But buying organic is so much more expensive…. That’s one of the comments we hear most often: buying a lot of fresh produce, and chemical free produce, is really expensive. It’s a valid argument when you can place a conventionally grown apple next to an organic one and see that you’ll clearly pay more for the organic apple. And have you seen the latest fast food ads? A whole meal for $2.99! What the crap? How does anyone make a living at $2.99? The answer is coming right up.
Our experience has been quite the opposite, though. What I mean is, switching to a plant-based diet, and organic as much as possible, has actually saved us quite a bit of money. How? Well, you either pay the farmer or you pay the doctor, and doctors (and drug companies) cost more!
Amazingly, as a percentage of individual income there isn’t a country in the world that pays as little for food as the U.S. does. But guess who spends the most money on health care? Doesn’t that seem screwed up? Most farmers are going broke and out of business because the government chose a few large growers to support and condemned the rest. The large growers take the farm subsidies, grow as much as possible for as cheap as possible, and then sell it at artificially low prices, again, supported by the government. Their food is typically grown with genetically modified seeds, treated with insane amounts of chemicals during the growing season, and picked long before it should be because it’s going to spend so much time on a truck getting to our grocery stores or restaurants. Then we eat this cheap, nutrient poor food, get sick and can’t figure out why, so we go pay a doctor to prescribe a pill for us or put a stent in our heart.
And when I say supported by the government, I mean the U.S. government chose to support them with your tax dollars. So that $2.99 meal is actually already costing you more than just $2.99, whether you buy it or not!
Since Kelli began seeing her current doctor a year ago and took a nutritional approach to her rheumatoid arthritis, she has been able to cut out 10 of the 11 (yes, 11!) prescriptions she was taking on a regular basis (there were even more). Most of those were prescribed to take care of the side effects that an earlier prescription was causing, so once she really got to the root cause of her illness, those pills started falling like dominoes. She’s still taking the last one not by choice, but because her brain is literally addicted to it and it takes a long time to wean off (another reason we’re so adamant about trying all natural remedies first).
So yes, the organic apple costs more than the conventionally grown one. And the conventionally grown apple costs more than boxed processed food. But when you add it up and look at the consequences, you’ll spend less by taking care of your body now rather than trying to fix it later. And wouldn’t you rather support a farmer than the drug companies? Me too. Pay the farmer.
