The health benefits of following the Mediterranean diet are strictly related to the adoption of organic foods, according to new research published in the American Journal for Clinical Nutrition.
Our study shows that eating organic food allows consumers to switch to a healthier diet, without increasing pesticide intake.
Eating non-organically grown foods associated with the Mediterranean diet exposes consumers to potentially harmful compounds from pesticides and herbicides used on certain crops.
In contrast, the researchers found that choosing organic options could lead to a 90 percent decrease in the consumption of toxins and pesticides.
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Twenty-seven British students were divided into two groups for five weeks during their stay in Crete, an island in southern Greece and the largest olive oil-producing region in the country.
One group received non-organic foods from the Mediterranean diet, which consists of eating lots of fruits, vegetables and whole grains. The other group received an organic version of the same diet. Previously, both groups of students had mainly adhered to the traditional Western diet.
The researchers analyzed both the food that was eaten and the urine samples collected from the students.
They found that high consumption of fruits and vegetables led to three times higher intake of insecticides and organophosphates. Meanwhile, these values were reduced by 90 percent in the group that followed the organic version of the diet.
More specifically, the research found that conventionally grown fruits, vegetables, and whole grains could be the most important dietary sources for synthetic chemical pesticides.
The scientists said that eating organic food would reduce the total intake of pesticides derived from eating foods that comprise the traditional Mediterranean diet tenfold.
To better understand what happens when switching from one type of diet to another, the students ate their usual Western diet before and after the two-week intervention period during which they switched to the Mediterranean diet.
“Switching from a usual Western diet to a MedDiet was associated with increased exposure to insecticides, organophosphates, and pyrethroids, while eating organic foods reduced exposure to all groups of synthetic chemical pesticides,” the researchers wrote. “This may explain the positive health outcomes associated with eating organic foods in observational studies.”
Per Ole Iversen, professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Oslo, added that “There is growing evidence from observational studies that the health benefits of increasing consumption of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains are partially offset by the increased pesticide exposure associated with these foods.”
“Our study shows that eating organic food allows consumers to switch to a healthier diet, without increasing pesticide intake,” he said.
According to the researchers, many synthetic pesticides detected in urine samples are confirmed or suspected endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which cause cancer.
See also: Olives among the foods with the lowest level of pesticide residues in Europe, according to a study
Thus, the 10-fold higher exposure to pesticides from conventional foods may provide a mechanistic explanation for the lower incidence of obesity, metabolic syndrome, and cancer associated with high levels of organic food consumption in epidemiological and cohort studies.
Carlo Leifert, a professor of plant sciences at Australia’s Southern Cross University and one of the lead researchers on the study, told Olive Oil Times that the most dangerous chemicals found during the study are parathion and glyphosate.
“Based on World Health Organization and International Agency for Research on Cancer classifications for individual pesticides, parathion, a banned organophosphate insecticide, with a WHO classification of extremely hazardous, and glyphosate, the most widely used pesticide, with an IARC classification as probably carcinogenic to humans, they are the most dangerous substances,” he said.
Leifert also stressed that the true extent of the damage caused by these chemicals in humans is not fully understood and requires more research.
“It is important to consider that humans are exposed to pesticide mixtures, and the danger posed by pesticide mixtures is unknown,” he said.
According to Leifert, the most important barrier to a major shift to organic farming is the reliance that conventional farming systems have developed on the use of pesticides.
“It would take time and investment, especially in training, to retrain farmers to use organic farming methods,” he said.
See also: The Best Organic Olive Oils
Leifert in fact that in Western countries, the average age of farmers is around 60 years, “and close to retirement age, farmers are reluctant to substantially change the way they farm and take risks or make the necessary investments to convert to organic production.”
“The most effective ways to support the phasing out of conventional agriculture would be: taxes on agrochemical inputs, including pesticides and mineral nitrogen fertilizers, the manufacture and application of which are estimated to account for more than 20 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions of agriculture. and in phosphorous and potassium chloride fertilizers, which are non-renewable resources; investment in organic training at the level of colleges and universities; the research focused on the technical challenges facing organic farmers,” he added.
Leonidas Rempelos, co-author of the study, added that the research could establish a new path to assess the true impact of the introduction of new chemicals in agriculture.
“One of the difficulties in assessing the public health impacts of dietary exposure to pesticides is that once pesticides are widely used in food production, everyone is exposed,” he said. “This study demonstrated the potential of using organic food consumers as ‘‘low pesticide exposure control group’ to investigate the effect of currently used and newly released pesticides on public health”.
Given the relevance of the research and the small scale of the current study, the scientists told Olive Oil Times that now “We hope to find the funding to conduct a longer and larger human dietary intervention study investigating the effect of switching to organic food consumption on specific health and health-related physiological parameters.”
“This would be designed to investigate the mechanisms of health benefits associated with organic food consumption in the large human epidemiological cohort studies conducted by the University of Paris-INRA in France, which were reviewed in our article,” they concluded.