What is it about?
Health concerns is a main motivation behind consumers choice of organic foods. We used focus groups with Danish organic consumers, to investigate their understanding of health. When discussing food in general, consumers understood health as nutrition. When explaining their purchase of organic food, however, health as purity (i.e. absence of additives and chemical residuals) was dominant; other understandings like health as nutrition, health as pleasure and health in a holistic perspective were far less dominant.
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Why is it important?
These results are important for future empirical research in organic consumers because they highlight the need to specify the understanding of health asked about in surveys and interview studies. Too often, such studies ask about health in general, making it difficult to interpret the results. For producers and manufactures in the organic sector, it shows that they seem to supply products in accordance with consumer demands, that is products where the content of external contaminants is minimised.
Perspectives
Often debates about organic food and health end up being a discussion about if it is possible to present scientific evidence proving that organic food is or isn't more nutritious that conventional food. I hope this article will contribute to a more nuanced discussion of health aspects of organic food in the future.
Professor Jesper Lassen
University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Healthy food is nutritious, but organic food is healthy because it is pure: The negotiation of healthy food choices by Danish consumers of organic food, Food Quality and Preference, January 2019, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.foodqual.2018.06.001.
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