Most readers will be aware that a recent report commissioned and funded by the UK Food Standards Agency has found that organic food is not nutritionally better than conventionally-produced food. The study was a review of literature pertaining to the subject and was published July 29 in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. More on the study below.

Editor’s Opinion
My opinion is that nutritional value for humans is only a very small part of the organic benefits for human kind and if as the report suggests, organically produce food is not nutritionally better, then it is not a major upset for organic producers. Organic farming methods are better for biodiversity, soil health, wild life including insects and better for you because there is no danger of contaminants entering the food chain in the form of insecticides and herbicides. In other words, if you eat an organic apple, then you are eating only an apple. if you eat a non organic apple with the same nutritional value, you don’t know exactly what you are eating. Unfortunately, reports such as this – which are extremely accurate as far as they go, are taken up by the press in headlines which suggest to the lay reader that we might as well not bother producing organic food. All the other major benefits for plane/human health remain unmentioned. Our next post (Alternative Agricultural Practices Combine Productivity And Soil Health) looks at just one aspect of this. Ed.

More on the report:
Organic food consumers appear willing to pay higher prices for organic foods based on their perceived health and nutrition benefits, and the global organic food market was estimated in 2007 to be worth £29 billion (£2 billion in the UK alone). Some previous reviews have concluded that organically produced food has a superior nutrient composition to conventional food, but there has to-date been no systematic review of the available published literature. Researchers from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine have now completed the most extensive systematic review of the available published literature on nutrient content of organic food ever conducted. The review focussed on nutritional content and did not include a review of the content of contaminants or chemical residues in foods from different agricultural production regimens.
Over 50,000 papers were searched, and a total of 162 relevant articles were identified that were published over a fifty-year period up to 29 February 2008 and compared the nutrient content of organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs. To ensure methodological rigour the quality of each article was assessed. To be graded as satisfactory quality, the studies had to provide information on the organic certification scheme from which the foodstuffs were derived, the cultivar of crop or breed of livestock analysed, the nutrient or other nutritionally relevant substance assessed, the laboratory analytical methods used, and the methods used for statistical analysis. 55 of the identified papers were of satisfactory quality, and analysis was conducted comparing the content in organically and conventionally produced foods of the 13 most commonly reported nutrient categories.
The researchers found organically and conventionally produced foods to be comparable in their nutrient content. For 10 out of the 13 nutrient categories analysed, there were no significant differences between production methods in nutrient content. Differences that were detected were most likely to be due to differences in fertilizer use (nitrogen, phosphorus), and ripeness at harvest (acidity), and it is unlikely that consuming these nutrients at the levels reported in organic foods would provide any health benefit. Alan Dangour, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine’s Nutrition and Public Health Intervention Research Unit, and one of the report’s authors, comments: ‘A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance. Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority. Research in this area would benefit from greater scientific rigour and a better understanding of the various factors that determine the nutrient content of foodstuffs’.

*Notes: While organic food accounts for 1–2% of total food sales worldwide, the organic food market is growing rapidly, far ahead of the rest of the food industry, in both developed and developing nations.
• World organic food sales jumped from US $23 billion in 2002] to $40 billion in 2006
• The world organic market has been growing by 20% a year since the early 1990s, with future growth estimates ranging from 10%-50% annually depending on the country.
In the European Union 3.9% of the total utilized agricultural area is used for organic production. The countries with the highest proportion of organic land are Austria (11%) and Italy (8.4), followed by Czech Republic and Greece (both 7.2%). The lowest figures are shown for Malta (0.1%), Poland (0.6%) and Ireland (0.8%)
United States: Organic food is the fastest growing sector of the American.
Organic food sales have grown by 17 to 20 percent a year for the past few years while sales of conventional food have grown at only about 2 to 3 percent a year.
* Notes from Wikepedia

Organic Organic