Eating Healthy with Organic Foods

The 1980s had “low-fat.” The 1990s had “fat-free.” The latest buzz word to hit supermarket shelves is “organic.” In the produce section of just about every grocery store in the land is a section devoted to organic fruits and vegetables. Cereals and other products also feature fancy new packaging labeling the food contained within as “organic.” It’s everywhere. In fact, there are even entire grocery store chains devoted to organic products and free range meats and poultry.

How is Organic Food Different?

Foods which are labeled organic are grown without the assistance of fertilizers and pesticides. They hearken back to an earlier, more holistic age of agriculture, when foods were grown naturally, using the Earth’s own biological processes.

Organic farming relies heavily on composting and manure for its soil fertilization rather than through the application of chemicals. Because compost is essentially alive with microorganisms, adding it to the soil is often referred to as “feeding the soil to feed the plants.”

What is Free Range Meat and Poultry?

When you see a package of meat at the grocery store and it claims to be “free range” beef, it essentially means that the farm where the livestock comes from doesn’t cage in their animals. The farms provide a more natural way for the animals to live, and many believe that the relaxed and tranquil lifestyle helps the quality of the meat whereas when animals are stressed, they sometimes release chemicals into the meat.

Other names for free range meats include “free roaming” or “pasture raised.” The term “free range” is applied to meats, eggs and dairy products. For organically raised chickens, the term used is usually “pastured poultry.”

Is Organic Food Better for You?

This is a question that brings up a heated debate. Advocates against organic farming will try to dismiss the practice and even go so far as to say the use of manure as a fertilizer increases the chances of E. coli and Salmonella. However, studies have shown that there is no greater risk of contracting one of these illnesses regardless of which farming method is used.

Organic foods have been proven to not only taste better, but to also contain more of the food’s natural vitamins and minerals than foods harvested by modern farming methods.

A study released in the Journal of Applied Nutrition in 1993 stated that organically grown foods contained 63 percent more calcium, 73 percent more iron, 118 percent more magnesium, 91 percent more phosphorus, 125 percent more potassium, 60 percent more zinc and a whopping 178 percent more molybdenum than non-organic foods. In addition to the high levels of minerals, the organically grown food also contained 29 percent less mercury, a potentially dangerous chemical.

Another study published in the 2003 Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry showed that organically grown fruits and vegetables contained significantly more antioxidants than food grown by conventional means.

Fruits and vegetables release a certain chemical compound in response to stresses related to the environment, like insects and competing plants. These chemicals, called phenolic compounds, are the plant’s natural defense system and they are an extremely effective antioxidant in the human body. When a plant is not subjected to the stresses of the environment, it doesn’t create the phenolic compounds, which means that humans don’t absorb the chemical when they eat the food. Conventional farming’s use of pesticides and insecticides reduces this natural process whereas organic farming does not.

In closing, organically grown foods offer tremendous health benefits when compared to their conventional farming competition. Better flavor, more vitamins and minerals and higher levels of antioxidants far outweigh the slightly higher cost of the organic foods. For people who are serious about their health and interested in helping to end the planet’s current global warming crisis, eating organic can certainly help you get on your way to reaching both of those goals.

Have you considered sports the Green Way?

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