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Better Choices

How Do Your Favorite ‘Organic’ and ‘Made with Organic’ Snack Bars Rate? Take a Look at Cornucopia’s Scorecard

When you are in the checkout line at the supermarket and looking for a nutritious snack to satiate your hunger, take caution when selecting an energy bar.

The energy or snack bar market is big business — a $9 billion industry — and many people are easily fooled by the slick marketing that food companies employ to get you to purchase their products.

The absolute first thing to look for is a certified organic snack bar — one that has the green and white USDA organic seal on it.

And it’s very important not to fall into the trap of thinking that certified organic bars and ones that say “made with organic ingredients” are the same thing. They are categorically not the same.

Because of a loophole in organic regulations, many “made with organic ingredients” bars contain protein isolates which have been processed with the neurotoxic solvent hexane — a byproduct of the gasoline refinement industry.

In order to help you figure out which snack bars are the best, among both organic and conventional, The Cornucopia Institute has just released a brand new report called Raising the Bar: Choosing Healthy Snack Bars versus Gimmicky Junk Food.

Raising the Bar exposes misleading marketing practices by food industry giants and calls out leading natural/organic brands for using cheap, conventional ingredients instead of creating nutritive products that qualify for the USDA organic label.

As it turns out, the highest rated brands in this report are Simple Squares, Bearded Brothers, and Larabar Organic with Superfoods. These three are all USDA certified organic and use only organic fruits, nuts, and seeds without any added sugars, gums, flours, protein isolates, or preservatives.

To read Raising the Bar – Executive Summary, click HERE.

To read Raising the Bar – Full Report, click HERE.

To see how your favorite snack bars rate, check out the Snack Bars Scorecard, which is mobile-friendly.

This scorecard is just another extremely valuable piece of research from Cornucopia, one of the organic industry’s most important watchdog organizations. These people are doing the very hard work to keep us both safe and informed.

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Organic Insider

Better Choices

Analyzing the Pew Research Food Report: Millennials Don’t Trust GMOs, We Have Lots of Education To Do

The Pew Research Center recently released its findings from a new report called The New Food Fights: U.S. Public Divides Over Food Science, which largely focused on Americans’ perceptions of organic and genetically-modified foods (GMOs).

It surveyed 1,500 nationally representative adults (whatever that means), and I found the data to be both encouraging and worrisome.

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Living Maxwell

Better Choices

The Mystery Behind Organic Honey

One question has been really bothering me as of late: Is there such a thing as USDA certified organic honey?

Despite the picture you see above, there is good reason for me to have serious doubt.  Here is why.

In the past, I have spoken to numerous local beekeepers and when I asked them if their honey is organic, they have all told me that there is no such thing as USDA certified organic honey.

Yet when I go to the market, I see one or two brands of honey that have the USDA organic seal on the label. Almost all of the honey that has the seal on it comes from Brazil, which has made me wonder whether there is some type of corruption going on with the certification.

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Organic Insider

Better Choices

Could Regenerative Organic Coffee Farming be the Key to Reversing Deforestation in Peru?

Nestled in the heart of the mountains in the Andean Paramos region of Peru, there are 182 families who entirely depend on coffee cultivation for their livelihood.

Unfortunately, coffee rust – a fungus also known as “La Roya” — has devastated the coffee trees of 64 of these families, leading to catastrophic economic losses for hundreds of people.

With coffee production their only way to make a living and provide for their families, they have had no choice but to search for nearby land which has not been infected by coffee rust. While this is giving these families a financial lifeline, it has also resulted in the destruction of forests in the region, a territory that cannot that cannot afford this type of displacement.

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