Once upon a time I was asked to attend a meeting about business opportunities in organic agriculture. The meeting was organized by a large international chemical company that paid my bills. I was invited because I ran an innovation lab for the company to find safe pest-control alternatives to synthetic pesticides, and this was a brainstorming meeting to come up with ideas. I was certainly in the minority. My employer hired me and my lab scientists to make the company look good to shareholders. But almost all of the company’s products and employees focused on big-market chemicals.
The meeting started with a table topped with fruits and vegetables. One of the company’s product managers (who managed a billion dollar insecticide business) challenged the meeting attendees to identify which of the foods were grown organically and which were grown using traditional industry products. After tasting the various items, the results were inconclusive. It wasn’t obvious which were organic and which were not - at least based on taste alone. A few of the participants identified some of the organically grown vegetables because they were limp and some of the fruits were covered with a patina of mold. These items, it turned out, were intentionally added to the experiment to prove a point: you can sometimes identify organic products by how bad they look.
I wasn’t impressed, and today (a couple of decades later) I don’t remember anything else about the meeting. What I do remember is going back to the lab and wondering if my efforts were making a difference at all, or if I, and the scientists who worked for me, were spending time on meaningless projects. What kept me from quitting was an abiding belief that reducing pesticide use, especially on the foods that we eat, was a worthwhile challenge.
In the end, however, it didn’t make any difference. I didn’t have to quit. I was fired because I refused to reprimand one of my scientists for finding a problem with one of the company’s new insecticides. This was stressful at the time, both for me and for my wife. In hindsight, though, it turned out to be a huge relief.
It wasn’t obvious, all those many years ago, if there really was a health benefit from eating organic products. Avoiding pesticides was a good thing, for sure, but couldn’t you just wash your food and limit any residues that way? I spent many hours reading and wondering about these sorts of things. In my mind the word “organic” basically meant a food item that had not been sprayed with a pesticide and hadn't been grown with a synthetic fertilizer. And they were marginalized or ridiculed by most Americans.
Then honey bees started dying by the millions and I watched as the chemical industry started spending some real money on environmental issues (sort of). Honey bees, as we all know, are really important pollinators to many of the fruits and vegetables we enjoy, including organic fruits and vegetables. These are the crops that also receive uncounted applications of pesticides every year. And when people started claiming that the insecticides were the reason for honey bee deaths, the industry became defensive. I know because I had a front row seat to the self-serving counter-arguments for two decades. I guess it would be more accurate to say that I was on stage, playing a minor (and inconsequential) role as the court jester.
These findings changed the way we use insecticides, especially the group of insecticides called neonicotinoids that move into flowers and can become toxic to pollinators that drink nectar. Growers try to time these applications in order to avoid spraying when bees are active or when nectar is flowing. But not all growers are equally conscientious and problems occur all the time.
This focus on eliminating insecticides is certainly one of the key components of the word “organic” and the bee deaths that were covered frequently in the news at the time breathed new air into the organic movement, for sure. But I was beginning to realize that the importance of the word was much broader than I originally imagined.
There are a handful of definitions for the word “organic.” In my dictionary the third definition is the one we think of in an agricultural context - referring to food grown without pesticides and artificial fertilizers. The first definition refers to any organ system of the body. My lungs, following this definition, are organic. But it is the second definition that should be our primary focus when discussing organic agriculture. My dictionary defines it as follows: “Of, pertaining to, or derived from living organisms.” And the reason I think this is the better definition is because there are uncounted millions of living organisms that go into making organic foods so healthy and densely packed with nutrients. In fact these uncounted microorganisms are now known to be the major difference between organic and non-organic foods. If I were to go back to that meeting decades ago. I would tell the group that a field trip was needed. We would need to look at the soil in which the different food items were grown and see which soils were more alive. And then we would start to understand how it is that these microorganisms are able to break down all kinds of molecules in the soil to a form that plants can take into their roots - and ultimately make available to us.
The reason we need to limit pesticides is so that living things can flourish. I don’t mean that the insect pests that eat vegetable leaves need to flourish, nor that the many diseases that destroy roots should, and I’m certainly not wanting to encourage invasive weeds that choke out our seedlings. I do mean that the goal of organic agriculture should be the flourishing of living organic beings - including those that live in the soil and that create an environment for healthy plants.
Pesticides are an important challenge in our need to feed the world, but they are just one piece of the challenge. Equally daunting is the fact that our mass-produced foods lack many of the plant nutrients that we need for lasting health. Organically grown foods have a higher content of these healthy phytochemicals than do foods grown with many artificial inputs. This important fact is only now starting to sink in.
This has not always been clear because we tend to judge food by what it looks like on the outside. And, as my industry experience taught me, applying pesticides and fertilizers does, in fact, produce bigger, more abundant, and showier crops. So while it is true that the healthy phytonutrients are much more abundant in organically grown plants, there is no way to know this when looking at a grocery bin full of vegetables. There are no labels containing nutrient facts for every box of organic apples flown in from the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania, or of fresh shallots just harvested from Filaree Farms in Washington. One has to take these facts on faith, unless you have a body (like mine) that forces you to pay attention. Many people, when they get to be my age, learn first hand about the importance of nutrient dense foods because they make us feel so much better. When we ignore them, we pay a heavy price.
If I could go back to that industry meeting all those years ago and reply to the cynical business manager, I would also have asked for an analysis from a biochemistry lab, or a nutrition lab, comparing the micronutrients of both the organic and non-organic foods. Such a request would probably have been scoffed at. A carrot is just a carrot, after all. Or so most of us seem to think. And to be honest, that is how most of us thought about food a couple of decades ago.
Today I cannot emphasize enough how important micronutrients are and of the role they play inside the cells of our bodies. We need to rewrite some of our beginning biology and nutrition books that focus primarily on the role of the bigger and more abundant molecules.
I can give an example of how this plays out in classrooms all around the world based on my own experience teaching beginning biology classes. Most courses (and textbooks) begin by introducing the basic chemistry of living things. We cover atoms and the various kinds of bonds that hold them together in molecules. This is all fairly basic information. We talk about the importance of the element carbon to life because it is so important in forming the basic structures of our bodies. Oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen are likewise emphasized. These four elements are not only essential to life, but they are also the most abundant elements in our bodies. And being deprived of these elements can lead to illness and even death in just a short amount of time. So it is appropriate to focus on them.
We also recognize that there are other essential elements that are very important as well, but less urgently so, and that we need in smaller amounts. These include: calcium, potassium, phosphorus, sodium, silicon, chlorine and magnesium.
Then there are the trace elements that are sometimes essential as well (depending on the species) but that are present in much smaller quantities. For example, we need iodine for proper hormone function and we need iron in order to capture oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from our bodies. We just don’t need very much.
In short, we do a pretty good job of teaching the importance of the basic chemistry of life, but with a hitch. It often comes across implying that each of these elements acts alone, or in ways that should be understood in predictive algorithmic ways. In other words, we ignore the many molecular interactions that occur every moment inside our cells and we generally fail to notice the many phytochemicals that only organic foods supply. We tend to overlook them because they are complex and are considered too difficult for beginning biology students. These molecules need a broader treatment in a more challenging chemistry class, or so we assume.
Most students leave college believing that they need to eat more fruits and vegetables and take vitamins. This is their basic understanding of what nutrition means. And of course, this is a good start. If you ask the same individuals about the importance of phytochemicals (plant-derived molecules) they will likely have no idea what you are talking about. And yet this is the big contribution of organic foods. In study after study, it is these plant-chemicals that show up more abundantly in organic produce that haven’t had soil microorganisms fried by pesticides and synthetic fertilizers.
David Montgomery and Anne Bikle put it this way: The “consistent differences between conventional and organic crops fall out most clearly in their phytochemical and antioxidant content - that is, in the levels of compounds that halt the start of or reverse ongoing disease processes but are not generally considered nutrients” [italics mine].
Our students leave school very happy to know that nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus are all being dutifully added to our foods via synthetic fertilizers. It never crosses their minds that this is the same old story we have been telling ourselves for over a century - or maybe it would be better to say that it is the same old partial story we have been telling ourselves.
I am holding in my hands a copy of the 1939 Yearbook of Agriculture titled Food and Life. Like most of these annual tomes from generations past, it is timeworn and largely forgotten. Like old Readers Digests condensed books, these yearbooks sell for a dollar or two in thrift shops and largely collect dust. Yet I find them interesting. They are a window into the farm life of my grandparents, and they show our agricultural priorities from a simpler time. They also bring a realistic perspective to the long history of America’s adoption of industrial agriculture. There are long chapters here about basic nutrient requirements. But what surprises me is how similar many of the recommendations are to our modern nutrition textbooks. All the major and minor elements are here. And while there are insights that are missing (because they haven’t been discovered yet) I could assign one or more of the chapters to my freshman students and not go far afield.
Several of the authors point out the fallacy of perceiving healthy diets as a simple summation of calories. Apparently this was the bandwagon of the new science of nutrition during the 19th Century right after we discovered that we could measure energy stored in foods by how much heat they could produce - or literally how much of a particular food, when burned, would raise the temperature of water 1 degree Celsius. This was an important finding, for sure, and it helped us understand the relative importance of some foods in fighting starvation.
The authors point out, however, that proper nutrition is much more than just counting calories. You have to pay attention to the basic elements that confer health. You can get all the calories you need and still get sick because you lack certain basic vitamins and minerals. Reading this is a bit frustrating because there are still many among us today that are still stuck in the counting calories mindset.
It is also frustrating because we are making the same summation mistakes today. The difference is that we are now stuck in the count-your-vitamins mindset. We know that trace elements and minerals are important, and we tell our kids to eat their vitamins, but we let big business push these nutrients on us as if it is quantity that matters. It is this summation mindset that makes it impossible for many to understand the importance of organic foods. It also hides the importance of individual molecular contributions.
Take hemoglobin, for example. It is a critically important molecule that circulates in our blood and carries oxygen. It is primarily made of the common elements of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. There is also a single atom of iron tucked away in the folds of these other elements and it is this one atom that gives hemoglobin its unique shape and makes it possible for it to do its job. So while it is true that you can add up all the atoms and pretend to know what is required to make hemoglobin, it is really only iron that becomes critically important - or we might say that iron is the limiting element in making hemoglobin. It might also go without saying that iron is only needed in very small amounts.
In fact a diet with too much iron will upset the stoutest stomach, and in even larger amounts it can lead to organ failure, seizures, comas, and even death. Iron is critically important and it is also toxic - just like every other vitamin and mineral that we need in order to remain healthy. And this is the piece that we miss when it comes to the secondary chemicals produced by plants that grow in the wild or that are grown in rich organic soil. They are all handled by our bodies in a healthier way when we consume them in the context of real food, not as supplements or as fortified, refined, and packaged alternatives with endless shelf-lives.
Plant-produced molecules are often bitter. If you try feeding them to children they pucker their lips and refuse to eat. This is particularly the case for children (and even grown-up children) that judge all foods based on how sweet they are (because they have been fed sweets by their parents from a very early age). But here’s the big surprise: many of our cells have receptors for absorbing these bitter-tasting plant chemicals. What I mean is that our cells have evolved to need some of these molecules, and when we don’t get them, our cells stop working the way they are designed to work.
At the turn of the 21st Century, about when I began my frustrating career in industry, papers started appearing in scientific journals around the world suggesting that some plant compounds regulate cellular activity in the animals that eat them (Jacobsen et al., 2002; Lee et al., 2004). Flavonoids are an example. They are molecules found in many wild and organically grown plants that are produced as deterrents to herbivores. We now know that they also slow down cellular activity, even cellular division, and possibly slow down cancer cell activity in animals that eat them. Other phytochemicals seemed to be doing the same thing. The compounds were docking at the cell surface and sending signals that “modulated” internal activity. The abbreviation scientists came up with to describe this phenomenon was SKRM (short for selective kinase response modulators).
Jeffrey Bland summarized these findings as follows. “The studies confirmed that there are substances in certain foods that send messages to our genes through the influence of the kinase regulatory network, and that these messages control the production and release of inflammatory mediators.” The message that is slowly dawning on nutritionists around the world is that plant compounds slow down our constantly active cells. They reverse the many manifestations of inflammation, and it even seems that they can slow down inappropriate cell division.
I no longer flinch when someone criticizes my organic choices. The benefits are much more real to me now than they used to be. Just like I felt decades ago, I’m still happy to be lowering my consumption of pesticides. But more importantly, I benefit in tangible ways from the denser phytonutrients that organic foods provide. These are nutrients that don’t get written on food labels because we haven’t figured out how to do that well yet. In the meantime, I keep planning next year’s garden even though I’m writing these words in November. Being healthy, after all, is a year-long effort.
References
Bland, Jeffrey S. (2014). The disease delusion, conquering the causes of chronic illness for a healthier, longer, and happier life. Harper Wave.
Jacobson, K. A., Moro, S., Manthey, J. A., West, P. L., & Ji, X. D. (2002). Interactions of flavones and other phytochemicals with adenosine receptors. Flavonoids in cell function, 163-171.
Lee, L. T., Huang, Y. T., Hwang, J. J., Lee, A. Y. L., Ke, F. C., Huang, C. J., ... & Lee, M. T. (2004). Transinactivation of the epidermal growth factor receptor tyrosine kinase and focal adhesion kinase phosphorylation by dietary flavonoids: effect on invasive potential of human carcinoma cells. Biochemical pharmacology, 67(11), 2103-2114.
Montgomery, David R. and Anne Bikle. (2022). What your food ate, how to heal our land and reclaim our health. W.W. Norton & Company.
USDA. (1939). Food and life, yearbook of agriculture 1939. United States Government Printing Office, 76th Congress, 1st Session.
