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Over the past decade the obesity epidemic in the United States has garnered quite a bit of attention. That’s because it is, in fact, an epidemic, with nearly three out of five american adults tipping the scales as overweight and twenty six percent of american adults classified as obese.

As public consciousness about the epidemic has gained traction, so has a public desire to understand the root causes of obesity and rectify them. There are, of course, some obvious causes. People today are less likely to have jobs that involve manual labor, for one. For another, no matter what your parents or grandparents say about how hard they worked in their day, the truth is people, on the whole, put in more hours of work – which means more hours in a cubicle – than previous generations. And third, we simply eat more processed foods, more foods that are bad for us, than any previous generation.

In response to that, there’s been a vocal and growing minority that have moved their diets away from stuff produced huge agribusiness to certified organic foods. The idea being that we’re evolved, as a species, to digest and absorb nutrients from food that’s been grown in one specific way. And that one specific way has changed over the past century with genetic engineering of everything from cows to corn, and as a result we end up storing more of the calories from that food as fat rather than burning it as energy. Our bodies aren’t evolved, the reasoning goes, to digest anything but certified organic foods.

The problem, of course, is that certified organic foods tend to be significantly more expensive than mass produced foods. The reason being, certified organic foods need to meet specific requirements to achieve “certified organic” status. There can be no pesticides used, nor contamination with other strains of similar types of foods, with regard to fruits, vegetables and grains.

With meats, certified organic foods mean that the animals are fed feeds they would naturally eat – such as grass for cows, for example – instead of a cheaper blend that’s usually based upon corn (which is the most highly subsidized crop in the United States).