Organic food is expensive. Fruits and veggies can lead to a healthy lifestyle and lower your risk of cancer. Any risk that might be incurred by eating conventionally grown food is outweighed when you consider that eating just one less apple raises your risk of cancer disproportionately. So, if you sacrifice buying more fruits and veggies so you can afford organic, you’re losing.
In other words, the notion that you should avoid conventional food to avoid pesticide exposure just doesn’t add up.
Ok, just take a read:
“The Stanford study showed what most academics already knew: there are few if any health benefits of organic foods. In reaction, many critics of the study emphasized their lower pesticide content, and general environmental benefits.
The Stanford study emphasizes the importance of eating fruits and vegetables “however they are grown,” but the scale is missing. Eating more fruits and vegetables is incredibly more important than avoiding already well-regulated pesticides. In fact, it can be argued that if the higher costs mean you reduce your intake of fruits and vegetables by just one-thousandth of an ounce a day (equivalent of half a grain of rice), your total risk of cancer goes up, not down.
Based on my calculations using World Cancer Research Fund data: omit buying just one apple every 20 years because you have gone organic, and you’re worse off.But these points conceal much larger drawbacks. Avoiding well-regulated pesticides can do some good — based on my calculations using U.S. Food and Drug Administration estimates, it might avoid up to 20 cancer deaths per year in the United States. But organic food also costs 10 percent to 174 percent more for fruits, vegetables and meat. As I point out in my book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” a decrease of just 10 percent in fruit and vegetable consumption in the U.S. because of higher prices would cause an increase in cancer of about 4.6 percent of the total number of cancers, or some 26,000 additional cancer deaths annually.”
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