 Despite being carnivore, I've always recommended certain plant foods that I deemed were healthy from a nutrient perspective. Usually a high mineral content, maybe even calorically for survival more recently, I've been using organic as a sort of safety net for picking out your food and although it doesn't automatically remove all negative chemicals or make the food nutritious, it fares far better on those fronts than conventionally ground foods. I'm applying this more to plant foods because most people do have access to high quality local animal foods. Grass-fed beef from a nearby farmer that you know is raised properly regardless of organic certification or not. Although you can find organically grown meat, it's not nearly as necessary as making sure all of the food you buy in the supermarket is organic as it could be the difference between poisoning yourself and nourishing yourself or just poisoning yourself less. So again, it's a safety net for supermarket foods. You know, if you can't grow food yourself, if you don't have a local farmer that is not spraying anything which you probably pay out your ass for, it's okay. There is a lack of strict regulations which we will go into and again, the trustworthy local farmer is your ideal source of food. In some things, we want to ask ourselves before even jumping into this which can kind of discredit organic as a whole, you know, who's checking, not that many people. Most foods are imported which makes it even more difficult to know. It's all about profit. The quality can be there but it's usually not going to be from a supermarket, maybe on occasion and again, you're going to pay out your ass for it. The thing to keep in mind is the synthetic fertilizers, the things that are not allowed, can only be tested in the soil or as they're testing these fruits and vegetables and grains that are being imported when they receive them and the residue could be completely gone. So what are we looking for in general from a health perspective? We want both the animal foods and the plant foods to be raised naturally. So for animal products, that means grass-fed beef, pasture-raised pork, free-range chicken, corn and soy-free eggs, raw dairy. The same thing can be achieved on our plant side simply by growing in a nutritious soil but you don't want to take anything at face value. Always ask the farmer what he feeds or injects his animals. Also, what said farmer sprays on his crops as we want to remove any possible negatives which tends to be more important than actually adding the positives. And the main reason the focus here is plant foods is because if you are eating produce, it's very seasonal. If you want apples, pineapples, even sweet potatoes at any time of the year, it's going to come from part of the world that has ideal growing situations for that food and not even necessarily ideal growing situations, just something feasible to produce the food in. And you could base your diet predominantly around those local animal foods that are available all year. Same thing with local grains and foods that you can and keep non-perishable throughout the winter. Just throw in some seasonal produce here and there. And that would certainly be the most secure and natural way to construct your diet. Again, tends to be unrealistic, impractical and expensive for most people. So what exactly does USDA certified organic meat? These foods are grown and processed according to federal guidelines addressing primarily soil quality, animal raising practices, pest and weed control, and use of additives. Organic producers rely on natural substances and physical, mechanical, or biological based farming methods to the fullest extent possible to remove hundreds and hundreds of chemicals. And very importantly, there's no bio solids, aka human waste. And with all the antibiotics, pharmaceuticals, crap humans are consuming every day, you definitely don't want your food being grown in human waste. Produce can be called organic if it's certified to have grown on soil that has none of those prohibited substances applied for three years prior to harvest. And obviously, you know, if you had a conventional farm, just didn't spray stuff for three years and then started growing organic, that's what a lot of these people are doing. So is it really organic? There's probably a lot of residue leftover from those prior farming practices. And the prohibited substances include most synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. However, there are circumstances where the grower has to use a synthetic substance to achieve a specific purpose with an unfortunate list of approved substances. As for organic meat, regulations require that animals are raised in living conditions accommodating their natural behaviors, usually grazing out on pasture for beef, fed 100% organic feed and forage, and not administered antibiotics or hormones for the last third of gestation. And that feeding and pharmaceutical administration both apply to the last third. So some of this organic dairy was on a feedlot for the first two thirds of its life. And this does vary from food to food, so it's fairly subjective, but you have to understand that organic meat isn't completely organic. It was only fed organic for the latter portion of its life. That being said, it's still much better than regular feedlot meat, and on the plant side, we do remove most chemical concerns. So you can most likely be healthy simply by choosing organic and optimizing other lifestyle factors. Pharmaceuticals, injections, antibiotics are still allowed in the animal, and the plant foods can still contain agrochemical waste because on both fronts, for cleaners, there are corn derivatives like alcohols, which is made from GMO conventional corn. So why would you put that on your plant foods if you're trying to avoid it? Same thing with the animal foods. They can put glucose and glycerin in the feed for the animals, but those are extracted from conventional GMO feedlot corn as well. Granted, there are farmers that may or may not be using these things, but it kind of defeats the purpose of the organic certification, and we can't discount that chlorine and bleaches and certain chemicals we know are harmful can be used. When you move on to packaged foods, it gets a little tricky. They cannot contain artificial preservatives, but there's a list of approved preservatives like processed pectin or baking soda that aren't necessarily healthy, and that's an overarching concern with the organic certification is the lack of strict regulations. Can you have a farm where you're raising super-duper high-quality grass-fed beef and finishing it with really good local grain? Absolutely, but how many of those farmers are avoiding pharmaceuticals as much as possible or not spraying chlorine everywhere? That's what we have to consider. Now, when you go through that list of substances that are approved and disapproved in both the crop and livestock categories, you certainly have chemicals that would justify not consuming the food, and the list is far too extensive to go through entirely, but we can touch on some notable problems. So we briefly mentioned those cleaning alcohols that can be used. Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic crop production. Alcohols for use as algae sides, disinfectants, and sanitizer, including irrigation system cleaning systems. All of these alcohols, ethanol, isopropanol, as we said, are made from low-quality agrochemical sprayed corn. So off the bat, what the hell is the point of an organic certification if you can spray a product made from arguably the most infected food we ever grow? And you're running alcohol through your irrigation system and then you're gonna water the crops through that? It's insane. You can even use those chlorine and bleaching substances. They put chlorine in most water sources to disinfect the water, which also ends up disinfecting our stomachs and bodies of natural bacteria. It's no surprise that it's approved for agricultural use as well, and I wonder if these vegans are bleaching their stomachs with celery juice every morning? Under the guise of safety, they're poisoning us with approved chemicals that are not only making us sick. These can be easily replaced with something reasonable, such as iodine, even hot water. Some other notable questionable approvals are newspaper and recycled papers, plastic mulch and covers, synthetic insecticides, and there's some things that are approved for use as long as there is no contact with the crop, but again, who's checking on that? With those considerations, a vast majority of the compounds allowed for organic plant agriculture are from fairly natural mineral bases, and there's dozens and dozens of those that are pretty okay. Synthetic substances allowed for use in organic livestock production. For animals, they can use those same alcohols to clean them, but not as a food additive, but they are allowed to use those pharmaceutical drugs and even the glucose and the glycerin in the food additive that we mentioned. Overall, it's not really that bad. For the plant foods, you wanna focus on foods that don't require as many chemicals to be grown, such as an apple over some berries. For the animal products, it's possible to have a very healthy animal that is eating grass with some organic grain, but most of the meat in the supermarket is probably just gonna try to skate by for maximum profit. With all of the other things they're allowed to use with organic livestock, you definitely want to buy local meat from a trustworthy source. Moving on to the packaged and processed foods, there is a laundry list of problematic substances allowed for use. Two obvious ones are carrageenan and ascorbic acid, carrageenan known for causing digestive problems, and ascorbic acid being an agrochemical waste product made from corn. We don't have to worry about that too much because the ingredients are listed on the product. If you see something in a box of cookies you don't like, you can find a brand that doesn't have those or even make the cookies yourself using better sourced, higher quality ingredients. The problem with the fruits, the vegetables, the grains, the meat, the dairy, the eggs, they're not gonna exactly be testing for chlorine or antibiotic residue in the food, at least with the packaged stuff, specifically what they're putting in and if you should be avoiding things like soybean oil or enriched wheat flour, which they actually add iron filings to, which make you very sick. Overall, organic might not be perfect, but compared to what they're allowed to use in conventional foods, at least you're not completely destroying your health by eating several times per day. There's a reason all of these high level elites that run this planet have their own gardens, they're out fishing, hunting wild game. The best, highest quality foods for optimal nutrition and performance usually have to be grown yourself. My goal has been to provide you guys with high quality animal foods and as we grow on Frankie Syri's meat, we're trying to improve on all aspects as much as possible and in the next few years, we strive to be able to provide everyone with foods to compose a nutritionally complete diet free of as many negative substances and chemicals as possible. In the meantime, I'll try to provide guidance to you guys on what is realistic and available depending on your location. So hopefully you guys enjoy this. This was kind of all over the place because the information available on organic and the guidelines, it almost seems like you can have a feedlot cow that's fed corn stalks that are organic and it's really tough and the lines are very blurry. So again, do your best with what you have access to and above all, be subjective, trust your gut, see how you respond to a food. If you don't feel good and everyone's saying the food's so good, stop listening to those people. So thanks again for joining me today guys. If you do want to support me further, you can check out frank-defile.com but as always please just drop a like on the video, leave me a comment down below and above all, if you can please share the video on social media. I'll see you guys for tomorrow's video.