This article is the second in a series on the benefits of organically produced food.

First, eating organic food can reduce exposure to pesticides in our diet. Organic foods are also better for us because, more often than not, they provide more health-promoting phyto-nutrients than conventionally produced foods. Phyto-nutrients include important dietary constituents, like vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other beneficial compounds. Overall, however, what is the current nutritional status of our food supply, and can organic farming make it better?

In a recent study, Dr. Don Davis and his colleagues at the University of Texas (Journal of the American College of Nutrition, Dec. 2004) compared the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s records of food nutritional composition in 1999 with those from 1950. What they found was that over the last half of the twentieth century the nutritional quality of 43 garden crops declined for six key phyto-nutrients, including protein, calcium, phosphorus, iron, riboflavin, and vitamin C. In tomatoes, vitamin C contents declined by an average of 17 percent from 1950 to 1999, while iron declined by 25 percent, vitamin A by 43 percent, and calcium contents declined by 65 percent over those 50 years! If you thought that tomatoes just didn’t taste good anymore, consider also that they are less nutritious.

The authors of this study speculated that the main cause for this decline in nutritional quality of modern foods was the “dilution” of phyto-nutrients resulting from breeding for maximum yields and product size, that is “more and bigger.” However, there may be other explanations.

One alternate explanation is that the practice of conventional agriculture using synthetic fertilizers is depleting our soils of the organic matter essential to feeding the microorganisms that recycle nutrients within the soil. Organic farming, which requires that organic matter be incorporated into the soil, may offset the diluted nutritional quality of the foods we eat today.

In my study of organic and conventional strawberries produced in the Watsonville area of California, modern varieties grown organically contained more vitamin C than those same varieties grown conventionally. This shows that organic farming, even in an intensive production situation, can offset the “dilution” effect of plant breeding. Of course, “heirloom” varieties, which are more flavorful, may naturally contain more phyto-nutrients, as well.

One wonders whether the less nutritious food of today invites us to eat more of it in order to get adequate nutrition at the expense of excess consumption and a national obesity crisis.

Read Part 1
Read Part 3