You can probably guess that I’m going to disagree.  That’s my gut reaction anyway.  If I’m fair, though, high-fructose corn syrup is an outstanding example of the confusion at the heart of much of the nutrition world.  Depending on whom you ask, high-fructose corn syrup can be shown to be the root of all evil or just another delightful way to sweeten our foods.  So which is it?

It’s Made From Corn

It’s true what our lady told her man- high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is made from corn, but that’s a definite oversimplification.  Making HFCS isn’t in the realm of making, say, maple syrup, which involves little more than drilling a hole into a tree and waiting.  In fact, it’s exponentially more complicated, to the point of being industrial.

The short version of this process is still fairly long, so bear with me.  In order to minimize your boredom, I’m going to skip the processing of corn into cornstarch and use cornstarch as the starting material.  First, cornstarch is treated with an enzyme called alpha-amylase.  This enzyme breaks cornstarch down into shorter chemical chains, which happens to a further degree when the cornstarch is treated with yet another enzyme, glucoamylase.  These enzymes come from bacteria and fungus, respectively, making them making them relatively inexpensive.  The third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, is very expensive, and is used to convert the glucose in the cornstarch into a mixture of glucose and fructose (mixture A).

Next, the mixture is refined with carbon filters and ion exchange, and liquid chromatography is used to increase the percentage of fructose in the mixture.  Finally, this high-fructose mixture is blended with the aforementioned glucose/fructose mixture (mixture A) and viola, high-fructose corn syrup is born!

Simplifying HFCS to the point where “it’s made from corn” is akin to calling it “natural”, a word not used in the commercial, but frequently thrown around the rest of the pro-HFCS website (which is coincidentally sponsored by the Corn Refiners Association).  Technically, you could call this process and resulting mixture “natural”, especially considering that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has no formal definition for the word “natural”, but do you even know what liquid chromatography is?  Do you know what a tree and bucket are?  Which of those scenarios seems more “natural” to you?

As for the moderation part, I’ll give them some credit.  Part of me immediately thinks this is an excuse, as the same argument could be made for any number of dietary and lifestyle practices.  But yes, sure, high-fructose corn syrup is fine in moderation.  The issue is that we don’t consume it at that level.

American Consumption Doesn’t Qualify as Moderation

As of 2005, soda, made with high-fructose corn syrup, was the number one source of calories in America.¹ According to the USDA, the availability per capita (how much was available to be consumed per person) of high-fructose corn syrup increased 10,673 percent from 1970-2005.⁹ Today, a majority of the sweeteners used by food and beverage manufacturers (55 percent) are made from corn.¹ That reliance means that HFCS is found in a vast number of products, including salad dressings, cookies, breads, juices, cereals, granola bars, candies, condiments, crackers, pastries and cakes, chocolate, yogurt, ice cream, jams and jellies, sauces, and chips.  Of the money Americans spend on food, 90 percent is spent on processed foods.¹ If we eat this many processed foods made by manufacturers that rely so heavily on high-fructose corn syrup, can we really call that moderation?

The Calories are the Same

Okay, so maybe the idea that high-fructose corn syrup and sugar have the same number of calories means something, but it’s only a fraction of the story.  If calories were all nutrition was about, you certainly wouldn’t need my help.  Let’s look beyond this distracting oversimplification and talk about how this compound differs from sugar and how those differences affect your body.

Here’s where I have to get technical again for a moment.  The differences between HFCS and regular table sugar are twofold.  There is a small percentage difference in fructose concentration, with table sugar being fifty percent each glucose and fructose, and high-fructose corn syrup at either forty-two percent fructose or fifty-five percent fructose (the remainder in either case being glucose).   There is also a difference in whether the glucose and fructose are bound together.  In table sugar, they are bound to one another, and in high-fructose corn syrup, they aren’t.   Again, depending on whom you ask, either of these differences can be made into a major issue or dismissed as a minor detail.  It appears that the answer lies somewhere in between.

To illustrate what I mean let’s look at soda, since Americans drink a ridiculous amount of it.  Most sodas have HFCS in them, and studies show that it is the free (unbound) fructose within HFCS that causes the metabolic differences between HFCS and sugar.^{5, 6, 7} Sugar stimulates a hormone called insulin to be released, which goes into your blood, picks up the sugar from the things you eat and drink, and stores it tidily away in your cells (after fulfilling the body’s energy needs).  Free, unbound fructose in HFCS doesn’t stimulate insulin to be released.  Thus, rather than being digested into blood sugar, HFCS seems to end up being converted to trigylcerides (a form of fat in your blood) and fat tissue.

Aside from direct conversion to fat, this bypassing of insulin stimulation causes other problems.  Because insulin isn’t released, it can’t enhance the production of another hormone, leptin.  Leptin regulates appetite control and metabolism.  Because fructose fails to stimulate leptin, your brain doesn’t receive the signal that you’re full.  If you are not receiving the signal that you are full, you are more likely to overeat.  Therefore, despite the fact that sugar and high-fructose corn syrup match calorically, they certainly are not the same thing.

In the United States, soda is predominantly sweetened with HFCS, whereas many other countries are still using sugar.  Does that mean you should start importing your soda?  It’s not that easy, as unfortunately there also are downfalls to consuming excess table sugar.  Regardless of the intricacies in their chemical structures, too much of any sweetener means too many calories consumed.  But remember that it’s not just about calories.  Too much sugar leads to weight gain (especially around your middle, as the belly is the first place excess sugars are stored), increases in total cholesterol and LDL or “bad” cholesterol, and a condition called insulin resistance.  Long-term insulin resistance may lead to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, insomnia, carbohydrate craving, depression and mood swings, migraine headaches, heartburn, and irritable bowel syndrome.

What’s a Person to Do?

The easy answer is to limit your intake of all sweeteners, including high-fructose corn syrup.  Many of those against HFCS point to the mirrored increased consumption of HFCS alongside increased rates of obesity and diabetes as proof that HFCS is detrimental to your health.  It would be nice if it were that simple, but it seems that HFCS is only a part of the overall picture of the changes that have taken place in the Standard American Diet (SAD), including increased portion sizes and increased intake of processed foods.

Ideally, your diet would consist of whole foods and your sweet tooth would be satisfied by small amounts of fruit and natural, unrefined sweeteners like honey, stevia, maple syrup, agave nectar, brown rice syrup, date sugar, Sucanat, vegetable glycerin, and xylitol.

The big question: Was our lady correct to brush aside the unarticulated concerns of her man?  I ultimately return to the principle that guides me whenever science doesn’t offer a simple and easy answer; the less a food is processed, the better.  Given that you can’t drill into a kernel of corn and wait for high-fructose corn syrup to come spilling out, I’d say she say she shouldn’t be so quick to bite into that popsicle.

¹ Mercola, Dr. J. (2009) Don’t Believe the Hype — Fructose Truly is Much Worse Than Glucose, from Natural Health Information Articles and Health Newsletter by Dr. Joseph Mercola Web Site: http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/05/16/Dont-Believe-the-Hype-Fructose-Truly-is-Much-Worse-Than-Glucose.aspx
² Forristal, LJ. (2003) The Murky World of High-Fructose Corn Syrup from The Weston A. Price Foundation Web Site: http://www.westonaprice.org/motherlinda/cornsyrup.html
³ High-Fructose Corn Syrup from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_fructose_corn_syrup
⁴ U.S. Consumption of Caloric Sweeteners. (2008), from USDA Economic Research Service Web Site: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Briefing/Sugar/data.htm
⁵ Bray, GA, et al. (2004). Consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in beverages may play a role in the epidemic of obesity. American Society for Clinical Nutrition, 79(4), 537-543.
⁶ Elliott, SS, et al. (2002). Fructose, weight gain, and the insulin resistance syndrome. American Society for Clinical Nutrition, 76(5), 911-922.
⁷ Schwarz, J-M, et al. (1989). Thermogenesis in men and women induced by fructose vs glucose added to a meal. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 49(4), 667-674.
⁸ Two Bites TV Spot. (2008), from SweetSurprise.com Web Site: http://sweetsurprise.com/videos/two-bites
⁹ Wells, HF & Buzby, JC. Dietary Assessment of Major Trends in U.S. Food Consumption, 1970-2005 (2008), from USDA Economic Research Web Site: http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB33/

Agriculture

Just after World War II our systems for getting food to our tables began to take the shape that we are familiar with today, and it all started with agriculture.  Part of the agricultural transformation stemmed from the government encouraging the manufacture of chemical fertilizers and pesticides from unused bomb and nerve gas ingredients, such as ammonium nitrate.  This effort to dispose of excess munitions provided a progression from the growing processes that were the norm at that time (processes referred to today as “organic”) to a system that relies heavily on chemical fertilizers and pesticides.  The passage of government initiatives such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 and the Agricultural Act of 1949 resulted in the government providing subsidies to farmers for growing corn, soybeans, wheat and rice.  Farmers sold these grains for whatever price they could get, and the government made up for the deficit.  These government-granted subsidiaries essentially discouraged farmers from growing fruits and vegetables (deemed “specialty crops”) through sheer economics.  By growing as much of these subsidized grains as possible (which simultaneously forced farmers to reduce space for growing other crops or for raising cattle), farmers could simply make more money than was previously possible via small, diverse farms.  This, in part, undermined the financial stability of small farms, which were eventually bought out by huge industrial farms.  Large farms received more governmental money and thus continued to engulf small farms.  This trend was clearly the goal of the government, as illustrated in the 1970s by the words of Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz, encouraging all farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow” and “get big or get out”.

Fattening Foods

In addition to the disappearance of small family farms, grain subsidiaries also resulted in a market influx of cheap grain- grain that was being sold for considerably less than it cost farmers to grow.  Again, however, the government’s subsidiary checks made up for the farmers selling their crops at such low prices.  Subsidizing grain was the beginning of the price decline of grain-based food products, and grains subsequently began to find their way into more and more foods.  From the high-fructose corn syrup in sodas to the soybean oil used to fry potatoes, subsidized grains became a part of our processed foods because they were cheap and in abundance.  Read the label of a majority of mainstream processed foods and you are almost certain to find corn syrup or high-fructose corn syrup amongst the long list of ingredients.  Studies show that high-fructose corn syrup is not metabolized in the body in the same way as regular sugar; it does not stimulate insulin secretion or leptin production- which boils down to your brain not receiving the signal that it is full.  Is it coincidental that consumption of high-fructose corn syrup increased over 1000% between 1970 and 1990, mirroring the rapid rise in obesity rates in the United States?

Grain subsidiaries even affected the price of meat, as farms could no longer afford to grow grains and keep cattle.  Instead farms turned into factories, using inexpensive grain to fatten animals at much less cost than was possible through the traditional method of allowing cattle to graze on grass.  This took animal protein from its status as a specialty item to a commonplace addition on nearly every dinner table.  Thus, American meat consumption increased to today’s average of nearly a half-pound per person per day.

Whatever the original intention of our government’s efforts, they have brought us to a place of disconnection from our history of wild-food gathering, hunting, and subsistence agriculture.  Ask a child today where food comes from, and you will likely hear in reply, “the supermarket”.  In fact, “in the United States in 2002, fewer than two percent of people were involved in direct agricultural production”¹.  Before these agricultural changes, farms were run by families and depended upon by communities.  Farmers used crop diversity and photosynthesis to nourish their soil and manage pests.  Cheap energy eventually brought mechanization to the farm.  Mechanization and government subsidies led to monocultures (growing only one crop on a plot of land), and monocultures substantially increased the productivity of the land and the farmer.  Despite today’s high yields, we don’t directly eat much of the corn and soybeans that we grow today, but instead process forty percent of them into animal feed and another eleven percent into biofuels.

The Environment

Simply put, food today is cheaper, we’re more efficient at producing it, and we have a vast array of convenient choices available to us.  Unfortunately, these benefits are not without cost.  In order to produce these higher yields, agriculture increased its reliance on “chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing, packaging and transportation”.  In 1940, 2.3 calories of food energy were produced for every calorie of fossil fuel energy used, while today it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce just one calorie of those foods on your grocery store’s shelves.² Second only to cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy.

Like growing grains, transportation is subsidized in the United States, making it possible for New York City to get its produce from California instead of the “Garden State” next door.  These subsidies encourage practices such as catching salmon in Alaska, shipping it to China to be filleted and then shipping the fillets back to California to be eaten.  Our cross-country and global food economy contributes to outstanding environmental costs, including groundwater and ozone depletion, global warming, soil erosion and mineral depletion.  The systems we use to put food on our tables contribute as much as thirty-seven percent of the greenhouses gases to the atmosphere, more than any other single factor.²

Health

It’s not just our environment that is suffering.  Our health is suffering as well. In 1960, Americans spent just five percent of our national income on health care.  Today that number has risen to sixteen percent.  These costs continue to climb to treat the diseases caused by pollution and chemical residues in our food.  More directly, we are overburdening our health care system through the increasing demands to care for and treat preventable chronic diseases.  These disease rates are skyrocketing due, at least in part, to the ever-increasing calorie loads of our foods and drinks.  Diet is a causational link to four of the top ten deadly diseases in America today: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.  So while our spending on food has decreased from twenty percent of household income to less than ten percent, national spending on healthcare has risen from five percent to sixteen percent.  These figures are absolutely related; this is not just happenstance.

Unfortunately, this is not just an issue for adults.  Our children are bearing the brunt of the ill effects of our poor dietary habits, and it looks to only get worse.  The Centers for Disease Control estimates that one in three American children born in 2000 will develop Type 2 diabetes.  Type 2 diabetes is often associated with being overweight or obese, and carries with it an increased risk for developing other conditions such as heart disease and stroke.  Our children are being confronted with the very real possibilities of blindness, amputation or early death.  People with type 2 diabetes have not only this myriad of health concerns to preoccupy them, but also the financial struggle to pay for an ever-increasing load of prescription medications.

The American diet is in shambles.  Our society values cheap, convenient food.  The information age puts us at the mercy of the marketing machine, informing us of our need for the very processed foods that are contributing to our current health crisis.  At some point we became convinced that quantity had more value than quality, that balanced meals didn’t have all that much of an impact on our lives.  Even at school, with lunch programs designed by Registered Dieticians, our children are consuming meals that typically specify a minimum number of calories rather than a maximum.  Nutritional quality simply isn’t found in a meal of hamburgers and potato wedges, and corn syrup-laden ketchup doesn’t count as a vegetable.

The Natural Order

What if we went back to a time when farmers grew many different kinds of crops and raised animals like cattle and chickens, with the power of the sun and hand labor, rather than relying on machines?  If we return to utilizing sunlight to nourish grass and grains, the cows will graze on the grass, rather than getting artificially fat in a grain feedlot.  The chickens will clean up after the cows by eating the larvae and grubs out of their manure, subsequently spreading the manure as fertilizer while eliminating parasites.  When the chickens then defecate on those same fields, they release nitrogen to further fertilize the land.  The animals nourish the soil, preparing it to grow the next season’s grasses and grains.  Thus, the greater the diversity on a farm, the less need to rely on fertilizers and pesticides.  Not only has a farmer in this scenario cut fossil fuel use, he’s also raised high-quality beef.  Grass-fed beef isn’t just an example of the natural order of things; it’s actually better for you.  It has increased levels of omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid.  These substances are important for health in many ways, from anti-inflammatory benefits to a reduction of percentage body fat.

Maybe you’ve seen grass-fed meat in the grocery store.  Maybe you’ve wondered at the cost of it, especially compared to other meat.  We have come to expect food to be cheap, and therefore balanced diets are pushed aside for balanced budgets.  Especially in today’s economy, who has more money to spend- on food or anything else?  It’s true that raising cattle on grass is more costly and more time-consuming, resulting in an increase in the price that we pay for it.  But one could also make the argument that when we pay for grass-fed meat, we are paying the real cost of meat.  Not only that, we are potentially paying for quality food now, rather than for health care costs down the road.  Perhaps we should view this as an opportunity to refocus on a balanced diet, one that includes less meat and more vegetables than the average American diet.  Not only would shifting the balance in this direction benefit our personal health, it would benefit the health of the environment as well.  “Meat and milk production represent the food industry’s greatest burden on the environment; a recent U.N. study estimated that the world’s livestock alone account for eighteen percent of all greenhouse gases, more than all forms of transportation combined.  According to one study, a pound of feedlot beef also takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce.  And while animals living on farms will still emit their share of greenhouse gases, grazing them on grass and returning their waste to the soil will substantially offset their carbon hoof prints, as will getting ruminant animals off grain.  A bushel of grain takes approximately a half gallon of oil to produce; grass can be grown with little more than sunshine.”²

Foreign Relations

We’ve seen some of the ways in which today’s food system is affecting our personal health, our healthcare system and the health of our environment, but it is also affecting our international policies and security.  While our government was pressuring American farmers to convert to monoculture agriculture, they, along with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, also pressured foreign nations to open their markets to internationally traded cheap grain.  In doing so, these nations made it economically impossible for their own farmers to continue farming, forcing them to rely on imported grains, and diminishing the world food supply.  In this way, globalization actually contributes to world hunger rather than reducing it.

It isn’t just food availability that’s an issue, but also safety.  Consider the recent food scandal in China involving the known addition of a banned chemical to watered-down milk.  The deceit of this manufacturing facility resulted in the deaths of several infants and illnesses in thousands more.  Whether accidental or intentional, a single factory that is processing millions of servings of food at any one time could easily inflict significant harm on the American population.  There are systems in place to protect us from such disasters, but a much more simple and fiscally responsible method to preserve our safety would be to simply decentralize our food growing and distribution practices.

The Local Market

Casting safety issues aside, it still doesn’t make sense to import food from halfway across the globe when we can support our own community through local farming.  Traditionally, food was a local resource, created by and for the local community.  Any money spent through local producers continued to circulate locally and stimulate the local economy.  Today we do things differently, as illustrated by an Iowa State University analysis that compared the average distance traveled by a certain set of foods produced locally versus purchased through conventional shopping systems.  The distance from local growers to the university was an average of 56 miles, whereas those same types of food purchased through supermarkets traveled an average of 1494 miles, nearly 27 times farther.  Clearly this has cost implications regarding fuel, but what about the discrepancy in what the farmer earns when selling directly to a consumer versus to a production plant or some other middleman (not to mention the difference in what the consumer pays)?  The 2001-2002 Agriculture Fact Book showed that farmers selling their wares through conventional systems received nineteen cents per food dollar; the remaining eighty-one cents went toward everything else, deemed “marketing.”  Let’s remember as well, that food eaten closer to the land on which it’s grown is fresher, therefore it requires less processing and is more nutritious.

Fortunately for both farmers and consumers, markets for organic and local foods are flourishing.  It is estimated that there are now more than 4,700 farmer’s markets registered with the USDA, which is more than double the amount registered a decade earlier.  There are also nearly 1,500 community supported farms, or CSAs, which allow consumers to pay an annual fee directly to a producer in exchange for a weekly box of produce throughout the growing season.  This is the direction that we as a country need to go in order to reform health care, energy dependence and environmental health.

Quality Counts

Big changes are necessary to get us to a place where we are protecting our health and that of the land.  It must be said that these changes will certainly cost time and money.  However, we need to keep in mind that cheap food is only cheap because of government handouts and exploitation of workers, animals and the environment.  We need to remember that “cheap food is food dishonestly priced – it is in fact unconscionably expensive.”² It is negatively affecting our health, our children’s health and the health of the environment.  We must also keep in mind that most of our current forms of food production rely on unsustainable energy, and that they threaten the global food supply, putting us all at risk.  In order to repair the damage that we have done, we need to emphasize the quality of the food that we eat- from the farm to the table.

¹ Katz, SE., The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved. Vermont: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2006.
² Pollan, Michael. “Farmer In Chief.” The New York Times. 9 October 2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/magazine/12policy-t.html?_r=1

Definitions and health implications

Organic vs conventional

The term “0rganic” describes foods and fibers that are grown without the use of toxic pesticides and fertilizers.  This is in contrast to the term “conventional”, in which farmers and growers apply synthetic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers to their crops and soils.  There are four categories of organic.  Think of these categories as a range or a spectrum where some things are “more organic” than others.  Here’s the break down.

Certified organic

“Certified organic” is the top of the spectrum- the most organic, if you will- and is used interchangeably with the term “100% organic”.  Foods or materials categorized this way adhere to strict standards set by the US Department of Agriculture, as verified by independent state or private organizations.  Farmers of certified organic crops do not use synthetic chemicals to boost their yield or minimize pests, but instead use methods of prevention for disease, weed and insect control.  Achieving 100% organic status is fairly difficult because very few additives, no matter how “safe”, can be used in 100% organic foods.  Many foods that fall into this category are whole foods like fruits, vegetables and grains.  Foods in this category may display the USDA’s organic seal.

Organic

“Organic” is the category that a majority of organic foods fall under.  This category stipulates that the food contains 95-99% organic ingredients.  The foods classified as “organic” may not be considered “100%” or “certified” organic due to the use of processing aids, flavorings or natural preservatives.  Foods or fibers in this category may display the USDA’s organic seal.

Less than 70% organic

The final category doesn’t have a name, per se, but rather applies to a product in which some of the ingredients are listed as organic.  This category has less than 70% organic ingredients, and cannot make an organic claim on the main face of the package.  Foods or fibers in this category are not allowed to display the USDA’s organic seal.

Are organic foods better for you?

This is a highly disputed topic; but what is undoubtedly true is that organic foods are free of toxic pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and fertilizers.  Many of these chemical inputs are being applied to crops with the Environmental Protection Agency’s approval, which was granted long before research linked these chemicals to diseases such as cancer.

In the last fifty years, vitamin and mineral content of American-grown fruits and vegetables has declined significantly.  Nitrogen fertilizers are often used in conventional farming, and while they increase yield, they simultaneously deplete the mineral content of the soil.  Over time, the soils become deficient in minerals and so, subsequently, are the foods grown in these soils.  Natural, organic fertilizers, on the other hand, are rich in minerals and trace minerals, and pass these nutrients onto the foods that thrive in the soils to which they are applied.  Many studies conclusively show that organic foods are up to 40% higher in cancer fighting antioxidants than their conventional counterparts.

Free-range, grass-fed, pasture-raised, cage-free

These categories are usually applied to meat, such as beef or chicken, or animal products, such as eggs or milk.  The term free-range means that the animals were allowed to roam a prairie or ample-sized pen rather than be confined in a feedlot or henhouse.  This practice is not only used to improve the happiness (and arguably health) of the animals, but to produce a more nutritious product.  Generally speaking, these terms are all used to show that the animal has been allowed to live a more traditional life and consume its natural diet- grass in the case of cattle and insects and plants for chickens.

Raising animals in highly confined spaces is a substandard arrangement and usually calls for frequent doses of antibiotics and growth hormones to help them survive into adulthood.  Feedlot cattle are raised on grains laden with pesticides or on soy feed (which is too high in protein for them and therefore toxic to their livers) and injected with steroids to make their meat more tender.  Between the hormones and the fat-inducing high-grain diets, feedlot cattle are sent to slaughter at a much younger age than their grass-fed, free-range counterparts.  These systems ultimately lower the cost to the consumer, but at what price to the animals’ and your own health?

Providing animals with a proper diet has a direct effect on the nutrient content of the meat you consume.    Grass-fed beef has higher levels of CLA, an antioxidant compound that has been shown to offer protection from cancer and reduce the deposition of body fat while increasing the ratio of lean body muscle.  Pasture-fed chicken eggs are the most complete and nutritious form of animal protein available.  Eggs from these chickens have an ideal omega-3 to omega-6 ratio of approximately 1:1, whereas those chickens fed only grains have almost 19 times more omega-6 than omega-3.  Clearly this further perpetuates the American overconsumption of omega-6 fatty acids (also found in vegetable oils).  Remember, omega-3 fatty acids help protect us against heart disease, cancer, strokes, high blood pressure, arthritis, eczema and psoriasis, asthma and autoimmune disorders.  Unfortunately, only a small percentage of hens are pasture-fed and given ample space.  The overwhelming majority of hens live their lives in tiny wire cages with their beaks trimmed to prevent them from harming themselves or others.

Wild-caught vs farm-raised

Due to being forced into confines that are inappropriate for them, farm-raised fish often receive antibiotics and inappropriate feed, like soy meal (containing toxic pesticide residue).  Due to this improper diet, the fatty acid profile, or omega-3 content, of farm-raised fish will not be as good as that of wild-caught fish.  This is physically apparent in salmon, as farm-raised salmon are pale cream in color and are therefore dyed pink, giving grocers and restaurateurs the expected appearance of salmon without the price tag.

So you want me to spend more money on food?

With organic foods, just as with conventional foods, consumers pay for the steps of growing, harvesting, transportation and storage.  Organic foods see additional costs because they must meet stricter government regulations throughout all of these steps, making the process more labor and management-intensive.  Because of this, you pay more up front for organic products.  However, there is mounting evidence that the indirect costs of conventional food production (such as cleanup of polluted water and replacement of eroded soils) actually cause organic foods to be cheaper or the same price as their conventional counterparts.  Just like any “new” technology, the prices for organic products will likely fall as more consumers demand these products and support organic farmers.

There are a several rules of thumb to make the most of the organic label while maintaining your budget.  Sign up for the Environmental Working Group’s shopper’s guide to pesticides at http://foodnews.org.  This guide will show you which types of produce are most and least exposed to pesticides and thus help you decide which you’d like to purchase as organic.  As another method to reduce your potential pesticide exposure, consider purchasing the organic versions of the items that you consume most often.  Purchase organic meats and dairy products whenever possible, because any chemicals that an animal has been exposed to will be concentrated in the animals’ fat.  Purchasing organic dairy and meat products is more expensive, but those are the real and fair prices for an animal to be properly raised and cared for.  These practices produce a nutrient profile that properly cares for your body as well.

Considering the environment

You don’t have to fancy yourself an environmentalist nor consider yourself part of the green movement to recognize the differences in the effects of conventional versus organic farming.  Conventional agriculture pollutes our air, water and soil and harms our wildlife.  This topic is another article in itself, so let’s just focus on how soil health eventually impacts our drinking water.  Organic farming maintains and replenishes soil fertility without using toxic and long-lasting pesticides and fertilizers.  Conventional agricultural methods, on the other hand, deplete and contaminate the soils, eventually leaching their chemicals into the water supply.  Tap water testing across the Corn Belt and in parts of the Pacific Northwest revealed widespread contamination via pesticides from farming, at levels high enough to present serious health risks.  In some cities, herbicides in tap water exceed federal lifetime health standards for weeks or months at a time.  The organic farmer eliminates these polluting chemicals while rebuilding healthy soils.  These healthy soils help grow healthy foods which in turn nourish healthy bodies.

Quality counts

It’s been said that you vote with your dollar.  We can choose to spend our dollars on quality food that nourishes us, voting for healthier selves now and in the future.  These choices also suggest improved health for animals and the environment, but that’s not necessarily why we make them.  We make them for ourselves and our loved ones.  We may pay more for these choices now, but we will be supporting practices that produce food the way it was meant to be: rich in nutrients, free of damaging chemicals and from a place where the land and animals were treated with respect.