When you are healthy and full of energy, you have the personal energy to devote to broader issues. Personal sustainability is a natural first step toward broader sustainability consciousness and it is the entry point for many of us.

Think about the synergy that can exist between what is good for us as individuals and what is good for our planet. In almost every case, what is good for you is ultimately good for society and good for our world.

Step 7: Go Organic

Going organic is perhaps the simplest and the most important first step you take toward self-preservation. You can start tomorrow with a trip to your local natural healthy supermarket. What could be easier than that?

Imagine a movie about your dinner last night. Now play it backwards. Food comes out of your mouth and goes back on the plate, jumps off the plate back onto the stove, back into the refrigerator, back to the store, the warehouse, the truck, the fields, and eventually back into the soil and rain and air and seed and sunlight that created the food in the first place. If you could play that movie backwards, you would see that all of the factors that go into your food and eventually become part of your body.

Some of them would turn your stomach. Typical foods are grown on soils that have been chemically fertilized and sprayed with multiple herbicides (chemicals that kill unwanted plants) and pesticides (chemicals that kill insects and rodents), then processed with high heat and preservative chemicals to extend shelf life, added sugars to improve taste and packaged in disposable plastic containers for your convenience. The typical bag of chips you buy at the supermarket may have been subjected to over 150 chemicals by the time the first bite reaches your mouth.

Whole foods are best, but that “whole” conventional apple may be genetically modified, fertilized with synthetic chemicals and sprayed with pesticides before it goes into your body. With the rise of industrialized food production, “whole food” was no longer good enough. “Natural foods” are an improvement, but there is no real definition of “natural” that provides confidence that a so-called natural banana is still exactly as nature intended.

That’s why organically produced food, without toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, is healthier for you and for the land.

If you can, go completely organic. You’ll find your health, your family’s health and the planet’s health will all improve.

It’s true, organic foods cost more. If your pocketbook simply won’t allow a total organic conversion, consider going organic with foods that carry the heaviest toxic load. Here’s a list of the foods that have the highest levels of contamination with pesticides, herbicides, hormones, antibiotics and heavy metals. If you can shift to buying organic versions of these foods, you’ll make big strides toward cleaning up your diet and your health:

Milk Cows grazing on chemicals pass them on to people who drink their milk or eat non-organic cheese and dairy products. Dioxins, Lyndane and DDT are regularly found in non-organic milk.

• Meats: These are high on the food chain, and thus can concentrate toxins from the animal’s diets in their fatty tissues.
• Dairy products: Also high on the food chain and rich in fats, which is where chemicals become stored.
• Fish: While not strictly organic, it is critical to buy wild fish and avoid all farmed fish. Hint: All “Atlantic salmon” is farmed, as this fish is virtually extinct in the wild.
• Salad crops: Lettuce and celery are highly sprayed, and have no outer shell to protect the part you eat - the leaf.
• Mushrooms: Mushrooms are highly absorbent, and conventional growing uses powerful fungicides to keep stray species from invading the intended crop.
• Root crops: Conventional potatoes, yams, carrots, onions and other root crops can be sprayed with fungicides as well as pesticides and the parts you eat grow in direct contact with the chemicals.
• Ground crops: Strawberries and other berries including grapes and other crops grown close to the ground and with a thin absorbent skin that you eat tend to contact and absorb more chemicals.
• Bananas: Conventional bananas are grown with a plastic bag of pesticides placed over the soft, absorbent skin of the fruit.
• Waxed fruit: That shiny apple has a wax coating that locks in the pesticides in a way that you can’t easily wash them off.
• Coffee and tea: Technically not “foods,” but hot water brewing can concentrate any pesticides while it is extracting the “good stuff.” Remember to use an unbleached filter and to avoid the Styrofoam cup like a plague!

You can also find good, healthy food for much lower prices at your local farmer’s market. Ask the sellers. It may not be officially labeled “organic,” but it’s been transported only a short distance, so its nutrient content will be very high and it may have been grown with minimal toxic chemicals.

Garden of Life was founded on the benefits of whole food based nutrition and its products are an embodiment of that mission. Living Foods™ are the result, selected for their potential to deliver meaningful health benefits with minimal processing. These naturally functional foods fit easily into your lifestyle and help empower your extraordinary health by making it more convenient to eat well.

All of our supplements come from organically grown whole food based sources whenever possible.

Despite our best efforts to eat a healthy diet, it is difficult to attain optimum nutrition with an overprocessed food supply and our depleted soil that cannot, in the best of circumstances, provide all the nutrients we need.

Whole food based nutritional supplements can help fill in the nutritional gaps that today’s world leaves. Whole food-based supplements contain the micronutrients, that are found in whole foods and that contribute to complete nutrition.

So far, more than 25,000 micronutrients have been discovered in fruits and vegetables. Researchers are just now discovering that these nutrients work in concert to orchestrate a natural harmony in our bodies.

Garden of Life’s nutritional supplements are made from organically grown whole foods whenever possible to provide you with the nutrients your body needs for extraordinary health.

We also include a variety of probiotic supplements that help support healthy intestinal flora essential to good health. Probiotics are also important because they help your body make the vitamins and short-chain fatty acids that support an healthy intestinal lining and boost immunity, depriving unwelcome microorganisms of space and nutrients.