Healthy Lifestyle

Following on from yesterday’s post Healthy Food, where I introduced some doubts over the wholesomeness of intensively produced crops, I’ll now talk about what these dangers entail.

Intensive farming methods call for the use of a lethal cocktail of many different pesticides, herbicides and fungicides to be sprayed on crops several times during their growing cycle, in order to free them from any nasty bugs, diseases or competing weeds that would stunt their growth or cause them to be diseased. From the point of view of the consumer this may sound like a good thing. It certainly means maximum crop yields per acre of arable land and those crops are free of all unsavory guests in the form of parasitic bugs and worms.

In fact, the use of modern artificial fertilizers means that every acre can be used to produce crops year in and year out without needing to be rested or allowed to lay fallow for one year in four as with traditional farming methods. Sounds all very good on the surface, but it’s what lies below that is discouraging news.

There are two big problems with this method of farming which are both detrimental to a person’s health.

The first is the pesticides, herbicides and fungicides that are sprayed onto the crops. These are lethal poisons which do not completely dissipate before the vegetables or fruit reaches the supermarket shelves. That means people are ingesting these poisons on a daily basis, which, if the body cannot deal with them will build up and can potentially produce what are known as “modern” diseases, such as cancers, asthma, eczema, Parkinson’s disease etc. I say potentially because there is no firm published scientifically derived “evidence” to prove this, but there is certainly a mountain of anecdotal evidence as well as the obvious: “Where were these diseases before the introduction of modern pesticides?”

I’ll delve into the second problem in my next post.

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