This review summarises existing evidence on the impact of organic food on human health. It compares organic vs. conventional food production with respect to parameters important to human health and discusses the potential impact of organic management practices with an emphasis on EU conditions. Organic food consumption may reduce the risk of allergic disease and of overweight and obesity, but the evidence is not conclusive due to likely residual confounding, as consumers of organic food tend to have healthier lifestyles overall. However, animal experiments suggest that identically composed feed from organic or conventional production impacts in different ways on growth and development. In organic agriculture, the use of pesticides is restricted, while residues in conventional fruits and vegetables constitute the main source of human pesticide exposures. Epidemiological studies have reported adverse effects of certain pesticides on children’s cognitive development at current levels of exposure, but these data have so far not been applied in formal risk assessments of individual pesticides. Differences in the composition between organic and conventional crops are limited, such as a modestly higher content of phenolic compounds in organic fruit and vegetables, and likely also a lower content of cadmium in organic cereal crops. Organic dairy products, and perhaps also meats, have a higher content of omega-3 fatty acids compared to conventional products. However, these differences are likely of marginal nutritional significance. Of greater concern is the prevalent use of antibiotics in conventional animal production as a key driver of antibiotic resistance in society; antibiotic use is less intensive in organic production. Overall, this review emphasises several documented and likely human health benefits associated with organic food production, and application of such production methods is likely to be beneficial within conventional agriculture, e.g., in integrated pest management.

Current organic agriculture performs well in several sustainability domains, like animal welfare, farm profitability and low pesticide use, but yields are commonly lower than in conventional farming. There is now a revitalized interest in increasing yields in organic agriculture to provide more organic food for a growing, more affluent population and reduce negative impacts per unit produced. However, past yield increases have been accompanied by several negative side-effects. Here, we review risks and opportunities related to a broad range of sustainability domains associated with increasing yields in organic agriculture in the Northern European context. We identify increased N input, weed, disease and pest control, improved livestock feeding, breeding for higher yields and reduced losses as the main measures for yield increases. We review the implications of their implementation for biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions, nutrient losses, soil fertility, animal health and welfare, human nutrition and health and farm profitability. Our findings from this first-of-its-kind integrated analysis reveal which strategies for increasing yields are unlikely to produce negative side-effects and therefore should be a high priority, and which strategies need to be implemented with great attention to trade-offs. For example, increased N inputs in cropping carry many risks and few opportunities, whereas there are many risk-free opportunities for improved pest control through the management of ecosystem services. For most yield increasing strategies, both risks and opportunities arise, and the actual effect depends on management including active mitigation of side-effects. Our review shows that, to be a driving force for increased food system sustainability, organic agriculture may need to reconsider certain fundamental principles. Novel plant nutrient sources, including increased nutrient recycling in society, and in some cases mineral nitrogen fertilisers from renewable sources, and truly alternative animal production systems may need to be developed and accepted.

We present a new method for separation of enantiomers with high-field asymmetric waveform ion mobility spectrometry (FAIMS), coupled to mass spectrometric detection. Upon addition of an appropriate chiral reference compound to the analyte solution and subsequent ionization of the solution by electrospray ionization, analyte enantiomers formed diastereomeric complexes, which were potentially separable by FAIMS. The methodology being developed is intended to be general, but here amino acid analytes are specifically considered. In the examples presented herein, six pairs of amino acid enantiomers were successfully separated as metal-bound trimeric complexes of the form [MII(L-Ref)2(D/L-A)-H]+, where MII is a divalent metal ion, L-Ref is an amino acid in its L form acting as chiral reference compound, and A is the amino acid analyte. For example, D- and L-tryptophan were separated in FAIMS as [NiII(L-Asn)2(D-Trp)-H]+ and [NiII(L-Asn)2(L-Trp)-H]+. As FAIMS separation typically takes place over a time scale of only a few hundred milliseconds, the presented separation method opens new possibilities for rapid analysis of one analyte enantiomer in the presence of the other enantiomer. Preliminary quantification results are presented, which suggest that fast and sensitive quantitative chiral analyses can be performed with FAIMS. Method limitations are discussed in terms of diverse phenomena, which are not yet understood.