Toxic warriors: By choosing organic produce you reduce exposure to contaminants. Picture: thebittenword.com
It’s startling what comes out of the mouths of some health professionals.
A lecturer recently visiting Iowa City spoke of the importance of a healthy diet in preventing illness.
Preston Maring, a doctor with 38 years of medical wisdom under his belt, prescribes healthy, organic eating for his patients, arguing that treating illness is the past.
“Preventing illness is the future of health care,” he said. So far, so good.
The obstetrician and gynecologist even practises what he preaches, introducing a farmer’s market to his California hospital, a model soon copied by about 28 other medical outlets across the nation. Even better. A medical man with vision.
But Cathy Scanlon, a clinical dietitian, isn’t convinced about the value of organic food. “I don’t think the American Dietetic Association is that big on organic food because we don’t have enough proof that it’s beneficial,” she told The Daily Iowan.
She points to the number of contaminants in our environment. “”We have so many chemicals in our body from the things we cook our food in, like non-stick coating on pans, that it’s pretty hard to get an actual pure food,” she said.
Sorry? Isn’t that a bit like saying “the boat is sinking, but let’s not bail out before it’s too late… we’ve all got to go sometime”? I don’t know about you, but I’d be bailing like hell.
One of the reasons it is so important to eat as much organic food as possible is precisely because there are so many contaminants in the environment. By choosing organic produce that has been grown without the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilisers, we help to turn the tide by:
- Reducing the contaminants that run off into the waterways where we drink, bathe and swim;
- Reducing the contaminants in the soils that feed us;
- Protecting eco-systems whose survival affects the future of this planet.
How can any of this not be beneficial? By encouraging more people to eat healthy organic fare, we encourage more farms to switch to organic farming, which can only have a snowball effect on the health of our environment and our bodies.
Cathy is right. There are so many chemicals we absorb that we can’t control. But rather than see this as an argument against the merits of going organic, the reverse should be true. We need to do our best to reduce the level of chemicals that we can control. Otherwise we simply leave a bigger poisoned chalice for the next generation.
