If you’re concerned about the health of your family, you might want to consider going organic.

1. You can trust the food. Certified organic food is grown to strict national standards, which are routinely checked, and the food is easily traceable. Only high quality farm inputs and ingredients are used.

2. You are avoiding or significantly reducing your family’s exposure to harmful pesticide and other man made chemical residues. Organic food is grown without the artificial chemicals such as fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides, drugs and antibiotics used in intensive farming. Infants are more at risk from residues due to their high food intake compared with body size and fragile and undeveloped organs and bodily systems. There is increasing scientific evidence that many diseases in later life stem from exposure to toxins and poor quality food in childhood.

3. You and your children will enjoy food more as organic food tastes better.

4. You are supporting sustainable farming, which recycles natural resources rather than depleting them. Unlike intensive farming, which strips the soil of nutrients and applies artificial ones, organic production builds the health and fertility of the soil.

5. You are reducing the pollution caused by intensive farming, which contaminates groundwater, rivers, streams and lakes with the over use of nitrates, pesticides and drugs used to treat farmed fish.

6. You and your family are helping to protect and encourage wildlife such as insects, birds, bats and butterflies and the wildflowers and trees that they depend on. These habitats have been progressively destroyed and polluted and several species in the UK are already extinct as a result.

7. You are contributing to your children’s ongoing good health by building a strong immune system, which will help to protect them against illness. The food that you eat will have more vitamins and minerals compared with non organic foods. Chemically treated food is forced to grow faster and bigger with artificial fertilizers and nutrients are often lost in the process.

8. You are helping to protect the ozone layer and save energy. Chemicals that are sprayed on crops damage the ozone layer and contribute to global warming and require large amounts of non- renewable energy to produce.

9. You experience the organic feel good factor. Shopping trips are guilt free, especially if you walk to your local shops or organize a delivery, which means one journey replaces lots of individual shopping trips.

10. Food is fun again. Organic food is best eaten fresh so it means getting into your kitchen , with the kids, to prepare family meals that can be enjoyed together !

With information from stockholmschild.se