BestLife International, Inc.
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8 Articles - Natural & Organic Foods
3BACK - ARTICLES: Table of Contents
The Facts About Natural & Organic Foods -- The two most misunderstood and abused terms in the food industry.
A factual perspective for the consumer.
1. Natural and organic is usually a good thing, but not always. The term all natural or organic is no more important than any ingredient listed in determining the healthfulness of a product. Arsenic, aluminum, turpentine, poison mushrooms, hydrogenated oils, homogenized milk, MSG and dozens of other additives are “all natural”.
2. Most of the organic foods in the world are not certified. Certification starts out with the intention of giving consumers the assurance that a credible third party has made certain the organic claim is accurate. As certification evolved food processors were forced to use organically certified lines of equipment, to the point that no un-certified products could be packaged on that line. Buying product from these lines is also more expensive.
3. It is cost prohibitive for many large food-processing plants to duplicate equipment and dedicate the whole line to certified organic product. This means that if a product that could otherwise be certified organic is produced using equipment that handles other food, it is no longer organic. This is like having two blenders in the kitchen, one for blending only organic bananas. If you blend non-organic bananas in it, wash it and blend some more organic bananas, they are not organic anymore.
4. While it’s assumed that organic products are free from pesticide or herbicide residue, it is rare that non-organic ingredients contain any at all and they can all be tested. Non-organic ingredients tend to be cleaner from the standpoint of fecal material, soil, worm and insect remains. The far majority of totally organic crops in the world are not certified. The consumer can benefit from these crops because they end up being less costly. Once an ingredient is analyzed for it’s nutritional content and purity factor, much more is known about it than a certified organic ingredient.
5. Being certified organic has absolutely no bearing in itself in guaranteeing healthfulness. The same holds true with less refined ingredients. Some items like sugar are in a more nutritious state when raw and un-refined, in other cases it takes refining to concentrate a nutrient and discard parts that are less desirable. As a rule certified organic ingredients are comparable in nutrition to their non-organic counterpart and they always cost more.
6. BestLife would like to use more organic ingredients because it encourages better growing practices and healthier foods. Unfortunately, it’s also an excuse to exploit the consumer without substance, not always, but often enough. Several of the healthiest most beneficial ingredients in our products cannot be certified organic at this time and would offer no advantage if they were. We will introduce a totally organic Sammi’s Best in 2003. How will we do that? Take out the added vitamins, fiber, calcium citrate, probiotics, chicory root, most of the complex carbohydrates and some other things that make our product more nutritious and balanced but prevent certification. We will then charge more for the product even though it contains ingredients that are less costly to grow, because of the paperwork needed to obtain certification and because we can’t produce the all-organic version in the same stainless steel, sterilized equipment used to make regular Sammi’s Best Soy or Soya-Rice. There are many similarities between organic certification and a kosher certification with organic being less reasonable.
