Organic foods are not necessarily more nutritious, rather organic food are spared the application of potentially harmful long-lasting insecticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers. Many approved pesticides were approved long before extensive research linked these chemicals to cancer and other diseases. Now, 60% of all herbicides, 90% of all fungicides, and 30% of all insecticides as potentially cancer-causing.

In the U.S. alone, nearly one billion pounds of pesticides are applied to farms every year, and are not essential to agriculture.  Unfortunately, because of the vulnerability of uniform, single crops to disease and pests, monocropping has made conventional farmers dependent on chemicals.  A National Cancer institute study found that farmers exposed to herbicides had six times more risk than non-farmers of contracting cancer.  Farmers in the U.S. Midwest were warned in 1994 to wash their clothes in a separate machine from the families because of the high incidence of tumours and cancers among spouses and children of farmers. 

Pesticides move up the food chain from field crops fed to animals and are then concentrated and stored in fat tissue before the livestock products are eaten by humans.  While long term effects are still largely unknown, health effects have been established.  Permanent damage to reproduction, immunity, neurologic function and metabolic systems of both humans and other “non-target” species have been shown to be pesticide related.