Why do consumers of organic food have more nutritionally balanced diets? – a Danish study

Policies encouraging consumers to follow nutritional dietary guidelines are widely used by governments as a strategy to improve public health. Organic consumers seem to adhere to nutritional guidelines more than others, but it remains obscure why, exactly, there is a correlation between eating healthily and organic consumption. Based on six focus groups, 1519 survey respondents, and purchase data from 2449 households (all data collected in Denmark), we found that not only dedicated but also occasional organic consumers eat more fruit and vegetables and less meat than consumers with no or little organic consumption. We also found that earlier findings on product-level consumption carried over to a meal context, where organic consumers were more likely to substitute some of the meat in their meal with vegetables than non-organic consumers. When respondents were asked about healthy food in general, nutritional health (involving fat, sugar, nutrients) was the dominant health dimension, but the health benefits of organic food were linked to the purity of organic products (e.g. being free-from pesticides, drug residues and artificial additives). We conclude that organic consumption and a nutritionally balanced diet are both driven by an underlying interest in health