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Being able to attain healthy, nutritious, clean food should be your right as a human being. Yet, in our current capitalistic climate, it is just not that simple. There is big money in food, just as there is big money in Healthcare, and when the only thing we worry about is turning a profit, things go to poorly, quickly. This goes for Conventional AND Alternative Medicine, as well as Organic AND Non-organic.
As aware human beings, the only option we have left is to ask hard questions and to be extremely knowledgeable consumers.
This is why I love my patients. They ask the tough questions, and it makes us all better.
A recent Stanford study was published comparing conventional and Organic food. The research consistently shows that there is not much of a difference in the nutritional content between Organic and Non-organic food. To me, this comes down to the fact that only 7% of the soil in the US is rated grade 1 prime, and if Organic or non-organic fruits and vegetables are picked and then transported thousands of miles, we can expect them to lose their nutritional content. But nutritional quality isn’t really why I buy Organic food anyways and I am not going to bang you over the head with stats about how the nutrient content of food has been depleted drastically since World War II. You see more about that here.
Studies have found that our current food supply is too weak to replete depleted cells in the human body. This makes a lot more sense to me. Think about it. If someone has eaten one, maybe three servings of vegetables a day for 20+ years, and they needed 13+ to just meet the RDA (which gets tossed if you exercise heavily or are stressed), are they going to be able to replete that by eating 13+ now? As my friend Teo annoyingly says all the time, “It’s simple math.” In this case, it is, and sometimes I don’t believe we can look backwards to fix new world problems. AKA, we are not going to be to supply the entire world population with food by going back to using oxen and single plows. You aren’t going to walk into new age war-zone with a bow and arrow or a hatchet. Thus, it looks like modern humans are going to need supplements.
So then why buy Organic?
It is the right thing to do….?
I believe that answer is Yes, but it is also convoluted, and sometimes we are really just picking between the far lesser of two evils (Organic farms can still use about 20 pesticides – here is an article from Scientific American). Still, I am never going to buy vegetables that are pounded with glyphosate or eat Bt-corn, which is known to rip apart our intestinal lining (this is how it kills insects). I am never going to even pick up meat from animals that live in their own shit and suffer every day of their lives. NEVER.
Philosophers stone – selected views from the boat http://philosophers-stone.co.uk