It’s Q&A time! You can ask your own question here for a chance to have it answered in an upcoming edition.
Today’s question is about organic food. The first part of my answer is available to everyone, and there’s a bonus section for paid subscribers (about special considerations for people with disordered eating).
What are your thoughts on buying organic food?
FYI: my answers here are for educational and informational purposes only, aren’t a substitute for medical or mental-health advice, and don’t constitute a provider-patient relationship.
At the beginning of my journalism career in the early aughts, I was an organic-food devotee. Several of my earliest published articles were about organic eateries and the economics of organic food, and in my personal life I tried to buy only organic whenever possible. After reading Michael Pollan’s books, I also started trying to buy local—and when I found a local product with the organic seal, it felt like hitting the jackpot.
But over the years, I’ve come to think a lot more critically about the organic-food industry, particularly when it comes to the claims about human health. Based on my reading of the evidence, I don’t think we can say organic food is necessarily any better for your health—nor is conventionally grown food clearly any worse.
The best available evidence is summarized in a 2025 systematic review examining the impact of organic foods on human health. It looked at 22 studies, 73 percent of which were observational—meaning they could only point to possible correlations or associations (aka “links”), not causation.
Most of the studies included in the review didn’t do anything to account for confounding factors (such as income, education, physical activity, etc.) that could explain the correlations, but a few were different. One was a large 2022 cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis that followed 6,633 older adults for 4 years. It included models that controlled for confounders as well as models that didn’t. In the unadjusted models, there were associations between organic food consumption and lower waist circumference, blood pressure, and hemoglobin A1C, and higher levels of HDL (“good”) cholesterol. Yet in the fully adjusted models—which controlled for many confounding variables including age, sex, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, education, physical activity, smoking, overall diet, and baseline health status—those associations disappeared. There was no correlation between organic food consumption and the risk of metabolic syndrome once other likely explanations were accounted for.
Another paper that attempted to control for confounders was a 2021 observational study of organic food consumption and BMI, conducted in a sample of 3,896 French people intended to be representative of the country’s overall population. Unsurprisingly, it found that organic food consumption was higher among people with higher socioeconomic status, a “healthier” overall diet, and higher levels of physical activity. It also included models adjusted for those confounding variables, and found that even with these adjustments, greater consumption of organic food was still associated with a slightly lower BMI and lower percentage of people in the “obese” category. Yet in most cases, the correlations became less statistically significant (the p-values increased) when those variables were controlled for. This suggests that there may be some residual confounding at play—either because the researchers didn’t accurately measure the known confounders, or because others remained unmeasured and uncontrolled. (For one thing, this study didn’t measure or control for some key confounding variables that the previously mentioned study did, including race/ethnicity, smoking status, and health at baseline, which are independently linked to weight and BMI in ways that have nothing to do with organic food consumption.) The researchers also acknowledge that the effect sizes of these associations were “systematically low” in both the raw data and the adjusted models. In other words: organic food consumption wasn’t linked to big changes in weight, no matter what was being controlled for.
There were a few interventional studies included in the systematic review, but for the most part they didn’t find any impact of organic food on relevant health-related measures, either. A small 2013 study from Denmark looked at the effect of organic food consumption on the intake and absorption of zinc and copper (two minerals that are important for health and may be affected by different agricultural methods) in young men. In two double-blind comparison trials where participants served as their own controls, the men alternated between being on a strictly controlled organic diet for 12 days and a “washout” period of at least 2 weeks, where they ate conventionally grown food. There was no difference in intake or absorption of these two minerals between the conventional and organic diets.
Similarly, a 2011 study by some of the same researchers involved two small, double-blind self-comparison trials looking at the intake and blood levels of carotenoids (plant-based compounds that may be associated with health benefits) among men consuming organic vs. conventional food. It also found no significant differences between the two groups in plasma carotenoid levels, or between the carotenoid levels in plants produced using organic and conventional agriculture.
On the other hand, the 2025 systematic review says that organic food consumption can reduce exposure to certain pesticides in a way that’s “indisputable,” given that some of the evidence comes from experimental studies. “This finding is important for human health because of the growing scientific evidence of the negative effects of long-term dietary or occupational exposure to pesticides,” the researchers write. But digging into that experimental data paints a more nuanced picture.
Importantly, only two of those studies were randomized controlled trials (RCTs), the only study design that can potentially tell us about causation. One was a 2019 trial in 20 low-income pregnant women in Idaho, where half of the participants were randomized to receive organic produce for 24 weeks, and the other half stuck with their usual conventional produce. At the end of the study, women in the conventional group had significantly higher levels of a non-specific biomarker of one type of pesticide (pyrethroids), though there was no significant difference in levels of two other pyrethroid biomarkers, or in any of the four biomarkers used to measure exposure to organophosphate pesticides—which are thought to have greater potential for toxicity than pyrethroid pesticides. These fairly underwhelming results were touted as showing the “indisputable” benefits of eating organic produce, but looking at this data shows that the reality is much more nuanced.
The other RCT was a 2022 trial in 27 adult students on an agricultural study-abroad program in Greece. Researchers randomly assigned 14 participants to consume a Mediterranean diet made up of entirely conventional foods, and 13 to eat the same diet of all organic foods, both for just 2 weeks. Before and after the intervention period, both groups ate “habitual Western diets” of conventional foods. The researchers found that participants’ overall pesticide consumption went up when they switched to the conventional Mediterranean diet, whereas it went down when they went on the organic Mediterranean diet (though for certain types of pesticides there were no significant changes). The study makes some specific claims about pesticide reduction that sound really favorable, but it’s important to know that the senior researcher discloses some conflicts of interest that signal a significant investment in organic agriculture: he owns an organic farm in Greece and is a member of the UK Soil Association, an organic advocacy group. As of this writing, he’s currently a scientific advisor to The Organic Center, the research arm of the industry group The Organic Trade Association, as well as being the director of a center for organics research at Southern Cross University in Australia. So this is clearly someone who is cozy with the organics industry and a part of it himself as an organic farmer, and maybe not the most unbiased source of research on the purported health benefits of organic food. (None of the other studies discussed here report any conflicts of interest—and I don’t have any related conflicts myself, for that matter.)
It’s also important to understand that pesticide levels in food are generally well regulated and not high to begin with. For example, in 2021 the USDA analyzed 10,127 food samples from 9 different states and found that more than 99 percent of these products had pesticide residues well below the EPA’s tolerance levels, which are already very conservatively set at only 1/100th of the maximum exposure level in animals. So it’s unclear whether efforts to further reduce pesticide exposure through organic-food consumption are productive or necessary, even if organics really did reduce that exposure in a meaningful way (which I’m not sure they do, judging by the data discussed above).
The authors of the 2025 systematic review do acknowledge that the included studies were so heterogeneous (in terms of organic farming practices, population demographics, and methods of dietary assessment) that they weren’t able to perform a meta-analysis. They caution that “although there is some evidence from observational and experimental studies for the superiority of an organic-based diet” (which I think is overstating the case), “the limited number of studies, the design and the inconsistencies between studies make difficult to draw definitive conclusions.” They call for further research and also raise the important point that there are real concerns about the capacity of organic farming to feed the world’s population. “Before proposing the implementation of organic farming on a large scale, other factors besides health aspects such as food security, food safety, environmental, economic, and social factors should be considered,” they conclude.
When it comes to impacts on the environment, organic food may have some advantages—but it also may have some drawbacks. Yes, organic agriculture uses fewer pesticides, which may help reduce environmental pollution and support biodiversity. And of course that’s a noble goal, which is why many people might want to support that system by buying organic. But organic farming also produces significantly lower yields than conventional agriculture, so farmers need to use more land to meet consumer demand, resulting in higher greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, as several studies have found. So now there’s an ongoing and very polarized debate in the scientific community as to whether organic farming is really a net-positive for the environment at all.
Given all this, it’s questionable whether the purported upsides of organic food really justify the additional cost. When it comes to human health, I don’t think they do.
But even if you want to buy organic foods for their potential benefits to the environment—which might feel more justified, depending on where you stand in the scientific debate over environmental impacts—it’s worth proceeding with caution if you have any issues in your relationship with food. Especially if you have a history of eating disorders or chronic dieting, frequently purchasing organic foods could pose some challenges to your recovery. Here are some important things to consider if you’re working to heal from disordered eating:
