6 surprising reasons to go organic
5. You don’t want a SAD salad.
Turns out, the same pitfalls (excess calories and deficient nutrients) underlying the Standard American Diet (SAD) apply to the plant foods themselves. Conventionally grown plants are fed their own junk food: nitrogen fertilizer. “A big part of what’s wrong with the American diet can be traced to farmers using too much nitrogen fertilizer to keep pushing yields higher,” Benbrook says.
Bigger plants and higher yields do not add up to more nutrition, he warns. Rather, nitrogen-spiked plants produce more simple carbohydrates—sugars and starches. “This increases the likelihood that whatever antioxidants, vitamins, or minerals [are present in the vegetable or fruit] are going to get bound up with sugar,” Benbrook says. And the more sugar present in a food or in your digestive tract, the less your body can access a food’s nutrients.