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Whole Foods and Wild Oats, along with many smaller organic grocery stores, have revolutionized awareness of organic food, and how it differs from how we historically shop for food. Most of us growing up simply watched our parents buy meat, vegetables, fruits, etc. At the supermarket without giving it any thought. Even as we started out living on our own we replicated this behavior – we didn’t worry about the quality of the food we purchased. Understanding healthy food options wasn’t even on our radar then as it is today.

Times have changed though – and not necessarily for the better in some cases. The percentage of “processed” foods we consume has grown dramatically over the last 10-20 years, and science has also entered into the equation in terms of antibiotic use in animals, pesticides, genetically modified food, animal breeding and feeding changes – the list goes on and on. Most of these changes – while good in terms of mass production and cost of producing food, are increasingly being highlighted as not necessarily safe or healthy in terms of human consumption.

Enter organic foods – whether you’re discussing vegetables, fruits, meat, or eggs, there are now plenty of organic options at both specialty stores as well as many supermarkets. According to Wikipedia:

“Organic foods are foods that are produced using methods that do not involve modern synthetic inputs such as synthetic pesticides and chemical fertilizers, do not contain genetically modified organisms, and are not processed using irradiation, industrial solvents, or chemical food additives.”

Although there have not been large scale controlled studies comparing safety and long term health differences between consuming food created using modern production methods versus organic approaches, most people inherently believe that eating more naturally produced foods is better for our bodies.

So what matters with organic? In an ideal world we would buy everything organic – however, almost all organic food tends to cost more than typical supermarket food, and in some cases the cost can be double or triple compared to normally produced equivalents.

So what should you target on your diet – whether for weight loss, losing fat, or simply being healthier?

Some high level guidelines that are helpful to choose where to spend your money for maximum benefit:

1. Buy organic fruit if you eat the skin – apples, pears, peaches, grapes, etc. If you peel the fruit then the risk is dramatically lower of ingesting pesticide residue – i.e. Buy conventional grapefruit, oranges, cantaloupe, watermelon, etc.
2. Buy organic lunch meat, sausages, and items like that – the goal here is to avoid nitrites and nitrates at all costs, in addition to potential antibiotic or growth hormone residues. If you can afford it, free range/pasture/grass fed meat is even healthier in terms of the nutrient profile of the meat. Recent studies have indicated a potential link between Pancreatic cancer and consumption of processed meats with nitrite preservatives.
3. Pay attention to the “dirty dozen” report from an ABC News Report in 2009 – these twelve fruits and vegetables were found to have the highest degree of pesticides [some with multiple pesticide residues in a single serving]. Buy these items organic: Peaches, apples, bell peppers, celery, cherries, nectarines, strawberries, lettuce, kale, Imported grapes, carrots, and pears.
4. Buy organic fruit juices – the juicing process in particular can cause pesticide residues from the skin or surfaces of harvested fruits and vegetables to appear in measurable concentrations in the juice.
5. Budget permitting, start with organic, free range, vegetarian fed chicken and eggs. Then branch out into beef, pork, or more exotic game meats such as bison, pheasant, deer, etc. Mass produced chickens and eggs can represent horrendous living conditions for the animals, their feed is a mix of a large number of ingredients that may not be ideal for them, and the focus is on fast growth and harvesting.

You can ease in to organic food using the above guidelines to maximize your health benefits on a limited budget – regardless of which type of diet plan you are using you can be smarter about focusing on healthy foods to eat.