Live Healthy By Going The Organic Way

What is the organic movement all about? A couple of things, namely health and environment. First, it is a reaction to decades of corporate farming companies growing crops with chemicals and pesticides, possibly to the detriment of our health.

Organic products also help out local farmers and ranchers. You are often purchasing locally produced foods, if you buy organic. This keeps money in your local economy, and is environmentally sound because it limits the amount of fuel used in shipping to market.

These are all noble goals, but the bottom line is that with some items, buying organic is a matter of protecting your health. Other products are fairly resilient and not affected by organic practices, either because they are protected by a thick skin or because they don’t soak up and retain the chemicals used in growing.

Other foods are better to buy organic, because they are sensitive to pesticides or chemicals:

1. Meat: Corporate farms often feed their livestock antibiotics to prevent disease, to offset crowded conditions in which they are raised. They are also fed chemicals to make them grow larger more quickly, so that it costs less to raise them to the point where they can be slaughtered for meat. The drugs and chemicals that animals are fed don’t disappear when they are killed – often the compounds stay in the meat, and are ingested by humans.

Organic certification not only prevents the livestock farmers from feeding them chemicals and drugs, but also provides some assurance of humane treatment. Animal products marked ‘organic’ come from animals that must be given some outdoor time each day, which is better than no time outside but should not be confused with genuinely humane treatment.

2. Coffee: Both the designation of organic and “Fair Trade” is important with coffee. When you purchase fair trade coffee, you are getting coffee that has been grown and harvested without the exploitation of workers. The workers who grew and harvested your fair trade coffee have been paid fair wages.

3. Some fruits: the Environmental Working Group has put out a list naming which foods tend to have high concentrations of chemicals. The number one item on this list, with the highest concentration of chemicals, is peaches. Always purchase organic peaches – the thin skin of a peach, together with the pulpy fruit, means that they tend to absorb and retain the chemicals that they have been grown with.

Other fruits that hold pesticides, and that you may want to purchase organic, are: apples, strawberries, cherries, and grapes. Wine, since it comes from grapes, should also be purchased organic when possible.

Besides organic food, the writer also frequently pens articles regarding the cork boards and dry erase white board.