This Family Ate Only Organic Foods For Two Weeks. Here’s What Happened.

This Family Ate Only Organic Foods For Two Weeks. Here’s What Happened.

Conventional foods grown with fertilizers and pesticides can be much cheaper than organic foods, which prohibit the use of those things. But is spending the extra cash actually worth it? When you find out how organic food changes your body, you may be inclined to dish out the extra money.

Coop, a wholesale distributor in Switzerland, commissioned the Swedish Environmental Research Institute IVL to learn more about what happens to the body when people switch from eating non-organic to organic food. To test this out, they chose a family with three children who rarely eat organic food.

For one week, the whole family had to eat conventional, non-organically grown foods for all of their meals. Urine samples were taken from each member of the family throughout the course of the study.

Researchers analyzed the pesticides that were present in the urine and found that the family was consuming insecticides, fungicides and plant growth regulators.

“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.

For the next two weeks, all of the family’s food was swapped with organic products.

Their personal hygiene products and detergents were also swapped with organic ones, and the family was asked to not purchase new clothing or bedding.

After testing urine samples a second time, nearly all pesticides had disappeared.

“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.” 

“When you hear this, you think about your children,” the mother involved in the study said in the video. “There were a whole number of chemicals removed from my kids’ bodies and I don’t want them back.”