Tzigone is right. Organic food is grown without pesticides, artificial fertilizers, added hormones or antibiotics. Non-organic food is grown with one or more of those additives.
Personally, I think it is particularly scary the way antibiotics is routinely used among many of those who produce meat in a non-organic way. The animals are given antibiotics with their food all the time. You may be aware that the more we use antibiotics, the faster bacteria become resistant to them. Actually the situation is right now beginning to slip out of control, as more and more strains of bacteria are getting resistant to more and more kinds of antibiotics. Do you realize what it will mean if we can't stop this downward slide? People get an infection and go to the doctor, and he can't help them. The infected person's body defeats the infection on its own, or it doesn't and the patient dies.
You may get pneumonia. Well, unless your own immune system can fight off the pneumonia, it's bye-bye to you.
Or how about you need an operation? Well, unless your condition is life-threatening the doctors won't operate on you, because the operation itself may kill you. Forget knee operations, for example. If your condition is life-threatening the doctors may operate on you, and then you may live or die depending on whether or not you get a massive infection afterwards. So can't the doctors give you antibiotics to combat the infection? Well, duh. The antibiotics don't work anymore in the scenario I have described here.
If bacteria become restistant to all the antibiotics that are currently available, average life spans in the West may plunge from about 80 years to about 40 years.
A really scary thing is that the big companies that produce drugs, vaccines etcetera aren't even trying to come up with new, improved antibiotics. Why is that? It's because the companies won't be able to make a lot of money on new antibiotics. The new antibiotics would have to be used judiciously and sparingly, so that the bacteria wouldn't get resistant to them right away. Therefore the companies wouldn't be able to sell a lot of them. They couldn't even market them aggressively to tell people to buy a lot of them, because that would be the whole point, that people couldn't buy a lot of them. There are so many other kinds of drugs that the companies could sell so much more of, and that's the kind of drugs they are trying to come up with.
Personally I always buy organic milk, which comes from cows that haven't been given antibiotics. I also buy organic meat if I can.
Ann
