Healthy Eating Primer

Back to Featured Articles

Don’t be flummoxed by the welter of new labels—be glad!  Once we had two kinds of food: industrial and organic. Now we have industrial food, commercial organic food, and many other foods raised with various ecological methods—some superior to organic foods. That’s progress. If you want to eat clean and green, here’s what you need to know.

This label has the force of law. It means the food was produced without pesticides, nitrogen fertilizer, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), hormones, antibiotics, or irradiation.  Big farm or small—and many industrial organic farms are enormous—organic food is cleaner than the food of chemical farming.  Be aware that organic doesn’t mean the animals ate their traditional diet or ran free on fresh grass.

Cows, sheep, and goats can make meat and milk from grass and hay alone. They don’t need corn or soy beans. Grass-fed beef, lamb, and milk contain more omega-3 fats, more CLA (a cancer-fighting, muscle-building fat), more vitamin E, and more beta carotene than the meat and milk from animals raised on grain. However, the label is not regulated by law—yet. Meanwhile, many grass farmers feed a little grain, which is not too terrible. If you want the most traditional meat and milk, look for “100% grass-fed.” It’s rare.

Unlike cows and sheep, pigs and chickens need some protein with their grass. When these omnivores roam outside, they’re called “pastured.” Pastured pork, chicken, and eggs contain more omega-3 fats, CLA, vitamin E, and beta carotene than the indoor versions. Indoor meat and eggs taste flabby by comparison.

Remember when the milk man left the bottle on the stoop? Perhaps not. You would remember the cream line, where the blue-tinted skim meets the dun-colored cream. That’s unhomogenized milk.  Now they force milk through a mesh so small, the cream droplets can never rise. There’s no evidence that unhomogenized milk is better for you, but it sure tastes better. Oh, and more cream is a fine measure of milk quality.

Raw means uncooked, of course.  Raw milk is getting more popular in states where it’s legal.  Many other foods, including cider, orange juice, nuts, honey, and even eggs are routinely pasteurized to kill pathogens.  Vitamins and enzymes die, too.  All these foods are more nutritious raw, but be careful: get them from producers who are scrupulous about animal health and food-chain hygiene.

This label—often seen on pork, chicken, eggs—means little. It means the pigs or chickens are not boxed up in tiny cages, so small they can’t turn around.  But if the product comes from large commercial farms, it probably means they live cheek by jowl in huge barns; they can go outside, but in practice, they don’t go out.

Industrial dairy and beef farmers give hormones to boost milk volume and hasten weight gain. These hormones aren’t good for cows, and some suspect they are linked to fat-related cancers in humans. Because F.D.A. regards bovine growth hormone (BGH) as safe for human consumption, it’s illegal for the label to say “hormone-free,” but most dairies who don’t use hormones find a way to say so. Hormones are not permitted in pork production, so the “hormone-free” label on a pork chop means nothing.

Routine use of antibiotics to keep animals from falling sick and speed weight gain has created antibiotic-resistant pathogens—and unhappy doctors, who find that common antibiotics don’t work on human patients anymore.  Organic farmers may not use antibiotics. Happily, conscientious beef, pork, and poultry farmers are starting to quit these drugs.  When dairy cattle get sick and take a round of antibiotics, their milk must be discarded, so the claim “antibiotic-free” on milk is meaningless.

Nina Planck is the author of Real Food: What to Eat and Why.

Back to Featured Articles