Dr. Greene

Dr. Greene’s Organic Prescription

Dr. Greene has outlined the top 10 organic choices you can make and placed them in order of importance, making it easy for you to start slowly while still making a huge positive impact on your family's health. Choose to start at the beginning, or skip around and see which parts of the prescription suit your family's needs. Go organic and help make your body and the world a healthier place to live.

#1 Organic Milk

There's more to a glass of milk than meets the eye. You see the milk, but hidden from view is the cow it came from, the dairy where the cow was raised, and all of the land devoted to growing food for that cow. It's a huge opportunity. When you choose a glass of conventional milk, you are buying into a whole chemical system of agriculture. When you buy a glass of organic milk you're creating more benefit than you see. The popularity of organic milk has already resulted in many conventional farmers choosing to raise cows without the use of artificial growth hormones. This is a big accomplishment, brought about by consumer trends. If we keep choosing organic milk, we can expect similar changes in the whole system - as well as good nutrition - and a cleaner environment - for our families.

#2 Organic Potatoes

For some cultures, the staple food is rice; for some it is maize. For American children, the staple food is the French fry! Potatoes are consistently on the list of most pesticide-contaminated vegetables. Organic potatoes make the list because by the time American kids are 18 to 24 months old potatoes are the most commonly eaten vegetables, mostly in the form of French fries. This gives a big opportunity to exert our power to bring about change.

#3 Organic Peanut Butter

More acres are devoted to growing peanuts in the U.S. than to any fruit, any vegetable, or any nut (peanuts are legumes, like beans or peas). More than 99% of these acres are conventional. Peanut butter is the leading use of all these acres of peanuts.

I loved peanuts and peanut butter when I was a kid. Baseball games, circuses, favorite sandwiches made with love by my mom… but somewhere along the way, about the time peanut allergies started increasing, I started thinking of peanut butter as an over-sweetened, unhealthy, high fat food. And if you look at the ingredients on a jar of conventional peanut butter, it's not hard to see why. In addition to peanuts, the next ingredient may well be corn syrup, then sugar. You might also find partially hydrogenated and/or fully hydrogenated fats, mono- and diglycerides, the pesticides ferric orthophosphate and copper sulfate, and a long list of other ingredients. Organic peanut butter will have a short, natural ingredient list. It might contain only organic dry roasted peanuts, perhaps with a pinch of salt. Peanuts are a good source of heart-healthy mono-unsaturated fats, protein, vitamin E, niacin, and folate. Peanuts are packed with antioxidants, on par with blackberries (and roasting peanuts raises the antioxidant levels). And they even contain resveratrol. Organic peanut butter can be a good picture of something convenient made naturally from whole foods.

#4 Organic Baby Foods

If I were going to pick only one time of life to eat organic, it would be from conception through age 3. Our bodies and our brains grow faster during this period than at any later time. Babies eat more than adults, pound for pound, and they are more vulnerable to environmental toxins.

Baby food makes it on the list primarily for the health of your own family, but also with an eye toward raising a generation that appreciates the value and taste of organic whole foods. For our generation so far, only 0.5% of US agricultural production is organic. Let's start now to make the percentage of organic cropland far higher in our children's generation.

#5 Organic Catsup

This switch is pretty easy, but how in the world did catsup end up on the top 10 list? Tomatoes contain an important nutrient called lycopene, one of nature's most potent antioxidants, known to help prevent and heal cell damage. Foods rich in lycopene can lower cancer and heart disease risk. Tomatoes are, by far, the #1 source of lycopene in the American diet, providing an estimated 80% of the lycopene consumed.

Just switching from conventional to organic catsup could significantly increase the nutrients in America's diet and decrease conventional tomato farming methods. How simple! And you might want to think about switching to organic marinara and pizza sauce at the same time.

#6 Organic Cotton

But cotton isn't a food! Or is it? Without consumers being conscious of it, much of it ends up in our food. The oil from the seeds is used in our food supply, appearing in vegetable oil (cottonseed oil), salad dressings, peanut butter, and snack foods such as crackers, cookies, chips, and pretzels.

If a product lists cottonseed oil or an unidentified vegetable oil on the label - choose an organic brand instead. And wear your organic cotton. Organic cotton is a safe choice for you and far healthier for the planet. This one is tough, but together we can target what is perhaps the single most important crop to change.

#7 Organic Apples

Consistently named as one of the most pesticide-contaminated fruits and vegetables, apples make my list because they are more popular than the other fruits and vegetables on the list. Thus, choosing organic apples can make a big difference both in lowering your family's pesticide exposure and in using our consumer power to change agriculture.

#8 Organic Beef

It's easy to find organic milk; it can be tough to find organic beef. Even though there are more than three times as many beef cattle in the United States as dairy cows, there are fewer organic beef cattle than dairy. Organic beef represents less than a quarter of a percent of the beef produced in our country. Choosing organic beef could make a huge difference in the health of the planet for all of the same reasons listed under #1, Milk, above.

I suggest replacing conventional beef either with grass-fed organic beef, or with a variety of other plant or animal sources of protein, such as organic eggs, garbanzo beans (a huge source of plant protein around the world), quinoa (a wonderfully complete protein), or soy.

#9 Organic Soy

If I were to ask you to switch everything in your diet that contains soy to organic, you would have to switch countless items. Soy turns up as an ingredient in a surprising array of products. Almost the entire soy crop in the U.S. is crushed to make soybean oil and meal. Only a tiny proportion is consumed as whole soybean products. Soybean oil is huge, accounting for about two thirds of all vegetable oils or animal fats consumed in the US.

Less than 0.17% of our massive soy crop is organic. We need to make a dent. Let's start by switching the soy we can see. Organic soy products made from organic whole soy beans (soy milk, soy yogurt, veggie burgers) can be a healthy part of the diet, and of our agricultural system.

#10 Organic Corn

Changing this tenth item on the prescription is the toughest one, only intended for those most committed to change. To adopt organic corn means looking at every ingredient label. If there is corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn sweetener, dextrose, glucose, cornstarch, modified cornstarch, vegetable starch, corn solids, or corn oil - choose organic. It means skipping most sodas and many baked goods. More than 4000 US products contain corn as an ingredient. And this doesn't count all the corn used in livestock production. To select organic corn means selecting organic meat, poultry and dairy.

The industrial production of conventional corn has a devastating impact on the American landscape: our soil, our air, our livestock, and our waters. Switching from conventional to organic corn is extremely difficult, but it could do wonders for the health of your family. And no other change would improve the health of so many acres of cropland.

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