Study Suggests That Organic Food Could Help Reduce Your Risk of Cancer

A cancer diagnosis is something we all want to avoid, and we know that there are a lot of healthy choices we can make to help make that happen. We can choose to exercise, get regular physicals and screenings, quit smoking, etc.

While eating a healthy diet that includes at least two and a half cups of fruits and vegetables each day is also a recommended way to lower your cancer risk, you might want to start buying organic fruits and vegetables if you aren’t already.

Researchers in France recently published a study that shows a potential link between eating organic food and a lower risk of cancer.

There were 68,946 French adults who participated in this study from 2009 to 2016. The average age of the participants when the study started was 44, and 78% of the participants were women.

Researchers had the participants answer health related questions including whether or not they ate organic food and if they had been diagnosed with cancer.

In the end, a total of 1,340 participants had been diagnosed with cancer. Based on the questions the participants answered, researchers found that the people who ate organic food more often had a 25% less chance of developing cancer than people who did not eat organic food.

More research is needed for several reasons. One is that nothing was done to verify that the participants were answering truthfully. Another is that there were other factors that differentiated the participants like income, education, exercise, etc.

Still, the research is worth paying attention to, and there were some interesting results. For instance, women who ate organic food the most often had a 34% less chance of developing postmenopausal breast cancer than women who ate the least amount of organic food. People who ate the most organic food were also 86% less likely to develop non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and 76% less likely to develop any other type of lymphoma than people who ate organic food the least often.

The French researchers think that the reason organic food may lower the risk of cancer is due to the higher amount of pesticide residue on conventional food. A team from the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health seems to agree. In a commentary they published, they state that glyphosate, malathion and diazinonthree, three pesticides that are commonly used in agriculture, are linked to certain types of cancer. “Malathion is associated with prostate cancer, diazinon is associated with lung cancer, and all 3 pesticides are individually linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma.”

The Harvard commentary goes on to state that “In the United States, more than 90% of the population have detectable pesticides in their urine and blood…Crossover trials have shown that switching from consuming conventionally grown foods to organic foods decreases urinary concentrations of pesticide metabolites, suggesting reduced exposure to pesticides.”

Not eating pesticides sounds good to us, and not getting cancer sounds even better.

For more on this new research, watch the video below.

Are you going to start eating more organic food?