Organic Food Has Higher Antioxidants

Picture by Basak Ekinci from Flickr

My wife is a firm believer in eating well. Even before my accident she's been buying organic food for the family. After my accident, eating organic in our household went up a few notches. I've been having green juices, organic cocoa and lots more. If you've been reading some of my older posts, you'd know I basically ate anything and everything, especially junk food and drinking lots of Coke too. I figured that since I exercise (and trained pretty hard before) I could eat anything I wanted.

Guess what, turns out my wife was right all along. According to a paper published in the British Journal of Nutrition (which reviewed 343 studies), you get 20-40 % more antioxidants if you switch from normal conventionally grown (read plenty of pesticides) to organic food. Antioxidants are thought to prevent or delay some types of cell damage and can therefore improve your health and slow the aging process.

Conventionally grown food were 3 to 4 times more likely to have pesticide residues and twice as likely to contain cadmium (a toxic heavy metal contaminant). This study differs differs from previous studies which concluded there were no significant differences in antioxidant content between conventional and organic produce.

This study's authors wrote that their finding is more reliable since more studies were analysed using more sophisticated means of analysis.

One suggested reason by the authors that organic food is higher in antioxidants is that plants produce chemicals that form antioxidants in response to environmental stress like pests, diseases and lack of soil nutrients. Since conventionally grown produce are mostly shielded from these stresses, conventionally grown produce do not produce antioxidants.

The second reason is that conventionally farming uses nitrogen with a much higher nitrogen content leading plants to produce fewer antioxidants.

Well, maybe it's time to look at what you eat.

Reference
Baranski M et al (2014). Higher Antioxidant And Lower Cadmium Concentrations And Lower Incidence Of Pesticide Residues In Organically Grown Crops: A Systematic Literature Review And Meta-Analyses. Brit J of Nutrition. FirstView Article pp 1-18. DOI: 10.1017/S000711454001366.

Some of the organic snacks my wife bought for my son