’t worth talking about too much, although it is something that is quite often brought up in the old like pro-organic food space. Something else to mention in regards to organic versus non-organic meats though, is that there does seem to be slightly lower saturated fat in organic versus non-organic. But again, if you’re having mostly lean meats, how much does that actually matter? Ideally, we don’t want to be consuming too many really high fat meat products anyway or on a regular basis. So again, like, does it really matter in talking about that?
The other study in regards to the antioxidants does require a little bit more of an analysis, starting with a bit more of a pro-organic thinking. Like you said, that is a significant increase in antioxidants. Like that is something that is significant. And again, like you said, that’s not a small sample size. There’s tons of studies there to suggest that this is something that is occurring in organic food versus non-organic food. But from the other aspect, there are some things that we kind of list about that study that maybe we should be somewhat critical of.
So the first thing is that it is funded by or it was funded by an organic farming charity. Not a big issue on its own. Like the funding for studies has to come from somewhere. That on its own, not a big issue. But when looking at, I guess, the media hype around it and how those, the authors discuss the findings to the media. It was pretty like overhyped and potentially that’s kind of something we can think of as being, I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just like, how important is this? Maybe we’ll have a little think about it.
Another aspect is even though non-organic produce had four times higher cadmium levels, does that matter?
Aidan:
Yeah, that was almost like listed in the title, like the headline of the study mentioned that the cadmium levels were like four times lower. But like the amount that’s in non-organic produce is…
Leah:
It’s still considered to be safe.
Aidan:
It’s considered to be very safe, yeah.
Leah:
So yes, there is less in your organic produce, but there is also what is deemed to be a safe amount in your non-organic. So once again, like, does it matter?
Aidan:
Yeah, it’s kind of like the opposite of that Omega 3 red mint kind of argument, where it’s like coming from a low baseline and there’s a percentage of just a huge difference, but it’s low.
Leah:
Another thing to think about when looking at this study is that although it is a lot of research and a lot of different studies involved in that analysis, some people question whether the antioxidant difference is a natural variation or whether it is something that is like nutritionally relevant to like the non-organic versus organic discussion.
And to even double down on that point a little bit further is that this review also found that organic cereals have significantly less protein than non-organic. We wouldn’t think about that too deeply, like is it natural variation? Is it something that doesn’t really matter at the end of the day? I think when it comes to the variation in nutrients between your organic produce and non-organic produce. I personally don’t think it’s really something we need to think too deeply about.
Aidan:
Yeah, I agree with that. The next thing we’ll go through is pesticides. So this is obviously a more complex topic. By definition, the amount of pesticides in organic produce should be significantly lower. Some people even challenge that concept a little bit, everyone, every now and then I’ll see somebody be like, well, just because it’s organic doesn’t mean it’s low in pesticides, like statistically speaking, based on this research, it is lower. It is significantly lower.
But in Australia we have quite strong food safety standards and all non-organic produce still needs to meet that pretty strict criteria. There are limits that are set on each pesticide that is used to ideally reduce exposure to very safe levels. If you want to do everything you can to avoid even trace amounts of pesticides, I can see why somebody would choose organic. I could see why somebody might be like mistrustful of the people who set the guidelines and everything like that. I can see that kind of that logic. And another thing is that the safe levels of these pesticides, which we’re going to talk about quite in detail, but the safe levels are set based on using each pesticide ingredient individually in quite large amounts.
We’ll go through that process, but what happens if exposure to heaps of them in combination has some form of different effect? Like that’s not tested as thoroughly. So once again, I see that argument, even though like when we go through things, you’ll see, you see why the levels are pretty safe, but there is that argument to be made as well.
Leah:
Things to consider with that is that, finances, like even if you wanted to choose organic produce because you just felt like it was better overall, it was just a better option, how financially viable is just buying strictly organic produce for most people. I’d say in this economy, probably not very… in 2023. But that’s why I want to kind of talk about, I suppose that like the dirty dozen and the clean 15, which is a concept that takes the financial constraints into some kind of consideration and looks at if you’re going to buy organic produce, maybe we could just stick to buying all the organic versions of the things that are kind of tend to be higher in these pesticides and the things that are naturally produced or even in the non-organic space is produced with pretty low amounts of pesticides, doesn’t have a lot of pesticide residue.
Maybe we don’t spend the extra money on purchasing organic for those particular things. So basically looking at what are the most important fruit and veg to buy organic versus the things that we can just save a bit of money on. So the dirty dozen and the clean 15 are just lists of fruits and vegetables put out by the environmental working group, which is designed to help with this. So theoretically, the dirty dozen has the highest pesticide levels and you should only by organic versions of these foods according to kind of this concept.
Meanwhile, the Clean 15 is the opposite and their non-organic versions have been deemed to be fine in terms of being pretty low in these pesticides. So this list does get updated every year as farming practices change over time. Which does sound good in theory, like overall as a concept because it is again taking into account that maybe we don’t have to buy organic everything if we wanted to go down more of this route. But there are absolutely flaws to the system as well.
Aidan:
Yeah, it sounds incredible in theory because I agree. It’s like what if you knew the 12 fruits and vegetables that were the highest?
Leah:
Yeah, and then you just buy organic versions of those. It makes sense, but I quickly do want to go through some flaws or we quickly want to go through some flaws.
The first thing, just doubling down on the point, that’s like even the foods that are on the list still fall into the category of having what is considered to be very safe levels of these pesticides. So it’s like, we look at it through that perspective, theoretically, this doesn’t matter. Although I did have the caveat of like, I could see where somebody would still want to. Another flaw though, is that the weighting system of the dirty dozen is affected by the number of different pesticides pretty heavily. It’s hard to go through all the factors in the criteria since it’s pretty complex, but like something that is worth factoring in is that the weighting system is affected about a number of different pesticides pretty heavily.
If even barely detectable levels are found, it skews the results. Like trying to use a crazy example, if something had 12 different pesticides in very, very trace amounts that were just enough to be measurable, it would weight higher on this list theoretically than something that had a moderate amount of just like one pesticide. So like that’s another thing to factor in. It does measure both the total amount and it does measure the number of different types, but the weighting system can be skewed because of that.
I can see why they’ve done what they’ve done but it’s still worth factoring in is it isn’t weighted in comparison to risk or anything like that. They’re not looking at it necessarily being like these pesticides are better, these ones are worse or anything like that, which would once again be a very hard thing to do because we are working under the assumption that all of these pesticides are safe. They’re safe already. So it’s like, can’t really be like, this one’s worse than this one when we’ve already got strict laws identifying what we can and can’t use.
So it’s not weighted in comparison to risk or anything like that, although that would be difficult to do. It’s more just measuring the amount of different pesticides and the total amount but if you go through all of that you can see some pretty clear flaws in how it’s designed then you can’t really rely super heavily on that because of it.
Leah:
The next thing we should probably touch on coming from that is like what what are the safe levels of pesticides like how is that determined because that’s an important part of the discussion as well looking into kind of the dirty dozen and etc even just this are like organic versus non-organic discussion in general. So we often see comments from people that are like no amount of pesticides are safe, like they’re all terrible, like never safe to use pesticides, but like anything the dose makes the poison.
Just because we have something that might be harmful in really, really high amounts doesn’t mean it’s necessarily harmful in very, very small amounts. So the dose really matters. And the way that pesticide safety thresholds have been chosen is by finding the level in animal studies where chronic exposure does cause adverse side effects. And then they find the spot where no adverse effects are found and they divide it by the safety number, which is usually a hundred. So they find amount that where chronic exposure is safe and then even still we’re using far far less.
Aidan:
Yeah, you can’t focus on chronic exposure as well. not like there’s a short term like these are chronic over the entire lifespan and then as I said like a hundred times lower.
Leah:
Yeah so usually the tolerance threshold that is proposed by like the organisations that recommend these safety levels is a hundred times lower than the level that has been demonstrated to cause no adverse effects with chronic exposure anyway. So it’s not like they’re just throwing these pesticides on things and going, we’ll just see what happens. Like there is testing involved and we’re still using far, far less than even the safe levels.
Aidan:
Yeah and I guess one other thing I’ll add on to that as well is that’s the level that’s deemed to be safe but that also doesn’t mean that companies are using like 100% off to that level when we actually look at the data companies are using far, far, far less than that level as well. So it’s like, don’t want to put numbers on there because now I’d be making stuff up, but it’s like far below the hundred times lot and then what has been observed to be safe.
Leah:
Yeah, that’s just like the maximum they’re allowed to use for those pesticides. So that’s a good point as well. They may not be using up to that level. Something that I found really interesting that you popped in the show notes was this little factor on strawberries. So strawberries have topped the dirty dozen list previously. And I think anyone in the organic space is always like, I mean I was told growing up like you should never buy non-organic strawberries or you should wash your strawberries really really well, but it would take the average person consuming 453 strawberries per day at the highest level of average pesticides recorded on strawberries to reach the dose threshold.
And theoretically it would take a hundred times that amount to reach a dose where adverse effects have been observed with chronic intakes. So like, that’s just crazy. So you’d have to have an unhealthy amount of pesticides. You’d have to eat like 45,000 strawberries.
Aidan:
Per day.
Leah:
Per day. Every day. For a while. Every day. Yeah. And you’re like, no one is doing that. I just think that’s a really good way to kind of conceptualise this.
Aidan:
Yeah. And this is why I look at it both perspectives. On the one hand, I’m like, if we’re looking at it in isolation, single pesticides, you can see that some of the sodium ant, we don’t need to be worried about it. The only argument I can say more validity to is like what if you have that combination? Like what if there are 12 different amounts of different pesticides and they’re not in trace amounts, they’re all around that amount? What if there’s like synergy between them and then that adds up? Like it’s getting complex at that stage, right? And it seems relatively unlikely to matter, but that’s an argument I see a bit more.
So, moving on to some other stuff that we can measure a little bit. So we’ve got the topic of like, just overall health, cancer, mortality. I’m always big on measuring health outcomes more so than just the theory, but there is some complexity that comes with this. The main one is healthy user bias, but we’ll talk about that. So I’m gonna start off with like looking at probably the most pro-organic systematic review I’ve seen on health outcomes with organic food, which was done in 2020. And they found, I’m just gonna quote them, significant positive outcomes in longitudinal studies where increased organic intake was associated with reduced incidence of infertility, birth defects, allergic sensitisation, otis media, preeclampsia, metabolic syndrome, high BMI and non-Hodgkin lymphoma. So that does look incredibly positive. But coming back to that concept of healthy user bias, do we think that people who eat organic do anything else differently versus people who don’t eat organic?
Leah:
Highly likely.
Aidan:
Very, very, very likely. So it’s like, can’t read into that too much because it’s like, firstly, they are going to be doing things very, very differently. And I’ve talked about this a bit, like sometimes in research they try to account for this by accounting for variables, but the more extreme the situation gets, the less we can kind of account for those variables. If somebody’s eating organic almost all of the time. Even if you try to account for those variables.
Leah:
Its a very specific person. I think if that’s going to be eating all organic produce all of the time, they’re going to be doing everything else in terms of from a health perspective.
Aidan:
Yeah. In that systematic review, they notice that organic consumers tend to be more health conscious and more likely to be vegetarian or vegan and are more likely to be physically active, which obviously feeds into that. Because it’s like, if you talk about the organic versus non-organic aspect and you just pointed to those concepts, you’d expect similar outcomes to start off with.
Most other reviews which we’ve linked heaps of in the show notes have found noticeable differences in health outcomes when all other factors are equal and they’ve tried to apply for all of these variables. As I said, difficult thing to study. I lean more towards the latter, but it’s worth knowing that there is a bit of a spectrum in the research and the outcomes that have been found.
Leah:
Sure. Another angle we could look at is from the opposite perspective.
Aidan:
Yeah, I like this.
Leah:
Yeah. So what happens if you eat non-organic produce? Like do we see adverse health outcomes from eating these foods in general. Most of the research identifying benefits of fruit and vegetable intake have been done involving non-organic produce. Like we know that eating fruits and vegetables are good for health. Like I think looking at the breadth of like we all we all know that even if you haven’t looked at the research like very much positive health outcomes from consuming fruits and vegetables.
And we know that majority of the intake for most people and looking at these studies is in non-organic produce. If there was a really big issue with eating non-organic, we would see adverse health outcomes with a really high intake of fruit and vegetable consumption. So that is like something to look at from the other perspective. So research looking at fruit and vegetable intake on mortality in general found reductions in mortality up to about 800 grams of fruit and veg per day and reductions in cancer risk specifically topped out around 600 grams per day. So we know fruit and vegetable intake is good in terms of mortality, cancer risk, heart disease, like everything.
A study from this year covering more than 40,000 people found no difference in cancer rates over a 15-year period with organic versus non-organic intakes as well. I think that’s like a pretty big thing to mention in terms of like that’s a lot of people and in terms of cancer rates over a 15-year period.
There was no difference between organic versus non-organic eaters. I think cancer is probably one of the risks most people are concerned with. Most people are concerned about cancer. So with the research that we have, doesn’t seem to be a big issue. And again, that goes back to the pesticides levels in mnon-organic food does seem to be safe and that is something that is kind of rigorous rigorously tested. we also know that Australians pretty crap at eating fruit and veg just in general. So we know that less than six percent of Australians eat the recommended intake of fruit and vegetables If we then add on okay guys, like you have to eat all this fruit and veg and it has to all be organic, that’s just going to make that number worse, I think. Like it’s not going to be, we know that increasing fruit and veg intake at a population level improves health outcomes. We’re not going to add another barrier to that for what seems to be no reason.
Aidan:
Yeah. And like based on survey data, like I haven’t gone too deep down this rabbit hole because I don’t care about it as much because we kind of shared our opinions, but like based on survey data, it does appear that the more organic produce is promoted through the lens of non-organic not being as good, the less people want to buy fruits and vegetables.
Leah:
That makes sense.
Aidan:
And it’s like, that’s the one thing we want to avoid. I guess that’s kind of a bit of a summary. Like I want to go through it from, you can tell that I’m trying to, in a way, play both sides, but like as a bit of a summary, it’s a complex topic. I think it’s very low on the list of priorities. I think most people should be eating more fruits and vegetables regardless of whether it’s organic or non-organic and the research we’ve kind of shared kind of really backs up that point. There are situations where it may matter more than others.
Like this is a very broad overview and it’s like you could go very deep down this rabbit hole and you could come to a conclusion certain pesticides matter more than others. Certain fruits, vegetables, whatever might have more of these pesticides. Maybe this stuff matters. Maybe I personally have a medical condition that this might matter a little bit more for. There’s a whole bunch of angles you can look at this from and I can see why least like the Dirty Dozen and stuff like that have some level of appeal. I can also see a lot of logic in washing your fruits and vegetables just in general even though as we said pesticides levels are relatively low or safe and everything like that. But like if we can minimise this, it still kind of makes sense to minimise this, particularly when at that stage there’s no downside to what washing it.
And if you have the access and the financial situation where buying organic is not that different to you personally to buying non-organic, I can once again see more logic to buying organic. I just also want to look at from the other angle being like, once again, encouraging more fruits and vegetables is a good idea to start off with.
Leah:
This has been episode 101 of the Ideal Nutrition Podcast. If you liked this episode and you haven’t left a rating and review, that would be greatly appreciated for you to do so. But otherwise, thank you for tuning in.