organic food inquiry -- crunchy hippies please read!

[daddysambiguity]

Last night I was kept awake until 5AM by a show about the creepy connections between the FDA, food manufacturers and drug companies. Essentially, medications and medicine companies make everything a disease in order to make money. They want to keep everyone sick when really there are natural cures to many ailments, or "diseases", but natural

Comments

[derekja]

I only drink soymilk. I eat cheese sometimes and fish now and then, but other than that I'm vegan.

There are two problems with non-organic meat products (well, lots more than that, but two that directly relate to your health). The first is that almost all commercially raised meat these days are stuffed full of growth hormones to make them mature more quickly. Up to 5 times more quickly in the case of chickens. These hormones are in the blood and tissues of the animals and just get passed right on to you when eat the meat products. The other concern is antibiotics. Since these animals are stuffed together into absolutely inhumane conditions diseases run rampant and the only way to keep them under control is to use preventative antibiotics. These also find their way into you and can lead to antibiotic resistant infections.

I'm reading a book right now called "Altering Eden: the feminization of nature" that makes a really good case for the use of hormones having a significant effect on animals and people in terms of sexual characteristics as well. This book mostly concentrates on natural animal populations that live downstream of feed lots and such, but the results are amazing. For instance, PCBs and pesticides such as DDT have an effect specifically on male hormones. The book relates the investigation of a population of alligators in Florida in 1990. The population had crashed and they investigated and found that pesticide runoff in the river had led to a doubling of estrogen levels in male alligators and a substantial reduction in testosterone levels.

Now you're not eating nearly as many pesticides as the alligators and if you wash your veggies I'm sure that the pesticide effect is fairly negligible, but the idea of it is scary!

So yeah, organic is good... I just got a really good cookbook from the library called "The natural health cookbook" that has some great recipes and such... you might want to read "Diet for a small planet" as well, although it concentrates on societal issues of vegetarianism and organics as much as it does the personal health aspects.