If your Acai bowl is organic, will it be better for you?

When asked what’s the biggest difference between organic and conventional farming he says, organic farming is “a pain in the ass: That’s the biggest difference.”

Mark says that because he’s not allowed to use certain synthetic pesticides and fertilisers to grow his organic crop. While it’s a pain for Mark, his organic customers love it.

Surveys find that people go organic because they believe it produces food that’s tastier, more nutritious and safer.

While organic farmer, Mark Reeves, finds a lot of that hard to swallow, he hasn’t done peer-reviewed studies. So when Science Vs. looked at the science, what did it say?

To see if organic food tastes better than conventional food, researchers at The University of Upsala in Sweden, gave people slices of tomatoes presenting them as organic or conventional.

People were more likely to say that the tomatoes presented as organic, were tastier. But, here’s the catch. Some of those tasty, seemingly organic tomatoes, were actually conventional. The scientists purposefully mislabelled them.

Other studies have similarly found that slapping an organic label over food, even if it’s not organic, can make people think it tastes better.

The organic section sure does cost more. So it must be more delicious, right?Source:Getty Images

Generally speaking though, research has found that growing a crop organically or conventionally doesn’t consistently affect its taste.

Many individual studies have also probed whether or not there is more nutrition in organic foods. In 2012, researchers at Stanford analysed scores of studies on the nutritional value of organics, and concluded that they “did not find significant differences in the vitamin content of organic and conventional.”

Any minor differences that were found wouldn’t matter for most people. For example, organic produce tended to have more phosphorus in it, but the authors wrote: That would only be important to someone facing “near total starvation”.

Dr Kathryn Bradbury, a nutritional epidemiologist at Oxford University, who was not involved in the Stanford study agrees with its conclusion: “If you review all of the studies there’s really not a lot of difference between organic and conventionally grown fruit and vegetables”.

Much harder to study, however, is whether the organic food is safer for us in the longer term than conventional food because, say, it avoids certain synthetic pesticides.

In high doses, some of the pesticides used in conventional agriculture are bad for our health. “We know that in high enough doses they’re toxic. Otherwise, they would be pretty poor pesticides,” says Cynthia Curl, an assistant professor in environmental health at Boise State University in Idaho.

Agricultural workers, for example, are known to be at a higher risk of certain types of cancers than those who don’t work around these chemicals.

It’s difficult for scientists to know how relevant these findings are to the average Joe at the supermarket, who would eat a steady diet of foods with tiny traces of pesticides, but is never exposed to large amounts of them.

“If you’re down to the levels that we’re talking about in conventional foods is it below a threshold where there is anything to worry about? That’s the million-dollar question”, says Curl.

The best study that we have on this comes from Kathryn Bradbury and her colleagues, who followed more than 620,000 women – some who ate organic food and others who ate conventional – for nine years. They were looking for which women developed cancers.

When Kathryn looked at the overall cancer rate – for 16 of the most common cancers types – she found no difference in the overall cancer rate between women who ate organic and those who didn’t.

When looking at individual cancers, Kathryn did find that women who usually or always ate organic were less likely to get non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, but more likely to get breast cancer.

She says these results could just be statistical blips, chance findings, but wants more research.

So, while there is still much we don’t know about the effect of tiny traces of pesticides in our food, the current science doesn’t support some organic food’s big claims.

To hear more about the Science of Organic Food: including more information on the studies described above, and whether organic food is better for the environment, listen to Gimlet Media’s podcast Science Vs Organic Food.