Wise Choice: Organic or Inorganic?

Myron Yau, HK BioTek Nutritionist

Organic foods, a very familiar term to every one, has long been giving a healthier and more nutritious perception than inorganic foods to the general public, experts, and farmers. In fact, this concept is very rational on the theoretical level.

Organic farming is one type of slow farming, which offers longer time for foods’ growth so that they can synthesize more vitamins and other nutrient contents before they are harvested. Oppositely, a much short time is allowed for foods’ growth in inorganic farming and thus, higher water content is resulted to give comparable sizes and weights to the products of organic farming. Therefore, the nutrient contents inside may be compromised.

However, there are few recent research findings showing that, after taking all the related experimental data in the past 20 to 50 years into consideration, there is no significant difference in nutrient contents between organic and inorganic foods. But the market prices of organic foods are five-times those of their inorganic counterparts, leading to dramatic difference in their quality-price ratios.

It is noteworthy that these researches also stated that the possible benefits of eating organic foods are lower likelihood of ingesting pesticides and bacteria which are commonly seen in inorganic foods. In particular, the investigation of the Stanford University revealed that over one third of inorganic foods contain pesticide remanence but only 7% in organic foods. In addition, the chances of bacteria in inorganic pork chops and chicken meats are 33% higher in organic counterparts.

Of course, they are just the preliminary researches and this field of researches has just begun. In the respect concerning the health impacts on humans by organic foods, further researches are required in advance to the any conclusion that can be drawn.