Why Do People Buy Organic Products and Foods?

It can be difficult to know what to buy at the grocery store for you and your family. There are so many products to choose from; they all seem to be doing the same thing: feeding you. But organic foods can do more than just provide you with nutrients. Read about organic foods and their benefits in Pritish Kumar Halder’s post.

Read on to learn more about some of these things and why buying organic food is a good idea.

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Consume fewer pesticides

Since organic farming does not use harmful pesticides, the foods that come from it are healthy. Some organic farmers use pesticides, but these materials are all-natural and toxin-free. Even so, every natural pesticide still has to be approved for organic farming, so there’s no need to worry.

The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) and the National Organic Program (NOP) maintain a list of materials used in organic production. This list is compiled with the help of farmers, businesses, consumers, and the general public. The general rule for the national list is that materials from nature are allowed, and materials made in a lab are not. In addition, approved natural pesticides can only be used when other means of getting rid of pests, such as agricultural cleaning, do not work.

More Nutrients

Most people don’t know it, but our cultivated soil doesn’t have enough nutrients to grow healthy, sustainable, and biodiverse crops. Several studies have shown this to be true. For this reason, foods no longer contain as many vitamins and minerals as before.

A study examining the nutritional value of organic and conventional plant-based foods found that organic crops contained significantly more vitamin C, magnesium, iron, and phosphorus and significantly fewer nitrates.

Healthier soil

Your choices at the grocery store affect the health of the earth the same way they affect your health. Foods that aren’t organic are sprayed with dangerous chemicals that kill everything but the crop. This includes all the living things a plant needs to grow and add nutrients to the soil. When these organisms are killed, they are replaced with synthetic fertilizers made from more dangerous chemicals.

The ground struggles to correct itself. Therefore, more chemicals have to be used with even fewer good nutrients in the soil. When organic food is grown instead, there are fewer chemicals in the soil, making the soil healthier.

Pollinators benefit

Organic farms and crops are good for bees and other pollinators and protect them from dangerous chemicals. Pollinators are harmed by toxic synthetic pesticides, the destruction of native habitats, and the lack of nutritious foods due to the widespread use of monoculture.

Several studies confirm that organic farming is better for honeybees. It also has more pollinators in and around the land than conventional agriculture. Indeed, organic farming standards not only prohibit synthetic pesticides, which are very dangerous for bees and can remain in the environment for a long time but also oblige organic farmers to manage their farms in a way that improves natural resources and promotes biodiversity.

1. Organic foods are produced without the use of genetic engineering or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Consumers are understandably alarmed about untested and unlabeled genetically modified ingredients in foods commonly sold in supermarkets. Genetically engineered ingredients are now found in at least 75 percent of all non-organic U.S. processed foods, even in many products labeled or advertised as “natural” or “all-natural.” And the overwhelming majority of non-organic meat, dairy, and eggs are derived from animals reared on a steady diet of GM animal feed. Organic standards prohibit the use of GMOs in foods labeled as “organic.”  To safeguard organic standards, OCA believes that genetically engineered animal vaccines, now temporarily allowed in organics, should be banned.

2. Organic farming prohibits the use of toxic pesticides, antibiotics, growth hormones, and climate-destabilizing chemical fertilizers. Consumers worry about pesticide and drug residues routinely found in non-organic produce, processed foods, and animal products. Recent studies indicate that an alarming percentage of U.S. meat contains dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria. To safeguard organic standards, OCA believes that the loophole in organic poultry production, whereby one-day-old chicks are injected with antibiotics, should be eliminated, along with the practice of spraying the antibiotic streptomycin on organic apples and pears.

 

3. Organic foods and farming are climate-friendly. People are increasingly concerned about climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas pollution, including CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide. Between 35-50 percent of these gasses in North America come from our energy-intensive, chemical-intensive food & factory. On the other hand, organic farms and ranches use far less fossil fuel, emit far less methane and nitrous oxide, and can safely sequester large amounts of CO2 in the soil (up to 7,000 pounds of CO2 per acre per year, every year.) Twenty-four billion pounds of chemical fertilizers applied on non-organic farms in the U.S. every year pollute our drinking water and create enormous dead zones in the oceans. They also release enormous amounts of nitrous oxide, a super potent, climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas.

 

4. Organic food certification prohibits nuclear irradiation. Consumers are justifiably alarmed about irradiating food with nuclear waste or electron beams, which destroy vitamins and nutrients and produce cancer-causing chemicals such as benzene and formaldehyde. OCA believes that “mutagenesis,” a process that involves irradiating seeds and microorganisms to induce mutation, should be banned from organics.

 

5. Consumers worry about rampant e-Coli, salmonella, campylobacter, Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), and fecal contamination in animal products coming out of the nation’s inhumane and filthy slaughterhouses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention admit that millions of Americans suffer from food poisoning every year. Very few cases of food poisoning have ever been linked to organic farms or food processors.

 

6. Consumers are concerned about billions of pounds of toxic municipal sewage sludge dumped as “fertilizer” on 140,000 of America’s chemical farms. Scientific evidence has confirmed that municipal sewage sludge contains hundreds of dangerous pathogens, toxic heavy metals, flame-retardants, endocrine disruptors, carcinogens, pharmaceutical drugs, and other hazardous chemicals coming from residential drains, stormwater runoff, hospitals, and industrial plants. Organic standards categorically prohibit the use of sewage sludge on organic farms and ranches.

7. Consumers worry about the routine practice of grinding up slaughterhouse waste and feeding this offal (the parts of a butchered animal that are considered inedible by human beings) and blood back to other animals, a practice that has given rise to a form of the human mad-cow disease called CJD, often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Animals on organic farms cannot be fed slaughterhouse waste, manure, or blood—offal that is routinely fed to animals on America’s factory farms. OCA believes that the current loophole allowing organic sausage casings to be made from the intestines of non-organic animals (most of whom no doubt were fed slaughterhouse waste) should be eliminated.

 

8. Consumers care about the humane treatment of animals. Organic farming, by law, prohibits the intensive confinement of farm animals. In addition to the cruelty and unhealthy confinement of animals on factory farms, scientists warn that these CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) produce enormous volumes of manure and urine, which not only pollute surface and groundwater but also emit large quantities of methane, a powerful climate-destabilizing greenhouse gas. OCA believes that the National Organic Program should crack down on large organic poultry and dairy operations where the animals are intensely confined, with little or no opportunity to go outdoors. To date, the USDA has ignored the pleas of organic stakeholders, consumers, and ethical family farmers, to crack down on the scofflaws milking as many as 10,000 cows on “organic” farms and confining as many as 100,000 “organic” birds to a henhouse.

 

9. Consumers are concerned about purchasing foods with high nutritional value and as few as possible synthetic or non-organic ingredients. Organic foods are nutritionally dense compared to foods produced with toxic chemicals, chemical fertilizers, and GMO seeds. Studies show that organic foods contain more vitamins, cancer-fighting antioxidants, and important trace minerals. Traditionally the “National List” of non-organic ingredients allowed in certified organic products was relatively short, with a “sunset clause” designed to phase these non-organic ingredients out as quickly as possible.

 

In September 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under pressure from corporate interests represented by the Organic Trade Association, without any input from the public, changed the way the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) decides which non-organic materials are allowed in certified organic. Before the change, the industry needed 10 of 15 votes to keep a non-organic material on the National List of allowed substances in organic, or the material would automatically be dropped, or “sunsetted,” after five years. Under the new rules, non-organic materials automatically remain on the list, unless 10 board members vote to remove them from the list. The rule change now all but guarantees that when the NOSB (now comprised of a majority of industry representatives as opposed to organic consumer or organic farmer representatives) meets every six months, the list of non-organic and synthetic materials allowed in organic will get longer and longer.

 

10. Consumers care about preserving America’s family farms, they care about world hunger, and the plight of the world’s two billion small farmers. Just about the only small farmers who stand a chance of making a decent living these days are organic farmers, who get a better price for their products. In addition, study after study has shown that small organic farms in the developing world produce twice as much food per acre as chemical and GMO farms while using far less fossil fuel and sequestering large amounts of excess CO2 in the soil. Yields on organic farms in the industrialized world are comparable to the yields on chemical and GMO farms, with the important qualification that organic farms far out-produce chemical farms under extreme weather conditions of drought or torrential rains. Given accelerated climate change, extreme weather is fast becoming the norm.

 

For all these reasons, millions of American consumers are turning to organic foods and other organic items, including clothing and body care products. It’s part of an overall movement toward healthy living, preserving the environment, and reversing global warming. But to move this Great Organic Transition forward we need to safeguard and strengthen organic stands, not weaken them.

ref from:-http://wikipedia