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EAT ORGANIC: Why non-GMO doesn’t go nearly far enough

by Kim Vidya, RHN, HOL

Walking through your average health food store today, you will see the old food paradigm creeping back onto the shelves. Row and rows of cartoonish boxes and bottles with colourful labels that claim to be “health foods” abound, but are not really that different from the products found in mainstream supermarkets. One of the most concerning aspects of this trend is the emergence of “non-GMO” as a brand/meme that competes with “certified organic” in the minds of consumers. But once one understands the issue, there really is no choice at all. Eating organic is the only way to go if you care about your health and everything else that lives.

When food is organic, it automatically means that it cannot be genetically modified, so why has the “non-GMO” label emerged at all? It sure seems like the non-GMO brand protects a whole lot of Monsanto’s agri- business. They get to keep selling chemical fertilizers, nerve-agent pesticides, fungicides, and devastating herbicides to the tune of billions of annual sales. Consumers have been duped into thinking that their non- GMO groceries somehow represent a progressive choice, as if they were organic-like. But as we shall see, there can be no compromises when it comes to eating organic.

Roundup® the Glyphosate!

Monsanto’s Roundup® is a glyphosate-based herbicide (GBH) originally designed to clean boilers. In 1974, it was approved for use to kill weeds for agriculture. The World Health Organization’s Agency for Research on Cancer recently declared it to be “probably carcinogenic”, but the list of health problems associated with GBHs is far greater than just cancer.

Dr. Stephanie Seneff, a research scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), reveals how glyphosate wrecks human health. According to Dr. Seneff, glyphosate is possibly "the most important factor in the development of multiple chronic diseases and conditions that have become prevalent in Westernized societies,” including but not limited to: autism, bowel diseases, obesity, allergies, cardiovascular disease, depression, infertility, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and many more. Glyphosate does this by stripping your body of minerals (remember it began as a boiler cleaner), and causing systemic toxicity. It also disrupts intestinal flora, preferentially killing healthy bacteria (such as acidophilus) and allowing pathogens to overgrow.

GBHs are used extensively on most farm fields, and are sprayed on virtually all GMO and non-GMO grains right before harvesting, making eliminating glyphosate the number one reason for eating organic. Cooking oils are one of the highest concentrations of glyphosate. ONLY ORGANIC FOOD IS GLYPHOSATE-FREE. JUST EATING “NON-GMO” DOESN’T CUT IT.

GO for NO GMO!

Genetically-modified organisms represent one of the bigger ecological concerns of our era. But health food store products that say “non-GMO, all-natural” isolate only one aspect of being organic (and definitely NOT “all-natural”.) ORGANIC ALWAYS MEANS NON-GMO. So when you say organic, you are saying non-GMO. No need to say both.

Healthy soil, healthy food, healthy world, healthy you.

Non-organic crops often use varying amounts of chemical fertilizers. These chemicals imbalance the soil, and produce veggies that might look nice but lack the underlying minerals found in organic produce. Organic produce costs more to grow and purchase, but has a much higher nutritional value. Organic farms such as Moondance or Cookstown Greens have extensive soil enrichment procedures that provide full spectrums of minerals and trace elements to your food. Chew less, feed your body more: ORGANIC PRODUCE CAN HAVE UP TO 2-3 TIMES THE VITAMIN/MINERAL CONTENT.

Agent Orange or Green?

Pesticides used extensively on non-organic crops were originally designed as nerve agents and used as military weapons of war. Should we really accept this being on our food? Our tolerance level for nerve agents on our food should be absolute zero. EATING ORGANIC MEANS EATING PESTICIDE-FREE.

What about the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen?

These two lists focus only on pesticide levels on produce, and as such they are as incomplete as non-GMO. The idea with the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen list was to highlight products that have more or less pesticide residue (sometimes after pressure washing), in an attempt to help consumers make better choices as to which produce they should buy organic or never eat. On the surface this seems like a noble effort, but when you consider the fine print, not so much.

Take for instance the inclusion on the Clean Fifteen list of frozen sweet corn, where it has appeared for several years. Corn gets sprayed with tons of chemical fertilizers, plus glyphosates at harvest time, and until recently was also sprayed extensively with neonicotinoids, an insecticide that has now been banned by multiple environmental protection agencies due to massive die-offs in local bee populations. How can the use of this chemical have been allowed, and the corn produced with it listed on the Clean Fifteen, with the resulting environmental damage? Because the criteria is overly simple with the Clean Fifteen list - it only focuses on pesticides, and if there are small enough residues of the chemical when the consumer goes to eat it, then it passes this narrow test of “safety”. So you can buy a veggie off the Clean Fifteen list that was dosed with chemical fertilizers, contains high levels of deadly glyphosate residue, and was sprayed multiple times with a chemical linked to massive bee deaths. That doesn’t sound very clean to me. The problem is with singularity of focus, i.e. pesticides, instead of

the holistic perspective, which considers the “whole” instead of myopically focusing on just one part.

When you choose ALL-ORGANIC, ALL THE TIME, without compromise, you are supporting a world where there there are no more disastrous mad science food adventures, perhaps causing irreversible harm to our eco-systems.

Small is Beautiful - Tending A Tiny Garden

There are many more reasons to choose an all-organic diet. Organic farms are much smaller, often family-based businesses. The higher prices for organic produce allow farmers to make a better living selling organic, despite smaller production volumes. Generational wisdom of organic farming practices can be enhanced and preserved, so that future populations will be able to receive and protect this knowledge.

What Frankenfood comes next?

Who knows what the chemists and mad doctors will come up with next to mess with our healthy food supply for the sake of profits? What new thing will they spray on our food, where the negative impact is only felt a decade or more later? What is the long-term environmental impact? ALWAYS EAT AN ALL-ORGANIC DIET and you no longer have to worry about the answers to these questions. 

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