What Happened To A Family That Ate Only Organic Food For Two Weeks?

By R. Siva Kumar - 01 Jul '15 06:50AM

Organic foods may be in fashion, but they are more expensive. How much does dishing out that extra cash help your body to develop? Here's one family that found out, according to aplus.

Coop was a Swiss wholesale distributor, who was assigned by the Swedish Environmental Research Institute IVL to understand what happens when people switch from eating non-organic to organic food. For their test, the organization chose a family with three children, who rarely ate organic food.

Find out why the study was conducted, and what it led to from coop.se.

For the first week, the family ate only non-organic food. Urine samples were collected and tested to find out the effects. The findings were not pretty---insecticides, fungicides and plant growth regulators were found in the urine.

"We know very little about the long-term effects of eating food treated with pesticides, especially if you consider the chemicals can be much more harmful when combined together than they are on their own," the study's co-author Jorgen Magner said in Coop's video on the findings.

But for the following two weeks, the family's food was exchanged with organic products. Some personal hygiene products and detergents were swapped with organic ones, while the family was told not to buy new clothes or bedding.

After the second testing, it was found that all the pesticides had vanished.

"The results of the survey clearly show that some pesticides are absorbed into the body through diet," according to the full report. "By choosing organic products, it is possible by and large to avoid the consumption of these chemicals through food. Compared with the period when the family consumed conventionally grown food, the concentrations of pesticide residues decreased on average by a factor of 6.7 when the family ate organic food."

The mother in the video agreed that her children had benefitted. There were so many pesticides infecting her children, and she certainly did not want it back into their bodies.