I'm heading out for a family event 80 miles away, but wanted to post a brief answer to reader Jayraj's question on eating all or partly organic. First, I'd like to clarify his comment that the age of puberty has dropped from 17 to 12. I'll drop in a link I found on the National Library of Medicine website, (NLM.org). I think of puberty as a process with a number of stages; NLM says the onset of the initial stages in girls (early breast development and pubic hair) varies from age 8 to 13 and typically precedes onset of menstruation by 2 to2.5 years. (http://kidshealth.org/parent/growth/growing/understanding_puberty.html# There has been some change in the timing of puberty, but I'll need to spend some more time researching if there's a consensus on the linkage to hormones and antibiotics in food and milk.

In the meantime, both from my reading and my own personal views, I think buying organic is a good idea, if you can afford it, if the food products are locally produced and if they are available during the season you're stocking your larder for.  I could go to a large food store in town, part of a huge chain, that has many additional organic products, essentially year-round, but lots of them come from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. There's a cost, often a hidden cost, to buying these. Some of the transportation costs are likely subsidized and therefore invisible to us. There's also the cost to our planet in emissions that I think clearly contribute to global warming (I do believe in it; I've seen pictures of the glaciers receding and the Arctic ice sheet going away). So it's a balancing act, depending on where you live, what your finances are and what season of the year it is. I don't eat as much organic fruits and vegetables as our Boulder-based friend does; we do buy organic milk and eggs through a local dairy and, as I've said before, have purchased lamb, beef and bison that are organic. In answer to Jayraj, I'd say go as far along the organic pathway as you can logically do.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 26th, 2009 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Healthly lifestyle, Healthy eating, medically-oriented background info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.