Among some enthusiasts, organic food can do anything. It’s an endless parade of health benefits. The evidence isn’t quite as exuberant, partly because scientific research into organic food is still in the early stages, but there are lots of promising signs. You’re certainly not going to do yourself any harm eating organic, but does it actually impact your life expectancy?
The main problem with drawing any conclusions is that lack of research. Humans have been eating organic for much of our history because before industrialization, there wasn’t any other option. Artificial pesticides and intensive farming techniques have only really been a thing for a century or two. We were farming for thousands of years before that.
Despite that, organic food as a reaction to industrial agriculture and its more destructive excesses is a more recent phenomenon. It’s growing more popular, but science is still trying to catch up. For something like longevity or the human lifespan, that research will clearly take a while. You need enough time to see how many people are reaching old age.
That means the relationship between organic food and longevity is going to be particularly hard to prove. How do you set up the experiment, accounting for all the other variables that influence lifespan? Do you wait decades for your subjects to grow old? What if people who eat organic food are more likely to have healthy lifestyles in other ways?
What we can do, however, is theorize about the impact we know organic food has on our current health and consider whether it may affect our long-term prospects. For example, eating more organic food means you’re going to be absorbing fewer pesticides into your system. Pesticides are more harmful if they build up in your system over time, like from the limited but repeated exposure you might get from regular consumption. It’s even more significant with farmworkers who may be in repeated contact with larger doses.
There are other potential benefits to organic produce, like slightly higher amounts of some of the nutrients that are good for us. It may also be particularly beneficial to certain groups, such as children or pregnant women. Longevity is complicated, so any little thing can help.
We might not be able to prove that organic foods improve longevity, but we can’t disprove it, either. It won’t do any harm, and it might help.
