The bitter truth of our modern world continues to crash down around us. First, we learned that bottled water isn’t any healthier for you than the stuff that comes out of the tap. And now we find out that organic food is apparently just another waste of money.

Boys and girls, you may as well buy a box of Cap’n Crunch and drown a bowl of it in hormone-laced, pesticide-soaked milk produced by cows that consume chicken intestines and pork-related byproducts.

The latest assault to our long-treasured assumptions comes from The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where researchers unmasked the hard, cold realities about that expensive stuff in the fancy packaging.

When my wife saw the study, she shrieked: “How could that be?”

But as Elaine Benes told Jerry: “Oh, it be.”

The study, commissioned by the British government and published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, reviewed 162 scientific papers over a 50-year span.

The conclusion: “A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced foodstuffs, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance.

“Our review indicates that there is currently no evidence to support the selection of organically over conventionally produced foods on the basis of nutritional superiority.”

The researchers noted that some previous reviews did show superior nutritional components to organic food, but there was never a comprehensive look at the issue. Some of the differences that were found were due to the ripeness of the fruit or vegetable, or the type of fertilizer used.

Organic food consumption has fallen, by the way, but not because of this study, or studies like it. The recession has affected shopping habits, with consumers returning to cheaper, mass produced foods. The organic market had been seeing phenomenal growth – 26 percent per year – until recently. Sales growth in Britain slowed to 1.7 percent in 2007, according to a Reuters report.

Actually, this doesn’t’ mean I’d never buy organic. I like the idea, for example, of buying eggs from chickens that are running around a real yard, having the time of their lives hunting for worms, bugs and other assorted chicken delicacies.

And there-in lies the salvation of the organic food industry. Some consumers will continue to believe that higher production standards are of some benefit, to themselves or the environment. But it may be that the double-digit growth the business enjoyed for so long is coming to an end.





