Introduction
Studies have shown that expectations regarding health effects of organic foodstuffs are the perhaps the strongest drives for consumer to purchase organic foods. However, these expectations lack solid scientific evidence. Various researches are being carried out to check the health value of organic products vis-à-vis the conventional produce and how organic food consumption has affected health biomarkers. Organic foods have become the benchmark of today’s debate over the value of grown with less additives and chemicals. While there are some health benefits in organic foods, the media has been time and again accused of hyping the benefits surrounding and exaggerating the information.
Methods
There were a total of 11 articles, and from that I identified 6 relevant studies. I used various study designs, 6 human studies (including 2 trial and 4 cohort study). I used Medline to develop search strategies by including medical topic headings and designate terms to highlight the exposure (traditional produced foodstuffs vis-à-vis organic) and also highlighted the outcomes (health related procedures). I searched for the following exposure terms: organic, health food, traditional plus food, nutrients, diet and utilization). The highlighted conditions were put together with those that show the relevancy of the health results that are included in the below categories: inflammatory diseases like allergy, respiratory, reproductive health, optical, chronic diseases, weight issues and anorexia. On the Health Biomarkers I assessed the potency of proof that benefits related to nutrition could be accredited to the intake of organic foods produced by systematically searching PubMed by comparing the health outcomes from the intake of organic foods in comparison to traditionally produced foodstuffs. There were three types of study considered for addition in the evaluation: randomized and non-randomized controlled trials together with case-control, cohort and cross-sectional designs.
Results
The main findings was that intake of organic products by men does not affect their levels of absorption of zinc and copper. However, subsiding healthier foods in our normal diet will lead to better nutritional behavior. Regarding vitamins they concluded that there were trends towards higher vitamin C contents in organic products, while data on mineral content were inconclusive. The rest of the studies had no proof of the differences in health biomarker outcomes related to nutrition that are as a result of consumption of organic or traditionally produced foodstuffs. Seeing as there is scarcity of the available data, the heterogeneity of study designs used, exposures tested, and health outcomes investigated, no quantitative meta-analysis was justified. The study also measured the content of phenolic compounds and it actually shown that the content of phenolic compounds is higher in organic products, as compared to the traditional products. Many of the other studies indicated no evidence of biomarkers related to nutrition.
Conclusion
The overall number of studies comparing the nutritional values of organic and conventional foods is growing, there is also an increasing interest in investigating the health effect of organic, and however the results are insufficient to formulate explicit conclusions. The lack of a straight forward relationship between nutritional value and health is also another reason why it has been difficult so far to draw conclusions from comparative studies on the health effects of organic foods. On the basis of experiments done so far, a hypothesis might be ‘organic food consumption increase the capacity of living organisms toward resilience. However to confirm this statement it is necessary to perform more effect studies on specific health biomarkers.
References
Mark AB, Kápolna E, Laursen KH, Halekoh U, Rasmussen SK, Husted S, Larsen EH, Bügel S. Consumption of organic diets does not affect intake and absorption of zinc and copper in men - evidence from two cross-over trials. Food Funct. 2013 Feb 26;4(3):409-19. Internet: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23192634 (Accessed 5/9/2016).
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