Organic or Non-Organic? Do you know what you are eating?
Hello all! 🙂 Did you miss me! I don’t think I’ve ever posted this late! 😛 Not that I’m a morning person but if I make my posts the first thing I do, then I have the rest of the morning to play in the kitchen! 🙂
Today I want to ask the question… organic or non-organic? Do you go shopping at a specific place or get a vegetable box delivered because you know you will get organic? Do you go to a regular store with the intention of buying organic… only to find that actually you are very limited in your selection!? Or, maybe you have never thought about how your food is grown and what pesticide residues are actually in it?!
In 2014 the British Journal of Nutrition published the findings of Newcastle Universities (UK) comprehensive review of organic versus non-organic produce. In the scientific study 343 different publications mainly relating to crops were analysed to consider the differences in composition of organically grown versus non-organically grown foods. The findings show that there are indeed significant differences and as Professor Carlo Leifert from Newcastle University states:
“This study demonstrates that choosing food produced according to organic standards can lead to increased intake of nutritionally desirable antioxidants and reduced exposure to toxic heavy metals” (www.ncl.ac.uk press release).
What does this mean? This means that all the food you buy which isn’t labelled as organic contains up to four times the amount of toxic heavy metal (cadmium) and the levels of healthy antioxidants deplete with levels from 19-69% lower than the organic equivalent! Therefore by choosing organic you can get a higher concentration of nutrition boosting polyphenolic antioxidants in a smaller quantity of food – great for reducing the effects of many chronic illnesses as well as being a great cancer preventative! 🙂
Sounds great in theory but…
Yesterday we conducted an experiment! 🙂 We visited the largest branch in our town of each of the five major supermarkets in the UK. Our discovery? Only ‘one’ of the chains had what I would call a ‘decent’ selection of organic fruits and vegetables… but not enough to get us through a few days let alone a week! It wasn’t that they had run out of stock, rather that they didn’t even stock organic! We were looking for what we think as standard items such as broccoli, green beans, bananas and apples to name a few and we discovered that for fruits it was slighter easier to buy organic but vegetables were generally met with a shake of a head and a ‘sorry no we don’t do that in organic’!
Of course, there is then another issue of freshness (and price) as until more people opt for or request organic, the organic produce which is available will stay at a premium price and also might have seen better days like these poor samples we saw!
What do you think? Organic? Non-organic? Depends?