What's the Price of Your Health?

As someone who has recently switched to an all organic lifestyle, I found both of these articles very interesting. Usually, when you ask someone why they don't eat organic they may respond with something along the lines of it being too expensive, it's not as quick or isn't as easy to find in supermarkets. Since the global production of organic food is expected to grow in upcoming years I loved reading Hjelmar's study in Denmark (high proportion of organic consumers) that picked apart the main reasons why people choose to buy organic produce. Two main points of his study were the difference between convenience and reflexive behaviors. People with children seemed to show more reflexive behaviors when it came to organic produce. They cared more about what they were putting in their children and grandchildren's bodies, when before they may have been buying whatever was the cheapest. They cared to fill their children with quality food over quantity of food. A big argument for buying non-organic food was that the price is cheaper for the amount you get. Meaning, they really cared more about quantity over quality of food. I don't really know how you can put a price on health--but maybe that is just me. I actually laughed a little at a quote from Hjelmar's study, "If I have tasted the organic product and found that it tastes not as good as the traditional product, then I would go back to the traditional. The organic producers need to make it tasty." It seems as though people today are so use to all of these fake additives and foods packed with sugar that actual healthy organic food is unappetizing to them--which should be very alarming to everyone.

As we discussed on Monday during class, I think that convenience and education also play a huge role in people wanting to buy or not buy organic. Let me first discuss what I mean about convenience. Here in the United States we make it very easy for people to buy processed, unhealthy, non organic food. It's cheap, fast, and extremely tasty. Do people even know what they are eating anymore? Seriously. Our country has made a fortune off of pretty much poisoning our bodies and pricing things like a large pop for $1.00 and a water for $3.00. Of course people are going to try and save money and buy the pop. The pop tastes better, it's packed with sugar, and sugar is 6X more addictive than cocaine. SIX TIMES!!!!! We wonder why we have an obesity epidemic on our hands. Even if people want to change their diet, they are told to eat "low fat" foods. Well guess what, you take the fat out of your food and it tastes terrible.. so what do we do? We add sugar. Did you know that when you look at a label for protein, fiber, etc. it shows their daily percent value... not for sugar. The average girl is suppose to consume no more than 6 teaspoons of sugar in a day... that is roughly 24 grams of sugar. That large pop--let's say coke, has 30 g of sugar. This leads me to my next topic--education. People do not understand this. They do NOT realize that the fruits you are eating were sprayed with pesticides and the crops you are chewing have been genetically modified to withstand pesticides that would usually kill your food. Would you take a can of pesticides and spray it into your mouth? People do not understand the harmful things we are putting in our bodies day in and day out. Big food corporations ban together to make sure that things look healthy, look organic, are "low in fat", "reduced sugar", etc. etc. but it is all lies. Go home and read a label very carefully--look up exactly what each preservative, additive, any word you don't know or can't even pronounce is and I promise you that the other things that it is used for will shock you.

The second article we read was by Keebaugh and the big take home point from that was that healthy food is expensive. Yes, healthy food may be more expensive. Like I mentioned above our government especially has mass produced all of this genetically modified food and made it more affordable for us. I feel as though inorganic food may be cheaper and may come in bigger quantities, but down the road, are the health issues that we are seeing like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, etc. and the medical attention that we then need for those, actually the cheaper route? I can't imagine so.

So I have this idea that if the consumers stop this at the source and stop buying all of this unhealthy food, our government will have no choice but to make the change to a more organic lifestyle. Don't you think that if the demand in GMO/processed food went down, the harvesting of organic food would increase? Would the best way to do this be by educating the country at large? I feel like a lot of this has to do with a lack of education and lack of convenience. How do you feel knowing that people in our government are actually paid to come up with new ways to lie to you on the label of your food? Shouldn't that be illegal? Has anyone heard of the "Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act"? NOT what you think it is.

Lastly, I want to leave my blog with a quote that really struck me. It's from a documentary called Fed Up (watch it if you haven't already--it's amazing), "If a foreign nation were doing this to our children, we would defend our families."