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Better Choices

For someone who loves organic food so much and cooks so often, my refrigerator is surprisingly empty. How could this be?

Well, I go food shopping A LOT and pretty much only buy whatever I need for the next meal that I’ll be eating. I have the good fortune of being able to do this because an amazing organic market is literally less a one minute walk from my apartment.

Plus, I LOVE going food shopping and making multiple trips to the market in one day is not exactly a burden. Staring at all of the amazing fruits and vegetables in the produce section is one of my favorite things to do.

Even though I do tend to “buy on-demand”, you’ll pretty much always find these 10 organic foods in my kitchen:

COCONUT OIL I am a huge fan of coconut oil.  Not only is it high in lauric acid and great to use after a workout but it is one of the few oils that you can safely heat and cook with. (Olive oil is not one of them.)

Aside from using organic coconut oil in my smoothies, I use it as a moisturizer as well.

Living Maxwell

Better Choices

Whenever I get asked the question of which are the best tasting organic foods, my response is always the same: the Biodynamic ones.

For quite some time, I have been wondering why exactly Biodynamic tastes so delicious, so I went digging for an answer.

THE BASICS

To understand why Biodynamic tastes so good and different from the rest, let’s first discuss its origins and then define it.

Organic Insider

Better Choices

True, organic is slightly more expensive. This is primarily because it is not subsidized by the government in the same way that conventional food is.

But what rarely gets mentioned is that organic also offers superior nutrition.

In two research reports recently completed by The Organic Center, which examined the nutritional differences of organically farmed grains compared to “natural” and conventional varieties, the authors concluded that commercially produced organic breads are more nutrient-rich, contain more whole food ingredients and have fewer preservatives and additives than conventional breads.

Living Maxwell

Better Choices

I got a comment from someone the other day who said “Why should we care about GMOs (genetically-modified organisms)? Let them grow what they want. It doesn’t impact the people who eat organic.”

Unfortunately, this individual could not have been more wrong.

GMOs impact everyone, including people who eat 100% organic, and a recent study from the Pesticide Action Network confirms this.

Water sampling results from communities across four Midwestern states — Illinois, Nebraska, Iowa and Minnesota — indicate Atrazine is present in drinking water at levels well above those linked to birth defects and low birth weight.

WHAT IS ATRAZINE AND WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT IT

Present in 94% of our water supply, Atrazine is a toxic weed killer and 76 million pounds of it is dumped onto our farms each year, mostly for corn.

And the health effects of Atrazine?

Living Maxwell

Better Choices

While we constantly hear about the tremendous health benefits of drinking tea, one thing that almost never gets mentioned in this message is just how critical it is to drink organic tea.

In a recently released report called Tea Steeped in Toxics, the excellent non-profit Beyond Pesticides gives us an inside look at what is going on in the tea industry. Needless to say, what they uncover is very ugly and very scary.

Living Maxwell

Better Choices

As you may have already realized, CBD (short for cannabidiol — a cannabis compound) is exploding in popularity and is showing up in an increasing number of food, beverage and personal care products.

Despite the explosion of CBD oils and CBD-infused drinks, almost all of these products do not contain the USDA organic seal.

Boulder-based RE Botanicals has bucked this trend and has become the first national CBD brand to receive USDA organic certification for U.S.-grown hemp. Given who is behind RE Botanicals, the fact that it has achieved this milestone should not come as a surprise at all.

Organic Insider

Better Choices

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.