At least do it for your kids
Some parents wouldn’t dream of providing any food for their kids that isn’t organic, while others believe it’s just a hype. But what does it really mean? And how can it have an impact on your child?
Organic can be defined as ‘relating to or derived from living matter,’ or is ‘produced or involving production without the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or other artificial chemicals.’ This means, any vegetables that have been sprayed with synthetic pesticides cannot be classified as organic.
For a safer home, our cleaning products are made without harsh chemicals, dye, petrochemicals, enzymes or synthetic fragrance. In addition, our laundry products don’t contain parabens, phthalates, or chlorine bleach to name a few. Omitting harsh chemicals from your home environment will benefit the health of your kids hugely. While this may seem like an impossible task, to begin with even the smallest tweak could be beneficial to your kids.
Avoid the chemicals
Did you know that when kids eat food, anything that is sprayed on it during cultivation or production is digested too? Pesticides sprayed onto nonorganic produce and unnatural preservatives in processed food enter the bloodstream. In fact, levels of pesticides in the blood are twice as high in children as they are in adults. While washing fruit and veg before cooking can help lower the amount of pesticides ingested, it still lets pesticides in!
By switching out organic food for just 5 days you can reduce pesticides in the body to an almost undetectable amount (1).
Your home will be safer
Chemicals aren’t only in non-organic food, but in our homes from cleaning products. There’s a whole list of dangerous chemicals that are often used in cleaning products, including ammonia, phthalates and triclosan. Just because your kids aren’t doing the cleaning with these products, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t affected by them. In fact, using a cleaning spray even as little as once a week can raise the risk of developing asthma significantly (2).
Harsh cleaning products don’t only kill unwanted bacteria, but they kill good bacteria, too. We need good bacteria for our respiratory and digestive systems. This means any product inevitably left on appliances could cause damage when inhaled by your kids.
Look to the future
Pesticides don’t just affect our bodies, but they have a huge negative effect on the environment, specifically topsoil. Topsoil is the top layer (5-10cm) of soil on the planet. Full of minerals, organic matter, water and air, it is the soil we need to grow produce well. It takes 500 years to form naturally, yet conventional farming destroys this gradually. Some scientists believe that we’ll run out of topsoil in as little as 60 years! What could this do to our kids and their children?
Organic farming actually replaces topsoil – it’s natural! Think about what would happen if everyone switched to organic food. We’d live in a fruitful environment to say the least!
In conclusion
Creating a chemical-free home is a challenge and possibly impossible in our day and age. However, reducing the amount of non-organic food and chemically harsh products you consume can improve the environment your child lives in significantly. Whether you’re making changes for their health now, or looking to help their future, and their kid’s futures, turning organic will have a positive impact regardless.