Courtesy ofCafePress.com

Why not eat local, organic, pesticide-free and non-GMO foods? Basically, we're talking here about foods that weren't created by man and come straight from nature. Most foods we eat are pumped full of chemicals to make them last longer on store shelves, more attractive to buyers, and ultimately to make more profit for the people who sell the foods.

For instance, the more meat a manufacturer can get out of a cow, the more money they'll make. So they'll pump them full of growth hormones, and feed them a fattening diet of grains, as opposed to their natural diet which is grass. The growth hormones will still be in the cow and its milk when it's slaughtered and you'll end up eating a lot of this extra junk... um gross.

What's more, over farming, soil depletion, commercial fertilizer, hybrid crops and genetic modifications are slashing the nutrients found in your fruits and vegetables. You'd have to eat 10 servings of spinach to get the same level of minerals from just one serving about 50 years ago.Producers create "hybrid" forms of your fruits and vegetables -- not for their ability to store nutrients -- but for their color, weight and shelf life.

Research has shown that the food we eat may be killing us, rather than helping us survive. So let's ditch the chemicals, and start eating actual food again by eating organic. The most popular definition for organic foods refers simply to all foods that are produced naturally. One might think then, that according to this definition, all food must be organic since all food is derived from some natural source, i.e., a plant or animal. But the legal definition of organic makes a clearer distinction between organic and all other types of food, that is organic food is food from plants and animals that is produced without the use of synthetic fertilizers, artificial pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, growth hormones, feed additives or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). So by eating organic, or by focusing on those foods that come with the heaviest burden of pesticides, additives and hormones, we can reduce our exposure to toxic chemicals and enjoy safer meals. Tada! Problem solved.