By Lindsay Abrams

Fruit flies fed organic produce from Whole Foods lived longer and laid more eggs than those fed the store’s conventionally grown offerings.

PROBLEM: Last September when Stanford researchers came out with findings that organic food doesn’t confer any additional nutritional value, the world countered: Of course not. While organic fruits and vegetables can claim health benefits in that they lack any number of additives that come included with traditionally farmed foods, calling produce organic doesn’t make it any healthier than it already, by virtue of being a fruit or vegetable, is supposed to be.

Still, that doesn’t mean researchers can’t turn it around and ask if produce containing chemicals, preservatives, and hormones are, comparatively, a little bit less healthy. While we know organic food serves the interests of the environment, public health, and human rights, there’s a lot we still don’t know about its benefits for the individual supermarket shopper deciding between the banana with the “organic” sticker and the one that’s heaped in with the other, conventional foods.

METHODS: At Southern Methodist University, researchers raised fruit flies on extracts of typical grocery store produce. Different groups of flies received either organic or conventional versions of potatoes, soybeans, raisins, or bananas, all purchased from the same Texas Whole Foods.

RESULTS: Despite the relatively poor health exhibited by all — as happens when one lives its entire life consuming only one type of food — the flies who ate organic generally performed better on a number of health measures.

Specifically, diets of organic potatoes, raisins, and soy were all associated with significantly longer lifespans, with no difference seen between organic and conventional bananas. Flies raised on organic versions of all four foods were more fertile.

Organic raisins, though, were outliers, associated with poorer outcomes in tests of stress and “starvation resistance.”

IMPLICATIONS: Fruit flies that wish to live long and prosper should hover around the organic food aisle. These results can’t tell us why organic foods appeared to improve health outcomes. But they do suggest that on a food-by-food basis, some organic foods may be “healthier” — in the broadest sense of the term — than their conventionally grown counterparts. Should that be the case, then we potentially have an entirely individualistic reason to buy organic.