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Natural and Organic Food

If you're interested in healthy eating and are leaning toward organic produce, you'll find a useful piece of factual information here alongside personal thoughts on the subject of natural, organic food.

Things like what it is, where it comes from, why it exists. More importantly, we'll be looking at how you can benefit from natural and organic food in so many ways, by supporting your local, small organic farms by buying their produce direct from their own farm shops to doing your bit for the environment and growing your own, organically grown cottage garden crops for your own use.

It's easier than a lot of people think and you don't need a garden the size of a football pitch to grow a very usable crop of your favourite natural and organic foods, fruits and vegetables. Natural and organic food should be the first choice of ever person who cares about their health.

The best part is being able to pick your own crops when they are at their peak of freshness and feed them to your family certain in the knowledge that they contain no harmful chemical sprays or poisons. Now how good is that?

How Did We Get To This Place?

How natural and organic food became forgotten.

For too long the supermarkets and chain food stores have had the farm industry firmly in their pockets, dictating what is grown and how with total disregard to nature or ultimately the health of those who buy the end product.

Farmers have been forced by economic forces to grow as much produce as they possibly can squeezed into every spare square inch of land they possess. The only way to do that is to first poison the land with powerful herbicides to kill any weeds, then plough and plant a single variety or crop per field, known as monocropping.

Once the plants grow, they are further sprayed with a lethal cocktail of pesticides to kill all the bugs, good and bad with relentless efficiency so that nothing but the crop can grow in that space.

The overburdened and continuously cropped soil is sprayed full of artificial chemical fertilisers to force the plants to grow faster than normal and produce larger than normal crops. The crumb structure and natural nutrient value of this soil is disregarded without a backward glance season after season until all that is left is sterile soil useless for anything but pumping full of more chemicals to force ever more mineral depleted and pesticide laden crops to grow.

The cruel result of this lunacy is that this is what you are feeding yourselves and your children on.

The chemical residue in vegetable and fruit crops grown this way (it's called intensive farming) are harmful to your health and damaging to your children's growth and causes a range of problems from behavioural difficulties to attention deficit disorder to health issues later in life.

Does anyone listen to this kind of talk?

No.

People prefer to bury their heads in the sand and believe the lies that they are told by their caring, benevolent government officials, politicians and spin doctors.

Why?

Because they are brainwashed into believing the lies by the clever manipulative power of the media and by continued denying of the facts.

People learn by rote, by repetition - it's how we learned our times tables at school. Politicians and advertisers alike are well aware how to manipulate a pliable public and the few people who are aware of what is going on are generally ignored, because they are powerless.

But the few have made a small mark on this abomination by resurrecting the older farming methods of caring for the soil the crops are planted in, by avoiding the cocktail of lethal pesticides and poisons. Some of the alternative cures that have been forgotten are also being resurrected and used.

People are astonished that these things work along with re-learning that organic produce is what a healthy body needs for fuel to work properly.

Organic farming is here. Now. If you look for it, you can find natural and organic food creeping into stores and supermarkets.

You just have to want to look for it.

Natural and Organic Food is Available!

Following on from the above, natural and organic food is available in a growing number of retail outlets.

It's just a case of being aware that natural and organic food is out there and can be obtained when you know where to look.

In Britain, the consumer shift towards natural and organic food is growing at a huge rate, prompting the big supermarket chains to re-think part of their marketing strategy.

As long as there is a good profit to be made from any sector of the agricultural industry, you can be sure the supermarkets know about it and will exploit it.

In a way then, consumer power has forced a change for the better. Supermarkets now display an ever growing range of natural and organic food from fruit and vegetables to meat and dairy products - all carefully labeled as such to allay any possible doubts the consumers may have to its authenticity.

Good news for the health of a nation. Good news for the soil that produces the fruit and vegetables and good news for the animals that are reared for their meat, as their living conditions on an organic farm are infinitely better than their counterparts which are merely existing until the day they are slaughtered on intensive farms.

So you, as the consumer have the power to change things for the better. You have to demand good food, free from dangerous pesticides and artificial chemical additives. When enough of you demand what you deserve, then your voice grows in volume and the huge supermarket chains have to listen.

It can be done. It is being done.

Natural and organic food is here to stay and is available at a store near you.

And if it's not, make that store get it for you or tell them you'll go elsewhere for your food!

The Health Benefits of Eating Organic

The many alternative heath benefits that come from changing your diet from normal, intensively farmed food to one of purely organic food are almost incalculable over the span of your lifetime.

First and foremost, by significantly reducing the levels of pesticide and herbicide residue entering your body by rejecting intensively farmed foods you are giving yourself a huge health advantage over someone who continues to eat all that cheap, poisoned food.

Only it's not really cheap when you put a price tag on your health and the length of your life, is it?

Slowly but surely, various medical experts and even government departments are coming out and admitting the health issues related to the overuse of chemical fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides on farmed fruits and vegetables as well as the equally damaging overuse of drugs, growth hormones, steroids, anti-parasite chemicals and antibiotics imparted upon our farmed meat, poultry and dairy stocks.

Practitioners of alternative cures and natural healing methods agree that by improving the quality of the food we eat by switching to organically grown and produced foods is a major step to improving overall health and vitality, the body's ability to fight diseases and also to combat the premature effects of aging that pesticide and other poison laden food causes.

This not only goes for fruits and vegetables, but also for organically farmed meat and poultry. Its no secret that intensively farmed meat and poultry are crammed full of antibiotics, which are passed on to humans when you eat those products. This causes your body, over time as the levels build up slowly, to not only become more resistant to propriety antibiotics that you'll need when you get sick, but also has the effect of depressing your own immune system, thereby leaving you more prone to disease as your body's built-in defenses are weakened.

Cut Your Allergies

It's no secret that the pesticides and other noxious poisons that the intensive farming industry lavished upon our food are having wide-reaching health consequences. Allergies in general have been on the rise in recent years in direct proportion to the rise in the volume and diversity of these poisons.

There are many more asthma sufferers nowadays than there were thirty years ago and the cost of asthma treatment has gone through the roof.

Add to that the increase in different forms of cancer that ever more virulently afflicts the population not only of the western world but increasingly in places where it was previously almost unknown, such as the Far East and Africa. The increase is apparent as in direct proportion to the increase in the use of more and more pesticides and other poisons in arable, non-organic farming.

Switching to an organic diet can cause a turnaround in the health of these people if only they knew about it.

Clean Water?

How clean is your drinking water? That's not a trick question, by the way. While many areas in most developed countries around the world have reasonably clean drinking water, not all of them do.

I speak from personal experience from a time living in southern Spain where the chemical composition of the drinking water leaves a lot to be desired. All over the region, the predominant problem is a high level of calcium, which is not only bad for water heating appliances and washing machines etc, but is also not particularly good for your health.

Another problem with the water here is that it is not delivered via a water main, but is stored in individual water repositories which supply each urbanization, or housing community. That means the grade of the water varies enormously from community to community.

There is a high level of bacteria in that water which is combated by the inclusion of a high level of chlorine - another bad chemical for your health.

There are also dangerously high levels of heavy metals present in the drinking water, including aluminium which is known to detrimentally affect the brain function and general intelligence levels.

Oh joy.

Guess what else is present in frighteningly high levels in our drinking water? Well, the farmers are not far away and they use unreasonably high levels of pesticides on their crops, which all leeches into the soil and down into the water table.

And into your homes.

The only way to combat this is to either filter the water you drink with an expensive water filtration system using reverse osmosis, or the cheaper but less effective option of using a filter jug like the Brita, which at least thankfully removes most of the nasties from the water.

I think more and more people are starting to listen and act. It's an uphill struggle and articles like this need to happen for reminding everyone of the issues and what's at stake.