Is Organic Really Better?



The foods you eat are very important to your health and wellbeing, and for a very long time, the mainstream media have taught people that the foods marked “organic” are best for a healthy living. But how true is this assertion? Are you actually healthier when you eat foods that are labelled “organic”? Many times whenshopping in grocery stores, youare faced with making the choice of either paying more money to buy the apples with the“organic” tags on them or going for the non-organic ones that are generally believed to be less healthy.

Are these organic foods pesticide-free as the label reads? Studies have revealed that just because foods are marked “organic”, it doesn't necessarily mean that they were grown without using pesticides. The fact is that farms that adopt organic methods of growing food and processing crops make use of arange of chemicals that are certified organic, the only difference between this and the conventional synthetic pesticide is that they are produced from natural chemicals.

There seems to be a war against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO), however, to date, there is no reliable evidence that genetically modified food poses danger to human health. In contrast, some recent studies have shown that genetic modification makes crops efficiently resistant to diseases and pests. In some cases, GMOs improve the nutrient content thereby making it healthier for human consumption. Improved resistance to pests means that farmers will lose little or no crops to pests and diseases during harvest, this has the potential of improving food sustainability in developing countries and the world in general. So do we even need to be afraid of pesticides in the first place?

Engineers grow plants using genetically modified organisms to make them tougher, more nutritious and taste better, the most common GMO foods are plants such as fruits and veggies. However, there has always been so much debate about the pros and cons of these GMOs

 Are GMOs safe?

All foods from genetically engineered plants on sale in the U.S. are currently regulated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Carl Winter, a renowned food toxicologist at the University of California and a member of the Institute of Food Technologists toldFuturism, that his worry about the GMO debate is that some of these inaccuracies may end up reaping the health benefits of non-organic foods. He says, “My biggest concern is that a lot of these reports may [produce] a negative effect in that they may discourage people from consuming what are perfectly healthy, conventionally-produced [non-organic] fruits and vegetables,”

“While everybody wants to do what they hear is the right thing, they could be doing themselves more harm than good in the long term.”

Winter also rebuffed the myth that non-organic foods are loaded with pesticides.

“From a consumer standpoint, our levels of exposures are very, very low,” Winter said. But that doesn’t mean farmers can just dump the stuff willy-nilly. “I’m not here to say pesticides are fine and we shouldn’t worry about it. We need to regulate them.”


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