Is it worth eating organic food?
Lorena has done some research over the years and like so many people she was sold on the idea that standard food was bad for health and organic was good. So we have tried to include some organic food items (going 100% organic is way too expensive) like milk and vegetables (we almost never eat any animals these days but when we do buy chicken, we try to pick organic). The small change in our food may have added a few hundred dollars each month to our groceries budget but it is hard to see if it has helped us in any other way, considering that we do so many other things to be healthy.
When I read this study that demonstrates that there are practically no benefits to organic foods and the wonders of organic eating were nothing but marketing messages from producers, I was not surprised. Anything organic has been a huge trend that many corporations have tried to ride on by introducing a whole range of organic products. If the media couldn’t stop talking about it, well, someone was funding the pitches.
So what do we do now? Should we give up eating organic foods? Lorena and I have discussed this and concluded that the impact on our budget is too small to change the way we are eating, but we do not have to blindly pick an organic product over a conventional product (e.g. we bought a whole bunch of organic wines for no reason other than that they were organic). As tempting as it is to not put nasty chemicals in our bodies, one has to also look at the hard data to make that decision (it appears that organic products do contain less of the toxic stuff but it is entirely up to you to decide whether you want to put any toxins in your body at all, even if FDA finds them to be harmless — by the way I am no fan of FDA either, considering how much pressure it is from business friendly politicians to deregulate). And this study has clearly concluded that the toxicity of standard foods in America is low enough to not justify eating organic.
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