If organic food really is healthier for you, it almost certainly has nothing to do with its nutritional content. A study comparing wheat grown organically and conventionally found that chemically they were virtually indistinguishable.
鈥淥ut of 55 metabolites, only five were statistically different in content,鈥� says Christian Z枚rb of the Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food in Detmold, Germany, who led the study team. 鈥淓ven for those, the difference was less than double between the organic and conventional wheat, and none is known to alter taste or nutritional quality.鈥�
Z枚rb鈥檚 team studied wheat of a single strain grown with uniform inputs, the only difference being whether the fertiliser used was organic or not. He says that this might give more reliable results than comparing items of unknown history bought from supermarkets (Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, vol 54, p 8301).
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The yields of organic wheat were 30 per cent lower, which would raise its price, though Z枚rb accepts that some people may be willing to pay extra for other reasons 鈥� to avoid pesticide residues, for example.
Z枚rb expects similar results with other crops and is now repeating the experiment with potatoes. Peter Melchett of the Soil Association, which represents organic farmers in the UK, says that the difference may be small because the crop rotation used for 鈥渃onventional鈥� wheat in the experiment was much closer to organic than usual.
