Is Our Food Safe?

There's been a lot of hype about organic food, about pesticides and toxicities in commercially grown and harvested produce, or what's really in the hamburger or fries you bought at your favorite fast food place (don't ask, it's too horrifying!)

The more I've read, the more my scientific spin on things has come through, and the more I come back to the ol' adage from the Word of Wisdom "All things in Moderation"!

An article forwarded to me from my hubby contains a menu with natural pesticides and carcinogens listed beneath each dish. The summary at the end talks about how these completely natural compounds can cause cancers in rats, and can be harmful, and are found sometimes in a 10,000 times greater quantity in food than synthetic (man-made) pesticides are found! Yeah, you get a bigger dose of "toxins" from the food itself than from anything somebody sprayed on the food to protect it from one thing or another. The catch is, the studies performed to determine if something is "toxic" were performed in such exponentially high doses (and in rats), it was ridiculous to compare that to a real-life information. You can read the article's example, but my favorite comparison is:

Water is absolutely essential to life. You can fast without food for quite some time, but you can survive only a few days without water. However, if you drink too much, and I'm talking about GALLONS of water in a day, you can actually kill yourself. Not drown, just screw up your body's salt content so much that you will die (and not just from peeing all the time). So, yes, even something as vitally important as water, taken in a ridiculously excessive dose, will kill you.

As in all things, one finds the information that supports one's position in a debate, right? And so this article supports my view that one can eat non-organic food and not worry about the "carcinogens" so long as one is eating a balanced, calorie-appropriate diet with all things eaten in moderation. Yet, the scare tactics work in that I am still freaked out what to feed my infant and will spend 10x what I would normally on baby food just so I "know" it's "safe"... Hmmmm.