ORGANIC - Worth It?

Hey, it's Dr. A answering some more questions. So this one is, the title probably let you in on, is organic food, is it worth it? Now this is one of those things that people have extremely strong opinions on, on all ends of the spectrum, probably, you know, multiple types of opinions, etc. And I think that it kind of comes down to a couple of basic ideas. Now, the first one is we should really look at why would it even matter, you know, for our food to be, you know, normal process versus organic process. And then there's maybe some shades of gray in there in between as well. Normally, depending on where you're looking at this, different countries have different rules about what it takes to be able that claim that something is organic. And one of the things, because I am— although I travel different places, mostly I'm in the United States, so I'm mostly familiar with their labeling and practices here— there is a lot of labeling, especially on meat products, I've noticed in supermarkets that is a little bit, you know, what you could look at it deceptive, or it's just kind of hard to read through. So you actually have to look through and see Because they might list something as, you know, pasture-raised, whatever the animal was, and then you look and it in no way was raised in an organic matter. Now, it might not have been raised in a feedlot, or if it's a free-range chicken, you know, maybe it was raised on the grass, but often in a small pen, you know, so it wasn't just like sort of, you know, chickens running around. Um, So you have to be a little bit thoughtful and careful if you are going to put some time, effort, and money into things, and you are trying to— you're going to pay extra money for as clean of produce and animals as possible. You really have to do a little bit of looking into the way that they're raised and what it means to be something like, say, you know, no antibiotics, but nothing about whether it was organically raised or not. So one of the things that you can do now with the internet certainly is if you're curious, you can, you know, maybe do a little bit of research over time. You can take your phone, take a picture of the different packages, and you can actually look the companies up and see. Now normally, if a company has gone to all of the effort and cost to be a producer of an organic anything, but especially something, you know, organically raised animals, usually that'll be really right at the top of their web presence and they'll have information about it. There have been, for example, fish that I have, you know, tried to source for a, you know, a dinner party or something, and I looked in it, you know, there's, you know, you can get salmon from different areas and you can look at how toxic the area is. Now, One thing we have to be real about, there is no non-toxic place in, in Earth anymore. It is— the whole world is toxic, there's toxins everywhere. What you're doing is trying to mitigate the amount of toxins that your body is encountering, really. And so with fish, a lot of times, you know, and you can look more into this, we could really go on for a long time, You know, farmed fish often are not what you're looking for, and a lot of fish are farmed. And the reason for that is there's the type of food that they get, and there's a lot of bioconcentration of things that you don't want. And again, you can look, and if you just do a search for, you know, for example, Atlantic farmed salmon, you'll find out a lot of information there about that. Now, in this case, it wasn't salmon. And so I was looking for a different type of fish, and I found a supplier that actually we could get in our area. And it turned out that they were actually— it was a lake river type fish, and they were sourced from a particular area, and they were wild sourced. Sometimes you'll see line caught. Line caught is nice, you know, it's not Not, you know, gillnetted, etc. But the other thing is you have to think about where it came from, because the water that they're in, how toxic that is, is how toxic the food they're eating is as well. So with fish, you got to look. Now, with terrestrial animals, so things that are raised here on the earth, not fish, you've got a little bit of a pedigree that you can look back on. Also, depending on where you live, now many people don't have this opportunity, but If you live near farms, especially family farms, you might find people who are local family farmers who may even be represented at your local, you know, food markets and things. And they may not have gone to the effort of being, you know, certified organic, but if you get to know them, you realize that basically they are raising the animals in a very clean organic manner. You know, I grew up on cattle ranches a long time ago, but the way that we raised our beef was essentially what would be considered organic now. And so, you know, certain ranches and farms will still do that. So you can look around for that. But if you think about why, why do we care? Well, our food is a way to bioconcentrate not only nutrients but toxins. And toxins, by bioconcentration, it means if you spray pesticides, you know, on crops, and then we eat the crop, that's sort of a direct way to get the pesticide or the toxin into you. Animals bioconcentrate more because they may eat the crop, and then that goes into them, and they concentrate it in their tissues, and then you eat the tissue of the animal, that's what the meat is, And then you're getting more of the toxin. So when we talk about toxins, what, what kinds are there? Well, you can look at chemical toxins, and we've had— and I'll put a link down in the description box below— we've had a discussion about endocrine disrupting chemicals, and in that YouTube video I even have a link to some research that I summarized and I wrote up and put in the newsletter. So endocrine disrupting chemicals are things that disrupt your hormonal system. This has become a huge problem because you can, for instance, look like you have the right amount of hormones in your body, but your body may be acting like it is deficient in those hormones, and that can come from an endocrine disrupting chemical. Or you might have something a little more sinister where you have an endocrine disrupting chemical that actually goes and binds to a hormone receptor and does not activate it appropriately, and you might get a disease like cancer from that. So endocrine disrupting chemicals can be very bad for you in a number of ways, not just hormonally. As I mentioned, there are cancer-causing chemicals. Most of us know, you know, about chemicals that have been found in certain areas. There are these cancer hotspots around the U.S. that the CDC identifies. Usually they're associated with exposure to chemicals. There's a lot of them that aren't identified as well, but there's also just a lot of knowledge in the scientific community about associations between certain chemicals and higher levels of certain types of cancer. You know, you see movies like, you know, Erin Brockovich, and there's been some more recent ones that have been out where, you know, these things happen. There's some sort of pollution, and then it winds up in the animals and the people, and everybody's sick. So those are problematic. There's also, in addition to the chemical type things, there are metals that are toxic as well. Now, toxic metals could be things like arsenic. There are toxic forms of chromium, for example. So chromium is normally a trace metal. In our body, but there are valent states, there's forms of chromium that are extremely toxic to us because they would go in your body and they would substitute for the good chromium, as an example. Then there are toxic metals like mercury and lead. We're pretty clear that those are bad for you across the board, and then there's other, you know, large numbers of toxic metals. Now toxic metals do a number of things. One of The things that toxic metals do is they get in the way of the receptor systems in your body. And so a receptor of a hormone or a neurochemical in your brain can be disrupted because of toxic metals. They also can stop the activity of enzymes. Heavy metals, especially like mercury and lead and all their friends, are considered irreversible enzyme inhibitors. Inhibitors. Enzymes create new things for us, so we go from a substrate or a base and turn it into a product that we can use. Well, if the enzyme doesn't work, we don't do that very well, so that's a really big problem for metals. And then, as I said, there are metals just like chemicals that are associated with certain cancer increases, which we certainly don't need. And pretty much all of the potentially or fully toxic metals have a number of cancers and other diseases. For example, lead levels— IQ points go down as lead levels go up, but also blood pressure problems rise as lead levels rise. For example, a lot of neurological problems with lead and mercury. I mentioned arsenic— arsenic and a lot of cancers and a lot of other problems. And it just goes on and on and on. So toxins are really nothing that you need to have. Now, like I said, you can't get away from toxins, so people say, well, you know, the heck with it, I don't need to spend extra money on eating organic. Well, the idea is you don't have to go out and try and get more toxins into you. So eating organic or eating as cleanly as you possibly can, because even organic food has some things that it shouldn't, it's just it should be less than the comparable food that is not organic. If you eat as low toxin as possible and you— whatever water you drink, you filter, etc., etc., you're at least going from maybe a very high level of toxin going into you to a lower level, not zero, but a lower level. Now, if the bioconcentration in you as a human of toxins gives you all these nasty things— potential for causing birth defects, potential for hormonal dysfunction, cardiovascular dysfunction, muscle and brain dys— you know, all everything dysfunction, potential for certain cancers, etc.— let's at least try and lower these amount. Now I've had people ask, and I mentioned it in the other video that I'm going to link about the endocrine disrupting chemicals, but there is a group, and there's no, you know, the internet has all sorts of things, some are a little more legit than others, and some are better than others, but this is a group that has very useful information. Is their information perfect? No. Is my information perfect? No. Nobody's information is perfect. I'm sorry. You can go to, you know, the CDC or the FDA or, you know, the FCC or anybody else, their information isn't perfect. So you have to just choose your sources as best possible. But something I've used a lot with patients is to help them navigate this, because you also have to be realistic that on one hand, toxic world, there's no non-toxic place, we'd like to lower our intake. On the other hand, the other piece of realism is it's expensive to buy less toxic animal products, organic, you know, produce and stuff like that. So one of the things people will do if they're trying to allocate their dollars is say, well, If I had to pick like the worst foods for being toxic, does anyone know what those are and can I identify so I at least spend my money on the stuff that is most toxic? And there is a group called the Environmental Working Group, and it's a very simple website, just ewg, like Environmental Working Group, ewg.org, not .com, .org. ewg.org, and they have a couple of lists that are very famous. One is the Dirty Dozen. It's now Dirty Dozen plus a few others, but we're sticking with the original name. And those are literally the most toxic foods from the standard food propagation areas. Now, these are— this is produce, not animals. They have information about animals there too. So the Dirty Dozen, if you are going to allocate money to spending on organic, that would be one place to allocate the money to spend. Okay, then they have the so-called Clean 15. Now the Clean 15 are ones where if I'm putting my money into organic for the Dirty Dozen, the Clean 15 I can probably go either way, right? Because the Clean 15, the way that they're The way that they're propagated, the way that they're treated, etc., has a low propensity for chemical additives and toxic additives, whereas the Dirty Dozen, high propensity for toxic additives. So ewg.org, again, nobody's information is perfect, but it's a really nice easy way to get into the information, see it, and kind of make some decisions so your pocketbook can handle you doing this. In general— now there are different types of diet plans and that's not what this is about, but in general we try and get people, you know, to get more of their food intake from the plant kingdom anyway, so a lot of vegetables, maybe some fruits, etc., and then some— if you don't eat animals, this doesn't apply to you. If you do eat animals, you want to get the cleanest animal products you can. Now, you can get organic animal products, and what that will usually do, unless you have unlimited money, is make you a little bit more cautious about how much animal product you're, you know, you're eating and consuming. But what's important about it is you, by choosing organically propagated animal products, or at least the cleanest version you can find. Again, look up their websites or get to know your local rancher or whatever, where you're going to buy stuff, and just get the cleanest possible animal products you can. You can at least then whatever— if you do eat animals. If you don't, great. If you do eat animals, that's one way to lower, because animals, remember, bioconcentrate more than plants do because they're eating the plants, right? So just remember to do your homework and look. The ewg.org, Environmental Working Group, has some great lists that you can help to plan around. And my personal opinion, based on the negativity to your health that toxins bring, is let's limit them as much as we can. We can't avoid them. Food is a huge way that we can limit them. So my opinion is eating as clean as possible, includes organic to the degree you can, is worthwhile. I'm Dr. A. I want to encourage you, if you haven't, to subscribe, like, share, notification bell, all those good things that we're supposed to do. Really appreciate all the new subscribers. I want to thank you for listening. Put comments in for other areas you want talked about, and I'll be happy to do it. Thank you.