Does organic meat really contain less chemical contaminants?

RESULTS
Working up from a representative sample set of French-farmed poultry, beef and pork products, 256 key contaminants—including environmental micropollutants, mycotoxins, and veterinary drug and pest control product residues—were quantified using highly-sensitive highly-selective methods. Research led in parallel borrowed approaches from economics science to characterize national meat consumption patterns. All of this data was then pulled together to serve as the foundation for a chemical risk assessment using a Bayesian approach integrating cooking and digestion processes as factors modulating toxicological impact.
The project brought reassuring evidence that contamination levels are well below the European regulatory values for all of the targeted chemical contaminants, both in organically-farmed and conventionally-farmed meat. The absence of certain veterinary drug residues in organicallyfarmed meat also reassuringly confirmed that organic farms effectively observe the organic farming standards. However, while the project quantified environmental chemical contaminant levels below the regulatory thresholds in all the samples, it also showed significantly higher amounts of environmental contaminants in the organically farmed meat. Organic farming standards stipulate that all livestock, whether poultry, pigs or cattle, is to be kept longer on-farm before slaughter and to be given continuous access to the outdoors, which may resultingly lead to a higher bioaccumulation of environmental pollutants in organic livestock systems.

FUTURE OUTLOOK

These findings could ultimately lead to a recast of the production standards for organic food chains.