The pesticide problem<\/strong>
If you’re a die-hard organics shopper, there may be benefits of organics beyond nutrition. For example, these researchers did not study the differences in chemical residues or the overall environmental footprint.<\/p>\nHowever, in a previously published review article, researchers compared the pesticide residues in three types of farming practices: organic, integrated pest management (IPM), and conventional.<\/p>\n
IPM is a manner of farming that uses multiple biologically based systems to control pests; it's the standard toward which most farmers are moving. IPM farmers are not allowed to use synthetic chemicals, but are allowed to use “permitted” pesticides. The results found that organic crops contained fewer pesticide residues, followed by IPM-produced crops, then conventional.<\/p>\n
The bottom line<\/strong>
Overall, there are probably minimal nutritional differences between organic and conventionally grown fruits, vegetables, and grains.<\/p>\nOrganics will have fewer pesticide residues, but IPM crops are significantly lower in residues compared to conventional as well. With a growing number of farmers using IPM, the pesticide residue problems of the past may not be an issue in future crops.<\/p>\n
While the debate over organics is far from over, I’m sticking to my rule of thumb: I buy farmers' market produce first, organics for a few thin-skinned fruits (like berries) and dairy products, and conventional for most other items on my grocery list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Julie Upton, RD Most of my friends would swear that organically produced foods are nutritionally superior to their conventionally grown cousins. They also believe that organic means chemical-free and that the premium price they pay gives them peace of mind, despite a price tag that is 50% to 100% higher than comparable conventional foods. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":857,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/1millionbestdownloads.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}