STUDY: Buy more organic, Get less diabetes

That is the observation of a study titled Inverse Association between Organic Food Purchase and Diabetes Mellitus in US Adults¹.

I was long a skeptic of the organic movement, and often questioned my wife about why she preferred to procure these products. A few years later, her hunch was right, and the logic is far greater than I could have ever guessed.

This Study

This project was based on a survey that asked the 8000+ participants the frequency in which they purchased organic products. You might then ask why I am willing to go more along with this one than the travesty disguised as a science piece last week about eggs being bad for us again.

There are two reasons to give this study more credit versus the egg debacle. (1) there is a sensible mechanism and (2) people tend to remember with greater detail that they decided to spend more money for a product (organic) versus what types of food they ate over a period in time.

Findings

Here is what they found:

With data from a nationally representative population, we found an inverse association between the purchase of organic foods and diabetes in U.S. adults. The association was independent of demographic, socioeconomic, dietary, and lifestyle factors. Moreover, the association showed a dose-response manner, with a more frequent purchase of organic foods being associated with lower odds of diabetes. In terms of individual organic food items, the associations were more pronounced for organic milk, eggs, and meats than for organic fruits or vegetables.

Nutrients 2018, 10(12), 1877;
Inverse Association between Organic Food Purchase and Diabetes Mellitus in US Adults
Yangbo Sun, et al

The more organic they bought, the less diabetes.

Mechanism

For correlation to infer causation, there must be a mechanism. We have that here.

I have explained in previous posts that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup – and the most used agricultural chemical in the world, is patented as an antibiotic. And, for a good reason – it effectively kills bacteria. The problem is that applies to the good bacteria in your gut – aka the microbiome.

Alterations in the diversity or structure of gut microbiota known as dysbiosis, may affect metabolic activities, resulting in metabolic disorders, such as obesity and diabetes.

Microbiome and diabetes: Where are we now?
Vallianou NG²

That is just one recent article from December 2018, there are countless others. Bottom line is your health is only as good as the health of your microbiome. Destroying gut bacteria with antibioitics from the pharmacy or from glyphosate can deal equal harm. The word dysbiosis used in the above quote refers to an imbalance of gut bacteria. When the good guys get killed off, other pathogens such as yeast can take over. The downstream consequences are severe.

I could point to other mechanisms such as mineral imbalances precipitated by industrial farming but for now the bacterial component is sufficiently strong to generate behavioral change.

Take Away

I continually advocate that often the most powerful interventions are what we remove from the diet, versus what we add in foods, drugs, or supplements. Preventing access to glyphosate is paramount – significant can gains come from this one maneuver.

Could there be the infamous “health user bias” here? Maybe, but I look at it differently. Here we aren’t comparing one drug versus another. In this case, the product version choice was shown to confer health benefits. Choosing organic is the reason for less diabetes.

Choosing organic is one way to help diabetes. I wrote a 20+ page whitepaper on diabetes, which you can access here (yes I mentioned choosing organic!).

Are you ready to jump on the organic train?

1. https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/10/12/1877/htm
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30342053