The truth about organic food and cancer

There’s a lot we don’t know about organic food. But one thing we do know? That being a person who both can afford to buy organic and chooses to do so generally means you’re a healthier person. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily mean organic food makes you a healthier person. That’s the central issue at the heart of a recent study published in JAMA that’s making headlines for purportedly showing that eating organic reduces your risk of cancer. Like so many studies claiming that any specific lifestyle choice will prevent cancer, there’s a lot more to this story.This is a classic case of association: French researchers asked 68,946 adults, also all French, to report how frequently they consumed organic food. They also asked everyone to report whether they had cancer, and at a five-year follow-up, asked again about any cancer diagnoses. On top of that data, the researchers collected information like whether the participant smoked, how much money they earned, how heavily they drank, and how much they exercised. Based on all that, they found a correlation between a lowered overall cancer risk and eating more organic food.What’s getting slightly less attention in the media is what happened when the researchers broke down cancer risk into specific kinds of cancer. Eating organic food had no impact on participants’ risk for premenopausal breast cancer, prostate cancer, colorectal cancer, or skin cancer. It was only associated with a reduced risk for postmenopausal breast cancer, lymphomas, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.otential confounding factors—like high income or physical activity level—are especially important when studying the health benefits of organic food, because eating organic is associated with lots of things that also help you live a longer, healthier life. In other words, people who regularly eat organic food tend to have other lifestyle factors and habits that could easily lower cancer risk as well.