Report after report confirms the benefits of eating organically produced food!

Report Confirms More Health Benefits of Organic food;

Organically grown foods higher in cancer-fighting chemicals than conventionally grown foods.

Fruits and veggies grown organically show significantly higher levels of cancer-fighting antioxidants than conventionally grown foods, according to a new study of corn, strawberries and marionberries. The research suggests that pesticides and herbicides actually thwart the production of phenolics chemicals that act as a plant's natural defense and also happen to be good for our health. Fertilizers, however, seem to boost the levels of anti-cancer compounds.

The findings appear in the Feb. 26 print edition of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society. The article was initially published Jan. 25 on the journal's Web site.

Flavonoids are phenolic compounds that have potent antioxidant activity. Many are produced in plants in response to environmental stressors, such as insects or competing plants.

"If an aphid is nibbling on a leaf, the plant produces phenolics to defend itself," says Alyson Mitchell, Ph.D., a food scientist at the University of California, Davis, and lead author of the paper. "Bitter or harsh phenolics guard the plant against these pests."

The need for these natural safeguards decreases with the use of herbicides
and pesticides in conventional agriculture. This decrease is reflected in the total amount of antioxidants the plants produce. "This helps explain why the level of antioxidants is so much higher in organically grown food," Mitchell says. "By synthetically protecting the produce from these pests, we decrease their need to produce antioxidants. It suggests that maybe we are doing something to our food inadvertently."  Read more

Advantages and Disadvantages Organic Farming: Good Things, Barriers and Environmental Effects

Advantages and Disadvantages Organic Farming pro and cons organic farming

Despite the good things about organic farming why do most farmers still operate by industrialized agriculture?

Here we explore the pros and cons organic farming presents for consumers and producers, as well as examining the environmental effects of organic farming.

GOOD THINGS ABOUT ORGANIC FARMING

CONSUMER BENEFITS:

Nutrition

The nutritional value of food is largely a function of its vitamin and mineral content. In this regard, organically grown food is dramatically superior in mineral content to that grown by modern conventional methods. advantages and disadvantages organic farming

Because it fosters the life of the soil organic farming reaps the benefits soil life offers in greatly facilitated plant access to soil nutrients.

Healthy plants mean healthy people, and such better nourished plants provide better nourishment to people and animals alike.

Poison-free advantages and disadvantages organic farming

A major benefit to consumers of organic food is that it is free of contamination with health harming chemicals such as pesticides, fungicides and herbicides.

As you would expect of populations fed on chemically grown foods, there has been a profound upward trend in the incidence of diseases associated with exposure to toxic chemicals in industrialized societies. advantages and disadvantages organic farming advantages and disadvantages organic farming.

Take cancer for example. Representative data on the number of new cancer cases in New South Wales, Australia has been collected by the New South Wales Central Cancer Registry.

Adjusted to take account of our aging population, their graph (above) shows that between 1972 and 2004 the incidence of new cancer cases per year (average for both sexes) has risen from 323 to 488 per 100,000 people. This is an increase of over 50% in just 32 years. advantages and disadvantages organic farming

Food Tastes Better advantages and disadvantages organic farming

It comes as no surprise, therefore, that organically grown food tastes better than that conventionally grown. The tastiness of fruit and vegetables is directly related to its sugar content, which in turn is a function of the quality of nutrition that the plant itself has enjoyed.

This quality of fruit and vegetable can be empirically measured by subjecting its juice to Brix analysis, which is a measure of its specific gravity (density). The Brix score is widely used in testing fruit and vegetables for their quality prior to export.

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