I love organic foods.

We eat organic foods whenever possible.

We buy and grow what we can and my husband hunts for the majority of our meats. However, it's not always available or affordable and hunting success can't be predicted.

Here are a couple of sites that I think are really helpful in choosing healthier foods :)

The first one is the Non-GMO Shopping Guide.

GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism. GMOs are the result of a laboratory process of taking genes from one species and inserting them into another in an attempt to obtain a desired trait or characteristic. (source)

Basically, this means that they are altering the organism to do what they want: grow faster, bigger; resist illness, disease, pesticides, etcetera in a laboratory.

With genetic engineering, scientists can breach species barriers set up by nature. For example, they have spliced fish genes into tomatoes. The results are plants (or animals) with traits that would be virtually impossible to obtain with natural processes, such as crossbreeding or grafting. (source)

The problem, in my opinion, is that these changes come at a cost. They are physically changing the natural DNA composition of these things. Our bodies, our earth, and everything on it are so complex. Quite frankly, I'm not sure that anyone on earth can mess with these things and fully know what changes have been made and the outcome of them. It could and likely will take years to know, or even partially know the effect they will have.

The Non-GMO Shopping Guide has a lot of great information, as well as a simple and easy to use printable guide to take shopping with you.

The other site is the Environmental Working Group's Shoppers Guide to Pesticides

This site offers another handy printable guide that lists the Dirty Dozen and Clean 15.

If you are interested, the full list of 47 fruits & veggies is here.

"The Shopper's Guide to Pesticides ranks pesticide contamination for 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on an analysis of 87,000 tests for pesticides on these foods, conducted from 2000 to 2007 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration. Nearly all the studies used to create the list test produce after it has been rinsed or peeled. Contamination was measured in six different ways and crops were ranked based on a composite score from all categories.

The six measures of contamination we used were:

• Percent of the samples tested with detectable pesticides
• Percent of the samples with two or more pesticides
• Average number of pesticides found on a sample
• Average amount (level in parts per million) of all pesticides found
• Maximum number of pesticides found on a single sample
• Number of pesticides found on the commodity in total"

*This methodology explanation is directly from their site. Click to learn more.