Organic food has become an industry unto itself in the food world.
With grocery stores like Whole Foods, Trader Joes becoming more and more popular, along with local health food stores and farmers markets.
But why is organic food better for you than the food in supermarkets? Organic food is food that doesn't use any modern day synthetic inputs.
Meaning the produce doesn't use pesticides or chemically altered fertilizer, and the meat doesn't have any antibiotics or hormone additives.
In other words, organic is 100% natural and unprocessed food.
Regular commercial produce and meat is produced by bigger commercial farms whose goal is to produce as much possible for the least amount of cost.
As a result these farms use pesticides and chemical fertilizers on their plants, and feed their animals the cheapest grain available, which is usually corn.
Since the commercial farm's mentality is to produce as much as possible many of these farms will continuously use all the land they have available for farming, instead of leaving some of their land aside to rest and let the nutrients return to the soil.
As a result, the poor nutrient quality of the soil requires increased fertilization, and the produce grown in this type of soil doesn't have the same nutritional content as produce grown in healthy nutrient rich soil.
In fact studies have shown that the commercially grown produce of today has significantly less nutritional content than in previous years.
Therefore with regards to why is organic food better for you, organic produce has more nutrients in it because it is grown in healthy, nutrient rich soil as opposed to heavily fertilized nutrient poor soil.
How cows are treated, fed and raised is also different on organic farms.
As mentioned commercials farms feed their livestock the cheapest grain available, which in the United States is corn.
Unfortunately, livestock like cows don't have digestive systems that allow them to readily digest corn.
As a result, the cows tend to get sick, and their growth is stunted.
This is why hormones and antibiotics are found so readily in commercially produced milk.
In addition, this diet combined with the sedentary lifestyle of livestock at commercial farms have resulted in commercial meat containing 500% more saturated fat than grass-fed beef.
As you can see there are a number of reasons that answer the question why is organic food better for us than it's commercially produced counterparts? Unfortunately many of us cannot afford to pay the premium cost of organic food compared to their commercial counter parts.
If you can't afford to eat entirely organic food, try to at the very least purchase organic produce when you're eating the skin of the produce, or to buy kosher meat, as kosher meat has stricter regulations than commercial meat and will be better for you.