There’s kind of an interesting post and discussion at the Biodiversity Weblog about a study showing another reason why organic vegetables may be better for you than conventional.
If I may be so bold as to condense a 10 year study into a few words, the basic idea is that many plants have natural defence mechanisms to pests that cause them to produce substances (in this case flavonoids in tomatoes) which seem to have a benefit to human health.
This may be part of the reason organic or home grown produce tastes different too.
Depending on your point of view I suppose, this is either justification for more research into this mechanism in order to devise ways of producing healthier foods, or it’s another reason we should be eating more natural foods.
Thanks for the link.
I should hasten to point out, for anyone who does not visit the discussion, that one of the questions is whether all the natural defence mechanisms of plants would be beneficial.
This is obviously not the case, so it is not, in itself, a reason to either promote or disparage organic or natural foods.
But it is interesting to think about.
Even if they weren’t good for me, I would continue to eat home grown organic tomatoes and other fruit/vegetables just because they taste so good. I can’t resist a garden tomato, flavonoids or not.
The fact that this research is finding out how good these foods are for us is just icing on the cake.
aah, I read this somewhere else kind of recently, and it makes perfect sense to me. Kind of nice to have scientific justification for why our tomatoes taste so damn good!