New Study Finds No Major Nutritional Difference between Organic and Conventional Wheat
Alex Avery
November 2, 2006
In perhaps the most comprehensive analysis yet, scientists say they “did not detect extreme differences” in the nutritional value of organic and conventional wheat. After looking at 52 separate nutritional components — including amino acids, sugars, organic acids (such as vitamin B5) and nucleotides – scientists found no statistically significant differences in 44 of the 52 “metabolites.”
In the 8 metabolites where statistically significant differences were found, however, few favored organic. In fact, significantly higher levels of three nutrients were found in wheat fertilized with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that are banned in organic farming. For example, vitamin B5 levels in wheat grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizer were over 10 percent higher than B5 levels in organic wheat and over 20% higher than B5 levels in wheat grown using “biodynamic” methods. The authors, however, concluded that this difference was “negligible with respect to human or animal health.” Amounts of the amino acid alanine were more than 60% higher in the synthetically fertilized wheat compared to the organic and levels of the essential amino acid valine were nearly 20% higher in the synthetically fertilized wheat. However the scientists, working at the German Federal Research Centre for Nutrition and Food and Bielefeld University, described these differences as “relatively small, indicating that these differences would have a negligible effect on the nutritional value of wheat from the different growing conditions.”
The full study, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, can be obtained here.
