A Healthy Living Diet - for Us and Our Planet

If you want to be greener, eat organic!

Organic food is grown by natural methods, many of which have been around for centuries or even millennia.

On the whole, organic food is safer for people and animals to eat.

A healthy living diet:

Organic farmers and horticulturalists use only natural fertilisers such as manure and compost. Natural fertilisers improve and nourish, the soil. Tiny organisms in the soil break down the fertilisers, much as the stomach digests food so that the body can use it. The growing plants are able to take their nutrients directly from the soil.

If organic farming is done well the foods resulting are free from chemical residues. They are strong and disease resistant, full of trace elements and vitamins, and exceptionally tasty.

Meat always used to be a good source of zinc. Now grazing land is often so depleted of nutrients that there is scarcely any zinc present in animals reared on such pastures.

Chemically grown plants are helped to survive against predators and disease by frequent spraying with pesticides. Some of the pesticides used end up - in tiny amounts - in your dinner. This might not matter if they were not toxic – but they are. Any chemical can be toxic if you give it in a large enough dose. But these chemicals are designed to be toxic and often they are toxic even in quite tiny amounts.

Also, the effects on humans may be hard to judge because there are many chemicals involved. Whereas scientists may understand the actions of one particular chemical, there is huge uncertainty about how these chemicals interact with each other within our bodies. There may even be unknown interactions between such chemicals and medical drugs or chemicals used in personal care products.Recent studies have shown that common foods such as apples and carrots sometimes have significant toxic residues in them.

And you can’t just wash these residues away.

It’s a good idea to wash your apples before you eat them of course, but many residues are found throughout the body of the fruit. Carrots retain significant residues in their outermost parts, which are also the parts which have the most nutritional value.

More and more people are turning to natural and organic foods as the health benefits become clearer.

A healthy living diet:

Why is organic food so expensive?

In Europe and many western countries farmers receive subsidies for using pesticides. Organic farming is more labour-intensive than modern, industrial farming. More people have to be employed to care for plants and livestock to ensure the high standards which have to be reached. In the UK for example, all organic farms have to be approved by the Soil Association before produce can be labelled as organic. The process costs time and money.

As more people turn to natural and organic foods some of these costs should come down.

See here for tips on how to find cheap organic food

A healthy living diet:

The health benefits of organic foods are so clear that it makes good sense to make organic foods the major part of your diet. What you lose in money you will gain in increased health and vitality for sure!

There will be other spin-offs too: fewer trips to the doctor’s, fewer days off work, fewer headache pills, fewer chronic diseases…, all of which can be costly. And of course, peace of mind that you are not slowly poisoning yourself with toxic residues of pesticides. This is the true meaning of a healthy living diet in today's polluted world.

A healthy living diet:

Even if you don’t want to buy organic food, it is still a good idea to shop locally for food. From an ecological viewpoint, the fewer miles food has travelled to reach the consumer the better. Many supermarkets buy in fresh food from all round the world (some of it organic). While this is very impressive in a way, it is not sustainable as a major part of our shopping baskets. Such food as fresh figs or mangoes have to be flown in to consumers in cooler countries and this contributes to climate change.

It is hard to completely avoid such foods but I believe you can have a wonderful diet whilst using mainly locally-sourced foods.

Also, some exotic foods are well suited to the slower but more sustainable sea transport, so you don't have to be completely hair-shirt about it! More and more supermarkets are selling organic produce, some of it local. Farmers' markets are springing up in Britain and the US. In Europe there are still good street markets, some of which sell organic produce. Shopping locally for most of your week's food is another way to find a healthy living diet for our planet!

So support your local farmers and horticulturalists and buy your natural and organic foods locally at the street markets and farmers' markets. You can often buy local craft and art items too and some of the more developed farm shops stock other eco-friendly goods, such as non-toxic domestic cleaning products.

A healthy living diet:

There are also farmers and horticulturalists who adopt a compromise position: they try to grow nutritious tasty crops with a very minimum amount of chemical aid. They focus on putting fertility back into the soil and they look after their local wildlife. But they do resort to occasional sprays and chemical fertilisers in some instances. The food produced is sometimes called conservation grade food.

I believe that this compromise position is certainly something to be encouraged as it represent a move away from the industrial approach to food production, with its reliance upon oil products. The resulting food will in most cases be of high quality, reflecting the care and expertise that has gone into its production. Local wildlife will be relatively better off, too as the soil fertility will encourage some of the insect life which is a necessary part of the food chain.

Conservation-minded farmers often plant and maintain good hedges and leave ample field margins, which can provide valuable habitats for birds and small animals. (The practice of leaving wide field margins is now being encouraged in Europe, thanks to the "Entry Level" system for sustainability.)

Natural and organic foods and conservation grade foods will become more available as the real costs of chemical farming becomes clear. Eating organic and conservation grade foods helps provide and maintain a healthy living diet for local wildlife.

A healthy living diet:

And of course you know it's fresh.

If you would like to learn more please go to How to grow a vegetable garden

There you will find many pages about growing simple salad crops and vegetables. I only include fairly simple, straightforward crops which suit the busy person, ones which will likely save you money as well as providing abundant, nutritious, delicious food.

You can also grow some things indoors or on windowsills. Home-grown bean sprouts can even be grown in a cupboard or on a shelf!

I hope you find some food for thought amongst these pointers towards a healthy living diet. I think we are beginning to learn that a sustainable diet is also a a diet for healthy living, not just for us humans but for our planet too.