Making a commitment to healthy eating is a great start towards a healthier life. Beyond eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and good fats, however, there is the question of food safety, nutrition, and sustainability. How foods are grown or raised can impact both your health and the environment. This brings up the questions: What is the difference between organic foods and conventionally grown foods? Is “organic” always best?
Organic crops must be grown in safe soil, have no modifications, and must remain separate from conventional products. Farmers are not allowed to use synthetic pesticides, bio engineered genes (GMOs), petroleum-based fertilizers, and sewage sludge-based fertilizers.
Organic livestock must have access to the outdoors and be given organic feed. They may not be given antibiotics, growth hormones, or any animal-by-products.
The evidence is unclear. Some studies suggest that, on average, organically grown fruits and vegetables may contain slightly higher levels of vitamin C, trace minerals, and antioxidant nutrients than conventionally grown produce. However, other studies have found no nutritional differences between organic and non-organic foods.
How to Organic Foods are Beneficial for YOU :
Organic foods provide a variety of benefits. Some studies show that organic foods have more beneficial nutrients, such as antioxidants, than their conventionally grown counterparts. In addition, people with allergies to foods, chemicals, or preservatives often find their symptoms lessen or go away when they eat only organic foods. In addition:
- Organic food is often fresher :- Fresh food tastes better. Organic food is usually fresher when eaten because it doesn’t contain preservatives that make it last longer. Organic produce is often (but not always, so watch where it is from) produced on smaller farms near where it is sold.
- Organic farming is better for the environment :- Organic farming practices reduce pollution (air, water, soil), conserve water, reduce soil erosion, increase soil fertility, and use less energy. In addition, organic farming is better for birds and small animals as chemical pesticides can make it harder for creatures to reproduce and can even kill them. Farming without pesticides is also better for the people who harvest our food.
- Organically raised animals are NOT given antibiotics, growth hormones, or fed animal byproducts. The use of antibiotics in conventional meat production helps create antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria. This means that when someone gets sick from these strains they will be less responsive to antibiotic treatment. Not feeding animal byproducts to other animals reduces the risk of mad cow disease . In addition, the animals are given more space to move around and access to the outdoors, both of which help to keep the animals healthy. The more crowded the conditions, the more likely an animal is to get sick.
- Yes, organic foods generally costs more. But so they should: organic farmers – if they are truly organic – are husbanding the soil and the environment. And this costs more than running a mainstream farm. Mainstream, non-organic farmers are taking more from the soil than they give back – it is impossible to sustain this mode of agriculture. Conventional foods are subsidized by the environment so their cost does not reflect the true cost of their production: fuel, transport costs and subsidies, chemical regulation and testing, health and downstream social problems and other externalities. Mainstream agriculture has a higher ecological footprint than does organic agriculture. In the long-term, an organic approach to agriculture is the only sustainable mode of food production.
Organic farmers have most of the costs of mainstream farmers, but they also have the additional costs of replenishing and maintaining the soils so that each year's crops come out of soils that are no more depleted than the soils that produced the previous crop. We consumers should feel privileged to be able to pay our farmers for this replenishment, restorative and rejuvenative husbandry.
organic soil quality is rich and cropping can be sustained, preventing soil erosion; rainwater is absorbed rather than running off.
Both the water that runs off and the water that is absorbed are free of pesticides and artificial fertilizers that contaminate downstream and underground water storage. More water is absorbed in soils with high organic content and more water is held for longer in soils with higher organic content. This will become increasingly important with climate change to absorb rainfall and prevent damaging floods, to prevent desiccation of soils (allowing more vegetation to grow and cool the surface.
Because they are grown in rich organic soils, with abundant bacterial, worm, insect and fungal activity and stable moisture levels, the plants and animals growing healthier and – when the time comes – better food for predators ... like us. In the absence of pesticides organically-grown plants produce more compounds to protect themselves from fungal and other infections; some of these compounds also have health-giving properties for humans. These compounds are present in very small quantities, are rarely tested for, and their effects on humans are larely unknown. What we do know is that these compounds – which were part of our evolutionary diet and, also, present in the air our ancestors breathed – are disappearing from our diet as a result of industrial farming techniques combined with a market focus on shape, size and sweetness as selection criteria.
Fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides. Artificial fertilizers are inimical to soil microbes. Many other chemicals are implicated in cancer, birth defects, nerve damage and mutations. They also can accumulate to toxic levels as they move up the food chain. Humans are the only species that deliberately poisons its food and there is far less chance of such poisons in the food chain from an organic grower to you, the consumer.
Organic farms are relatively labour intensive (using the skill, judgement, time, knowledge as well as the physical power of workers) rather than petroleum intensive. Mainstream farms also use fertilizers that have heavy production and transport costs and are generally produced or refined with high fossil fuel inputs
Organic farms have a wider range of plant and animal species than monoculture farms. Monocultural farms are also more vulnerable to pests.
Farm workers in monocultural agriculture have a much greater risk of cancers. In third world countries the same risks are magnified as control mechanisms are weak and there are children, illiterate people and farmers desperate to squeeze production out the soil without regard to future seasons.
Organic farmers are renowned for their devotion to producing heritage varieties of fruit and vegetables.
Although some people place a large store on organic foods having a more appealing flavour, improved flavour is not necessarily a characteristic of organic food. Organic foods may have a stronger flavour as they will have grown more slowly on a fuller range of nutrients, but there is no reason why that should necessarily make them more palatable to Homo sapiens. As organic foods are growing in soils closer to those under which they evolved and under husbandry practices that leave them more free to be themselves, their flavour may actually be less appealing to humans.Don't be disappointed if you can't detect a more favoured flavour in your organic foods. Modern plant varieties have often been selected with flavour as a main criterion. But modern mass market taste is for sweetness and blandness; a more refined palate will look for a distinctive flavour and will not be seduced by sweetness.
Like taste and flavour, the appearance of organic fresh foods may stand in contrast to foods from the supermarket chains. Larger size, uniformity and absence of blemishes are features that wholesalers and retailers can select for at wholesale markets. This means that what reaches the shops is often only those deemed the most attractive grades of foods, the others having been sold for processing, animal feed, sent to landfill or left to rot on the farms. These supermarket-preferred grades have no relation to nutritional quality and are determined solely on external appearance. Organic retailers are less critical of superficial, cosmetic differences from the commercial ideal, so what they sell will not always look as pretty. Superficial appeal is often achieved by more spraying, by addition of colouring agents (in the case of eggs and oranges) and by selective breeding for appearance. Supermarkets stock only the mainstream varieties of, say, apples and pears, whereas organic growers and sellers delight in growing and selling heritage varieties, even when these have been superseded in the supermarkets. Organic retailers will accept a larger range of skill blemishes than will supermarkets. Often these skin blemishes (especially in the case of apricots and russeted apples) point to a much tastier fruit. Organic foods have a smaller market than the mainstream and organic fruit and vegetables may remain on the shelves longer than in the supermarkets who often dump fruit every few days; supermarket foods may, therefore, be fresher. They may, on the other hand, just look fresher as their fresh appearance could have been achieved by storing the fruit and vegetables in gases and specially-developed plastic wraps that retard the natural ageing processes, while also allowing unnatural chemicals to permeate the food plants.
Certification costs organic producers, but it is your best single guarantee that the foods you purchase are organic
If you have any suggestion or Quarries Regarding Our Product and Services, Please Let us know Our contact details Are :
Plot No. 266, Faizabad Road,
Kamta, Post Chinhat
Lucknow-227105
Tel: +91-(0)522-2701579, 099562 96685
Fax: +91-(0)522-2701395
SMS: OI to 58888
Kamta, Post Chinhat
Lucknow-227105
Tel: +91-(0)522-2701579, 099562 96685
Fax: +91-(0)522-2701395
SMS: OI to 58888
Toll Free No.: 1800-180-5153
Abhishek Tiwari
abhishek.tiwari@organicindia.com
+91-9793065189
visit us : www.organicindia.com
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