Is organic food better for you?

No less an institution than the BBC recently reported that organic food is “better for you” than the conventionally farmed stuff. You can see the video report here. In it, the reporter says that “organically farmed milk, fruit and vegetables are more nutritious than conventionally farmed produce”.

The BBC does not mention here exactly what is meant by “nutritious”, but reports that up to 40% more antioxidants could be found in organic fruit and vegetables than in non-organic, and quotes the head of the research team, Professor Carlo Leifert, as saying “We have shown there are more of certain nutritionally desirable compounds and less of the baddies in organic foods, or improved amounts of the fatty acids you want and less of those you don’t want.”

The claims stem from research being carried out at Nafferton Farm near Newcastle Upon Tyne where a comparison study is being performed between organically and conventionally farmed vegetables. The research is being coordinated by Newcastle University’s School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development. It is funded to the tune of 12 million pounds by the European Union, under their Quality Low-Input Food (QLIF) initiative.

The QLIF initiative is a long-term “integrated project” to improve knowledge of the benefits and drawbacks of organic farming – since most of the consuming public seems increasingly fixated on the subject.

The QLIF initiative maintains its own website and publishes its own scientific papers which are available via an on-line archive set up by an umbrella organisation for research into organic methods and based in Denmark.

Before we jump ship and make the switch to organic however, we should reassure ourselves of two things: one is that we are not making the mistake of assuming that because nutritional quality might be higher in one type of food than another, it’s therefore appropriate to switch to the higher quality food. The other is to make sure that the usual, rather basic pre-requisites of science apply: the research the BBC reported on should have been published in a peer-reviewed journal of reputable standing in the field in which the claims are being made, and it should have been repeated, preferably by someone else somewhere else, to ensure that the results found are not artefacts of the experimental design.

The trouble is that hardly any of the scientific papers that appear to relate to the comparisons between organic and conventional foods on the QLIF website have been peer-reviewed. Out of 14 papers on effects of production methods, only two had been peer-reviewed. Of these, one (published in 2007) stated that it was not possible to “draw overall conclusions about the effect of low input production on food quality and safety” unless more research was carried out; the other concerned food that was being fed to rats, and found that the content of lutein was higher in feeds prepared from organic produce. Whilst this second result is certainly positive, it is hardly earth-shattering evidence of benefit to humans.

Also, the BBC report made plain that the results of the current research will not be published until next year. The BBC did not even make clear, in their reports that talked about the higher nutritional content of organic foods, whether they were referring to previous work that had been published, or to the as-yet unpublished results of the current research.

So let’s straighten this out. It looks like the BBC has been reporting on unpublished and incomplete research carried out by a team whose leader claims higher nutritional content in organic food, whilst in possession of no peer-reviewed evidence to make such an assertion. Of course, there may be evidence in hard-to-find places, behind an academic pay-wall for instance. On the face of it, however, this seems to leave the question as to whether organic food is better for us as just that: a question. It certainly does not seem to justify the rather positive spin placed on the news by the media. Indeed, one wonders, given that there seems to be nothing new to report, where the media picked up the idea in the first place.