Ria Chhabra, now a Texas high schooler, started research on organic vs. conventional fruit in middle school. Since then, she’s been published, won science fairs, and continued her research.
One of her studies used fruit flies to look at the health benefits of organic and conventional fruits. For measures of longevity, fertility, and stress resistance, fruit flies that ate organic food did better.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Organic foods generally taste better too, and past studies have even shown that in general they have more nutritional value. (And did you know? Only organic roses have a natural scent, the rest have to have it added on!).
There are 3 possible reasons why organic food could be better for you:
-Avoiding pesticides and herbicides may be the difference.
-The higher nutritional value may contribute to the longer life and better fertility (if that’s all it is, you can just take a multivitamin, too).
-In theory, in the absence of pesticides/herbicides plants could be producing natural version that could be beneficial to humans.
Weeds and insects are developing a tolerance to our strongest toxins anyway, so why do we keep feeding them to ourselves? The shortcuts used in farming and ranching are working less and less well for their intended purpose, and with evidence of the potentially bad effects on humans (or side effects like antibiotic resistant bacteria in your meat) we might need to change our policies.
Do you eat organic, or try to occasionally?
