Pesticide Consumption in Body when Eating Organic or Conventional Food

In recent years, the debate over the advantages of organic vs. conventional agricultural practices has been the subject of several studies.  The studies involve farming of land, feeding livestock, and then the food on your table.  The reasons for the use of both organic and conventional practices have merit, but are different for each other.  I would like to review one study comparing the effect on diet between conventional or organic practices.

          What makes a food “organic”?  Well, that starts back at the farm and depends on what kind of food you are eating, whether it be a plant or an animal.  For plants, they cannot be raised with the use of synthetic fertilizers, pesticide and herbicides.  You can still fertilize you crops, but you need to use substances like manure, compost, and liquid fish.  Since you can not use herbicide, which is a chemical that kills weeds, you need to use a cultivator or some type of tillage implement to help with this battle against weeds.  For livestock, the animal cannot be fed any feed that was grown inorganically.  That means the farm cannot use any pesticides, herbicides, and most fertilizers.  Then this animal has to be butchered in a facility that is only butchering organic animals.  Therefore, we can see why most farmers go with the conventional method, because it is much easier and requires less hands-on work.

          Organic has many benefits for your health.  Specifically, by eating organic, you are more likely to not consume a bacterium that can easily resist antibiotics, making your immune system more effective.  The consumption of pesticides though can be very dangerous to development of the brain, has been linked to heart diseases, are is a big cause of cancer.  Therefore, we can see why it is important to know and educate ourselves about what we are putting into our bodies so that we can make whatever decision that we feel is best for ourselves.  There was a study done in September of 2019 where data was collected from October to December of that year.  It was conducted at Emory University in Georgia.  The goal was to see if the biomarkers from pesticides would show up in urine samples more if someone was eating a diet of conventional food, compared to if someone was eating a diet of organic food.  They conducted this study over 40 days.  It consisted of a diet that had people eating organic food for 40 days, and then 40 days of consuming conventional food.  The other diet was just the opposite with people eating conventional food for 40 days, and then eating organic food for 40 days.  They would take four urine sample over the course of each period of the different food they ate.  This means when that when eating organic food, 4 samples were taken, and when eating conventional, four samples were taken. 

See how the study was conducted here

          The results for this study gave us a great insight into why organic food really may be better for us.  Pyrethroid and neonicotinoid pesticide were the two biggest pesticides that were present in the urine samples.  Neonicotinoid is a chemical that makes up nicotine, which we know the effects of greatly because of the extensive studies on smoking.  Pyrethroid is a natural herbicide that is usually safe for humans in all stages of life, but when too much is consumed, it can have negative effects on the body.  During the study, it was found that children had a lower exposure to pesticides when eating organic, compared to eating conventionally.  By the end of the 40-day period when eating organically, they saw a drop in the level of biomarkers for oxidative stress and inflammatory.  This was not to be expected when starting the study.

          Although there is not a lot of overwhelming evidence for the benefits of eating organic food that is proven with a study, we are still in the early stages of researching.  This recent study shows us just how there is a difference in the two types of diets, and how we can benefit from making a choice of what we eat.  I believe that more research will be done in the future, and we will be able to find more benefits.

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