Why Choose Organic?
"We have not inherited the Earth from our fathers we are borrowing it from our Children " - Lester Brown.
The average child receives four times more exposure than an adult to at least eight widely used cancer-causing pesticides in food. Food choices you make now will impact your child's future health.
The Soil Conservation Service estimates more than 3 billion tons of topsoil are eroded from the United States' crop lands each year. That means soil erodes seven times faster than it's built up naturally. Soil is the foundation of the food chain in organic farming. However, in conventional farming, the soil is used more as a medium for holding plants in a vertical position so they can be chemically fertilized. As a result, American farms are suffering from the worst soil erosion in history.
Water makes up two-thirds of our body mass and covers three-fourths of the planet. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimates pesticides -some cancer causing- contaminate the ground water in 38 states, polluting the primary source of drinking water for more than half the country's population.
American farms have changed drastically in the last three generations, from family-based small businesses dependent on human energy to large-scale factory farms. Modern farming uses more petroleum than any other single industry, consuming 12 percent of the country's total energy supply. More energy is now used to produce synthetic fertilizers than to till, cultivate and harvest all the crops in the United States. Most chemical fertilizers come from natural gas. Once in the soil, natural gas fertilizers give off nitrous oxide which is about two hundred times more potent than carbon dioxide. In contrast, organic farming is still based on labor-intensive practices such as hand weeding and the use of green manure instead of synthetic fertilizers to support soil.
Many pesticides approved for use by the EPA were registered long before extensive research linking these chemicals to cancer and other diseases had been established. Now the EPA considers 60 percent of all herbicides, 90 percent of all fungicides and 30 percent of all insecticides carcinogenic. A 1987 National Academy of Sciences report estimated that pesticides might cause an extra 4 million cancer cases among Americans. The bottom line is pesticides are poisons designed to kill living organisms and can also harm humans. In addition to cancer, pesticides are implicated in birth defects, nerve damage and genetic mutations.
Although organic foods and products might seem more expensive than conventional foods and products, conventional food and product prices do not reflect hidden costs borne by taxpayers including nearly $74 billion in federal subsidies in 1988. Other hidden costs include pesticide regulation and testing, hazardous waste disposal and cleanup, and environmental damage.
The Unique Vulnerability of Infants and Children to Pesticides
Infants and children are proportionately and biologically more vulnerable to pesticide exposure. Below, three biological bases for their particular vulnerability are identified.
First, children's metabolic pathways, especially in the first months after birth, are immature compared to those of adults. This makes fetuses, infants, and children less able to detoxify chemicals such as organophosphate pesticides.
Second, infants and children are growing and developing, and their delicate developmental processes are easily disrupted. Their immune system is immature. Many organ systems in infants and children undergo extensive growth and development throughout the prenatal period and the first months and years after birth. Thus, if cells in an infant's brain are destroyed by pesticides, if reproductive development is diverted by endocrine disrupters, or if development of the immune system is altered, the resulting dysfunction can be permanent and irreversible.
Third, because children have more future years of life than most adults, they have more time in which to develop chronic disease that may be triggered by early exposures. Exposures sustained early in life, including prenatal exposures, appear more likely to lead to disease than similar exposures encountered later. Also, deficits sustained early may persist lifelong. There is evidence, for example, that pre- and postnatal exposures to pesticides increase risk of childhood cancer. Additionally, concern has also arisen that early exposure to neurotoxic pesticides may increase risk in later life of chronic neurologic diseases such as dementia, Parkinson's disease, and amyotropic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig's disease).  |
