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Organic foods don’t just contain less “bad stuff”—pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides—than conventionally grown foods. In many cases they also contain more “good stuff”—naturally occurring chemical compounds that may have tremendous health benefits for the people who eat them.

That’s the focus of a hot new area of research nationwide and in the lab of Neal Davies, a Washington State University pharmaceutical chemist.

“Foods are natural delivery systems for phytochemicals,” says Davies. “When you sit down for your Thanksgiving dinner, you’re ingesting thousands of different chemicals.”

Most of those chemicals, although present in tiny amounts, have potent anti-inflammatory, anticancer, or antibacterial activity. Some “micronutrients” score high on all three.

While all fruits and vegetables contain micronutrients, Davies’s group has found that a food grown under organic conditions often contains more of the helpful compounds than the same food grown by conventional methods. Researchers believe that’s because organically grown plants, not being coddled with all sorts of chemical “help,” must provide their own protection.

“If they’re under attack, they release these natural antioxidants, natural anticancer, antifungal, and antibacterial compounds as a defense mechanism,” says Davies. “So then when we ingest it ultimately, we also have these defense compounds.”

Davies says it makes sense that conventionally grown crops would contain smaller amounts of the compounds. By fertilizing them heavily, we push them to put more energy into rapid growth and less into producing compounds that they don’t need, since we battle the insects, weeds, and infections for them.

His team tests compounds for their ability to kill cancer cells and bacteria, and their ability to prevent or relieve problems such as colitis in lab rats. Almost everywhere they turn they find a new experiment to try. Davies’s group has tested organic and conventional lemonades (organic is much better), different varieties of tomatoes (some are higher in key micronutrients than others), and the peel, pulp, and juice from apples, among other things.

The Washington state attorney general’s office has funded Davies and his colleagues to test several over-the-counter vitamin E supplements. They found that two of the products they examined contained a different form of vitamin E than claimed on the label—a form that lacks the anticancer activity that is a big reason many consumers buy the product.

Jaime Yáñez, a Ph.D. student in Davies’s lab, has mixed feelings about such supplements. While good ones provide a high concentration of important micronutrients, they don’t offer the rich mixture found in whole foods.

“They are good for you,” Yáñez says. “But when you buy a nutraceutical tablet, you’re going to have maybe 15 or 20 compounds. When you eat an apple or some blueberries, you’re talking about more than 5,000 compounds that you are eating.”

Besides, he says, “All these compounds that you can buy are actually natural. I mean, where do they come from? Fruits. So why not eat the fresh fruit? It’s cheaper; it’s natural; and it’s good for you.”

Not to mention, it tastes better.

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