So you want to eat better. Congratulations, making the decision to do something is the first (and most important step). But what comes next?
There’s buzz around eating organic foods, eating locally grown foods, eating foods that aren’t in packaging — that’s a lot to handle all at once!
In an ideal world, we’d only eat the cleanest, freshest, healthiest food, but how much of a hit is my budget (and my sanity) going to take if all of the sudden I can only eat locally grown, organic, fresh, in season food?
Here’s something to help you sort all of that out: The Dirty Dozen and The Clean Fifteen.
If you can’t buy everything organic, at least make sure that the twelve foods on the left are organic when they hit your shopping cart. Otherwise, you’ll be ingesting way more chemicals than is necessary. These foods are the ones that soak up the most pesticides!
If you have to buy some things conventionally grown, choose things from the list on the right. Those are foods that are pretty resilient when it comes to absorption of chemicals in their environment. You’ll be safer eating these foods!
Also, though, don’t forget that organic doesn’t just mean “pesticide free”. That’s only part of it. Organic also means that the foods haven’t been genetically modified. A lot of non-organic foods may not have pesticides on them, but your tomato, for example, could have genes extracted from a fish and bred into it!
So, choose organic whenever you can, but if you can’t, make sure it’s something on the Clean 15 list!
Happy eating!
xx. Julia
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