Going Organic

Many master athletes are quite familiar with the organic food movement that became popular in the 1960s. Today’s athletes seeking the healthiest foods can find a large variety of certified-organic produce, meats, and other foods in traditional “health food” stores, and now even in conventional grocery stores. Two common questions are whether it’s worth the extra price to buy organic food versus conventional, and whether we can trust the sign that says “certified organic.”

With great hesitation my answer to both questions is yes, but with an asterisk. The USDA’s organic program is now part of an international movement. The regulations are better than the previous unregulated organic movement, where anyone could say a product was organic. Many of the guidelines are potentially good for consumers—organic animals must be raised with organic feed, filtered water, and certified organic pastures, and many commonly used drugs can’t be used. Organic produce must be grown without commonly used pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals. Many food product ingredients—additives, chemicals, preservatives, and others are not allowed in organic foods. And the program is relatively strict, helping to rid the market of dishonest vendors. So if a product has the USDA organic label, it’s as good as the USDA’s ability to police the program, just like the rest of what the agency does for all foods sold to consumers. But like the rest of our food supply, you have to be a careful consumer, reading labels and being aware of and avoiding organic junk food, which makes up most of today’s organic products.

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True to Jerome Irving Rodale’s ideas of the mid-1900s, organic food is better, whether certified by today’s standards or not. For example, organic vegetables and fruits usually taste better. They’ve not been genetically altered and contain much smaller amounts of chemical fertilizers or none at all. Moreover, many studies indicate that organic produce is more nutritious, containing more vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients. Some of the organic produce studied had twice the nutrients of conventional equivalents. Many vegetables have been studied, including carrots, cabbage, lettuce, kale, tomatoes, and spinach, as well as a variety of fruits. The increase in nutrients found in certified-organic vegetables and fruits is most likely due to better care of the soil through organic farming methods, including composting, crop rotation, and cover crops.

I’ve also conducted my own research and found with independent laboratory analysis that some organically grown vegetables had significantly higher levels—ten times or more—of certain important nutrients such as folic acid compared to the same vegetables tested and listed in the USDA database.

For years, nutritionists insisted that today’s conventionally grown foods were as high in vitamins and minerals as the meals of our grandparents. There is now sufficient evidence indicating this is not necessarily the case. Reductions in food quality have taken place since the mid-1940s, when the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides rapidly became the norm in U.S. farming. A study in the British Food Journal compared the 1930s nutrient content of twenty vegetables and fruits with foods grown in the 1980s. Significant reductions were found in the levels of calcium, copper, and magnesium in vegetables ; and magnesium, iron, copper, and potassium in fruit. Similar trends can be found in foods produced in the United States, with reductions in some nutrients of as much as 30 percent.

Most foods are farmed with chemical fertilizers and pesticides, with the exception of certified organic foods, which contain significantly less nitrates and heavy metals—both of which can be very harmful, especially to the brain and in particular for children. Heavy metals enter the plants through certain chemical fertilizers—some of these fertilizers are even derived from industrial waste. As discussed previously, through genetic engineering, phytonutrients have been removed from some common foods to make them less bitter. Organically grown foods don’t contain genetically engineered ingredients or genetically modified organisms, making them a better choice.

However, the organic movement has created a whole new line of products for unsuspecting consumers—organic junk food. These include many of the same packaged foods much of the population has gotten sick and obese on, but which have been certified organic by the USDA. When in a health food or other store that carries organic products, avoid those containing organic sugar, white flour, bad fats, and other unhealthy ingredients that happen to also be organic. At one time, the term organic referred to being healthy—but that’s certainly not the case today.