The Top 5 Organic Foods To Switch To Right Now – Part 1

Share Button

By Analise Dubner

milkOrganic foods, while many are owned by the same massive Food Processing Monsters that make junk food, are undeniably better for your health. But we can’t all run over to Whole Foods and get a 2nd mortgage on our house just to buy 4 bags of groceries that may or may not be lining the same pockets that shovel Doritos into our hungry maws. If you can’t afford to switch to local growers or have the time to head down to the Farmer’s Market every Saturday, just these 5 things will dramatically reduce the amount of pesticides/drugs/fecal matter you are ingesting.

1. Milk

There are a million reasons why milk tops the list. I’m not even going to go into the horror of factory farming – and even if I were to, so many of the government certified Organic diary producers don’t allow their cows into anything resembling a pasture. The number one reason to buy organic milk is the hormones and antibiotics. While there has been a huge negative reaction to the introduction of rBGH to American Dairy farmers by Monsanto in 1994, it still remains in any milk carton not labeled “No rBGH”. This growth hormone, which increases milk production but is horribly destructive to the cows it is fed to, contains IGF-1, an insulin-like growth factor. Excess levels of IGF-1 have been increasingly linked to cancer development.

On the other side, milk that comes from cows fed on grass and pasture is high in Conjugated Linoleic Acids (CLAs). These are important fats that have been linked to decreased heart disease and diabetes. Dairy from certified organic farms has not been fed with pesticide-soaked corns and grains, although the goverment certification still allows genetically modified feed and protein additives… meat additives – which are wholly unhealthy for ruminants like cows.

2. Ketchup

If you have kids, and even if you don’t, odds are high that you have ketchup in your fridge right now. 75% of all tomato consumption in the US is in the form of processed tomatoes. Ketchup need contain little more than it’s primary fruit and some flavoring.. and yet if you read the bottle label, you will see a great deal more written there. Thinking about how much processed food damages both the environment and our bodies, just switching to organic on ketchup alone is a big deal. Plus, recent research has shown that organic ketchup has DOUBLE the anti-oxidants of conventional ketchup. And it’s not that much more of a cost.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this article shortly…..

– Analise Dubner is a backpacker, reader, science-nerd, and an obsessive freak about sci-fantasy shows. She writes about health issues for Ranker.com, a platform that hosts thousands of crowdsourced answers to opinion-based questions.