Are Healthy Foods and Organic Foods the Same?

This is the question that one may ask himself when hearing about healthy foods and organic foods. So what’s the difference, some people say that there is no difference between the two, but once you start researching a little you’ll find out that the two are in fact different from one another.

So let’s start by defining the organic foods, so what are they? The term of organic food is used for the foods produced by natural way and that aren’t chemically altered or genetically changed in any way and also for foods that comply with organic standards set by national governments and international organizations. They come just from plants and animals without other additives so that makes than very healthy for the human body.

Governments have a few standards that if a certain food meets it can be called organic , but you should know that a small amount of chemical additives is allowed but the food has to be 95% organic so that it may called an “organic food”. Also the whole processing of the food has to be organic, this meaning that no artificial methods of any kind should be used in the entire process from growing and up to the moment that it reaches the customers, so this means no chemical ripening, food irradiation, and genetically modified ingredients.

Previous to the 20th century almost all the food was organic as there were no chemical additives added to the food, but starting with the 1900 farms started to use pesticides and other methods that were not very healthy. Today we tend to call non-organic farming practices ‘conventional,’ as for more than 100 years this is the way farming was done by using a lot of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, insecticides and other unhealthy products, but of course with a few exceptions of privately run farms where the use of such chemicals was forbidden , but even today most of the world’s farming is done by the so called “conventional way” which means that all of those chemicals are still used and even if a certain growth in the organic foods sector was recorded we are still far away from having a fully organic agriculture a reason for this could be that the organic foods are on average more expensive than the normal ones.

So even if the term of organic food is a new one and this whole concept looks like something out of the 21 century actually it’s a returning to initial values for the agriculture which was a lot healthier than the one we all know today.

In recent year organic food requests have increased on the market even though the organic food is on average with 40 % more expensive than the normal food, but the advantages can be clearly seen, the food is first of all much healthier so that we can reduce the risks of having certain diseases also it tastes better than conventional food.

So the conclusion of this article can be that organic foods and healthy foods have a lot in common but we can’t say that they are the same.