Is Organic Food Better for You? What the Science Really Says
What Science Actually Says
Several studies show benefits of organic food, including lower risks of certain cancers, overweight and obesity, and congenital malformations. Specialists insist on the overall coherence of these results, even if their number remains too small for causal links to be incontestably established.
Is organic food really better for your health? When they launched their experiment in 2017, researchers from the Centre d’études biologique de Chizé (CNRS, University of La Rochelle) and the Biogéosciences laboratory (CNRS, University of Burgundy) did not intend to answer a question of public health, but rather of ecology. “We wanted to know how the contamination of the environment by low doses of a mixture of pesticides, that is to say what we find in agricultural areas, could affect the survival of field birds such as the grey partridge ,” says biologist and ecologist Jérôme Moreau, from the University of La Rochelle. Finding an experimental protocol that mimics these living conditions, to compare them to a situation where the animals are not or very little exposed, was complicated: we therefore chose to play on the birds’ food.”
For several months, the researchers raised two groups of grey partridges (Perdix perdix) , the first fed with wheat and corn from organic farming, the others with the same cereals, but obtained by conventional farming. The aim is to observe the impact of traces of synthetic pesticides – banned in organic farming – present in the birds’ diet. “Some colleagues told us that we would not see any effect. On the contrary, the results were striking and surprised us,” says Mr. Moreau.
In just a few weeks of experimentation, the “conventional partridges” saw their immune system disrupted compared to that of the “organic partridges”, their red blood cell count reduced, and the quantity of intestinal parasites increased. Published in 2021 in Environmental Pollution, these results also show that conventional females lay smaller eggs, with thinner shells; they have also accumulated more fat mass and are of a stronger build than the “organic” ones. As for the males, their plumage is less colorful. These effects modulated according to sex could be linked, according to the researchers, to the endocrine disrupting properties of certain pesticides.
