Key Research: Eating Organic Foods Cuts Your Cancer Risk and More!

Some people laugh at those who make the effort to buy organic foods as often as possible. It’s a waste of money, they say. An organic apple isn’t any healthier than a non-organic apple, they insist. Well, the next time you hear someone spew this baloney, you reference this recent research suggesting showing how beneficial organic can be.

Researchers in France say that people who regularly eat organic food have a lower risk of developing cancer than those who don’t.

Take that!

For the study, almost 69,000 adults volunteered to provide researchers with information on how often they ate organic food, drinks, and dietary supplements. Researchers scored the participants based on how often they ate organic food – “most of the time,” “never,” or “I don’t know.”

Related Read: Study Confirms Organic Food Has LOWER Pesticide Levels than Conventional

Researchers tracked the volunteers’ cancer diagnoses at 2 points in the study: in 2009 and again in 2016. Breast cancer was shown to be the most prevalent cancer diagnosis, but the team also observed prostate cancer, skin cancer, colorectal cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and lymphoma.

Participants who ate the highest amount of organic food were 25% less likely overall to develop cancer than the others. [1]

Additionally, the most frequent consumers of organic food had: [2]

• 76% fewer lymphomas

• 86% fewer non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas

• 34% fewer postmenopausal breast cancers

Julia Baudry, the study’s lead author and a researcher with the Center of Research in Epidemiology and Statistics Sorbonne Paris Cité of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research, said:

“We did expect to find a reduction, but the extent of the reduction is quite important.”

Read: 12 Ways to Eat Awesome Organic Food While Saving Money

Now, the study doesn’t prove that eating organic reduces your risk of cancer. It could be that people who eat organic food lead healthier lifestyles and there might be an environmental component to the findings, as well. As well, studies relying on self-reporting from participants is less-than-ideal.

But still, it’s impossible to deny that striving to live a clean, healthy lifestyle comes with great benefits – even if it means paying a bit extra for food that hasn’t been doused in pesticides. [1]

Baudry said that despite the other potentially influential factors not examined in the study, the findings strongly suggest “that an organic-based diet could contribute to reducing cancer risk.” [2]

Dr. Frank Hu, chairman of the department of nutrition at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said the study could have been strengthened by the researchers testing pesticide residue levels in participants in order to validate exposure levels.

Hu and other nutrition experts at Harvard said the study results “are still preliminary” and they are calling on the U.S. government to fund more long-term studies to confirm the results.

Read: Scientists Prove Organic Food More Nutritionally Rich than Conventional, GMO Crops

And if for some reason you are unable to buy organic foods, that doesn’t mean you should skip out on consuming fruits and veggies. As the American Cancer Society (ACS) notes, eating lots of fruit and vegetables is one of the ways you can lower your risk of cancer, regardless of whether they’re organic or not.

You can read more details of the study for yourself online at JAMA Internal Medicine.

Sources:

[1] USA Today

[2] The New York Times