40 4 40: 13 - Organic Foods, Lifestyle Choices and Effectuating Change

Within the last two years, I've been (sloppily, slowly) making a lifestyle change in the food department to eat more cleanly, consuming more purely raw foods, geared specifically away from gluten and its by-products (i.e. vinegar), because I was diagnosed with a gluten intolerance (non-Celiacs).  Just before my awareness of gluten issues in my life, I had been making the changes away from things that contained trans-fats and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

With the help of a holistic specialist, I went on a month-long cleanse, two weeks of it were nothing but juices.  I did it specifically to break a sugar addiction (it worked for a while....), and to lead a healthier lifestyle in general.  I am a little fearful of getting cancer at a too-young age since it's so rampant in my family. Also, at the time, I suspected I was pre-menopausal.  My mother entered menopause at age 39.  I was 38 at the time.  It wasn't out of the realm of possibility.  Additionally, I was having chronic migraines, five out of seven days a week.  My stomach was upset often, I was moody, crabby, irritable, and sleepy all the time.  I suffered from bouts of sleeplessness.

I just couldn't take it anymore.  I didn't want to feel like a slug just barely surviving life.  I knew there had to be more.  I knew I had to take responsibility and action for my own health.

With a heightened awareness of food, comes several frustrations.  Firstly, and most obviously probably, is the learning curve of what ingredients are safe to eat, and which aren't.  Generally speaking, prepared & processed food are horribly unhealthy for a person's body. 

I started shopping at grocery stores that specialize in organic foods and supply foods that are made to tailor to the health-conscious and/or allergy-burdened lifestyles.

It would be easy to blame convenience for our rising health issues concerning obesity, cancer, heart disease.  It's easy to look to the food industry and say, "you make the food we buy, so it's your fault".  It's easy to blame Starbucks, McDonald's, Chick-Fil-A and all the drive-through places:  "If you'd make healthier foods and offer them, we'd be healthier as a society".  

We have only to blame ourselves.

Certainly there is truth to pure foods being to expensive. Certainly there is truth that fast food restaurants such as McDonald's offer a more cost-efficient meal to a family.  Still, it's a personal choice.

We have the power of choice.  We have the freedom of choice. 

Robyn has several good articles on her website in which she offers buying organically on a budget, various nutritional information articles (i.e. HCFS), and she provides very good information via Twitter.

Q: What did your research reveal about the cost of food and food production?
A:Prior to unearthing all of this information, I was in the camp that thought that organic food was a lifestyle choice of the rich and famous or a hippie movement.  And it completely bothered me that it cost so much.   And in all candour, when we met the management teams of these companies when I was a food industry analyst, I ignorantly dismissed their work as a profitable marketing niche. 

But as I began to learn more, I realized that our taxpayer dollars are being used to support farmers that grow crops with chemicals, while farmers that grow crops without the use of synthetic ingredients are charged a fee to prove that their crops are free of these ingredients, then charged a fee to label these crops as having adhered to this higher standard, and at the same time, are not offered the same crop insurance and marketing assistance programs.  In other words, the way the food production cost structure is set up now, it is cheaper to produce food using chemicals than without them.  That means it’s also cheaper to buy foods made with chemicals. 

Or is it? Products made with synthetic chemicals have hidden costs that affect all of us—these externalized costs are called ag “externalities,” and they include damage and the chemical contamination of water sources, soil resources, and wildlife and ecosystem biodiversity, as well as damage to human health from such things as exposure to pesticides. No studies have been done to assess what the cumulative impact of all of these toxins and their synergistic toxicity are having on the health of our families and environment.

With the use of antibiotics, synthetic growth hormones, pesticides, and artificial colors and dyes, some of the greatest threats to our health aren’t actually found in our DNA, but in our food supply. So, while we only spend 9 cents of every dollar on food, we spend 16 cents of every dollar managing chronic disease.  On the other hand, if we choose to invest in organic products and those produced without the use of these synthetic ingredients, we are not only investing in our health, by reducing their families’ exposure to these toxins and the health risks that they might present, which can pay health dividends for a lifetime, but we are also paying the true cost of food rather than the artificially reduced prices of conventional food enabled by the federal allocation of taxpayer resources.  

Choose to not be lazy.  Choose to think critically.  Choose to be active in the food revolution.  Choose to invest time and effort into food preparation.  Get involved locally and nationally to effectuate changes in U.S. food manufacturing practices.

Lastly, hear this, please:  This blog post and I are not intending to be judgmental.  My intent is to educate (mostly myself, haha!).  I readily admit that I still eat chocolate, drink soda sometimes, love a good hamburger at Twisted Root.  I will go through times where I'm eating way too much gluten (thanks Thanksgiving and Christmas)!  I kind of take it for granted that my allergy isn't life or death.  I need to  commit to being better.  And when I read articles like Robyn O'Brien's, I get re-inspired.

Here are a couple of GMO Twitter feeds to which I subscribe (genetically  modified foods). I don't read everything that's tweeted, nor do I preach this as gospel.  Just critically read what you do read.

Non GMO Project

GMO Journal

Food Alliance

There are LOADS of others....click around and learn more! Then ACT! Inspire ME to do the same. :)

~Whoosh!