Be Sure About What We Are Eating

A balanced diet with meat, eggs, bread, veggies, greens, fruits, pulses and grains sounds perfect for a mother. I notice that at times, mothers succeed to feed a balanced meal effortlessly, but most times it is a dramatized effort with food being literally pushed down the throat of the little one, being bribed or emotionally blackmailed. But honestly, you still need to figure out what your child is eating is healthy or not.

When we expand this question to the world, we are dealing with larger numbers and scale.

Soon, the Earth would weigh more with the forecasted population growth of 8.3 billion people. By 2030, the world would see almost 30% more children — the future of human race . A balanced diet with the right amount of caloric and nutrient intake is what would make them healthy. But, is that it? Shouldn’t their food be clean from toxins?

The food from inorganic agricultural sources is as good as feeding your own child heavy metal with toxins.

How did these metals land into my child’s plate?

The current generation will be parents soon. The sad part is that if there not detoxified, they will be carriers of heavy metals and toxins. Especially mothers and pregnant women!

Children have unique exposure pathways. They can be exposed in utero to toxic environmental agents that cross the placenta.The developing fetus in the womb is perhaps most vulnerable to such toxins. Pregnant women exposed to higher amounts of organophosphate pesticides while pregnant are found to have lower IQ points once they reach the elementary-school age. To undo this, parents should choose to feed organic food to children.

Having said that, you may start imagining a plate of balanced meal with flagged labels of arsenic, cadmium, lead, acrylamides, mercury and other heavy metals, toxic in nature. Yes, your child, our future generations are eating it.

Over the years, with the unfortunate use of a variety of pesticides during crop cultivation, heavy metals have settled into the soil. Insecticides among them are the most toxic, followed by herbicides, fungicides, rodenticides, fumigants, and other pesticides. When theses pesticides are sprinkled over crops, soil is the first consumer of heavy metals.

Without the exposure to any of these chemicals, soil is rich with nutrients necessary to grow a crop. But, use of pesticides kills the inherent nutrients and creates a concentrated mix of heavy metal, perilous to environment and people. The water that seeps through agricultural soil imports a concentrated version of these metals. This water is now becomes a part of rivers.

Spinach, coriander leaves, capsicum and okra are some vegetables that hold huge concentrations of heavy metals. A large part of vegetables available in Delhi is grown along the Yamuna river and nearby regions which transfer these metallic toxins in abundance.

A river is a rich bed of flora and fauna where fish thrive. Animals and humans drink this water with heavy metals. In fact, the same water is used for crop irrigation, poultry cultivation, in the fisheries, which just seems to viciously compound the whole problem of concentrated metals. The other ignored means is through pollination.

Eating heavy metals is more dangerous to your health than SMOKING. The world-wide deaths and chronic diseases due to pesticide poisoning number about 1 million per year include children. They suffer from diseases that cannot be rooted back to any apparent reason, except for food contamination. Some examples include chloramphenicol exposure of newborns and vascular collapse (gray baby syndrome), tetracycline and dysplasia of the dental enamel, and lead and altered neurologic development.

Mothers can Detoxify their Children, The Organic Way

Parents who have fed their children with these adulterated foods can now reverse the toxication with food consumption patterns.  Children fed with an organic diet have much lower levels of metabolites, produced by high-risk insecticides, in their bodies. This ensures steady and healthy growth of children.

You can get started by growing your own backyard garden with simple green and vegetables. Organic brands stocked in the retail shelves like 24 Mantra use a certified label that indicates the authenticity of food. These grains, pulses and other foods come from organic farms. Such brands bring heavy metal-free food to your child’s plate. These foods also include meat, poultry, and other dairy products.

Organic foods provide higher concentration of heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids for children.  They also contain higher levels of antioxidants and less harmful chemicals than conventionally farmed produce. The organic produce not only helps children immediately from dangers, but also prepares the soil and environment. The farmer can also be encouraged to detoxify the soil by choosing the organic way of cultivation.

Detoxicating your child’s anatomy won’t happen in a day. Continuous intake of organic food would drain out the settled toxics over a period of time. A residue-free body manifests after repeated cycles of circulation of organic food consumption.

Some mothers may worry about the temporary prices that make organic food seem expensive. But, the price of ill-health and deteriorated future generations in exchange of adulterated food is higher.