I am sure the expiration is still fine. I mean that I opened the container probably a little bit too long ago (maybe 3 month ago?), at first they were easy to smash but now I can hardly break them.

Its hard I know but always try for the best you can...

I would take back my comment that the subject is inappropriate.
I just think we need to be careful when expressing opinion that we don't present those opinions as facts unless they are.
I have been researching and implementing as close to a natural diet for myself, my family and my animals for over 40 years. I also listen closely to my intuition.
I can easily see that we humans have made and continue to make some decisions that are having huge deadly effect on our planet and life on it.
The main reason for about 30% of the growth in the organic food industry over the past 5-6 years comes from environmental groups who don't want pesticides and fertilizers to do any more damage to the environment. In general, organic food consumers, manufactures and farmers believe strongly that organic food has the following benefits: antioxidant capacity, reduced risk of heart disease, boosts the immune system, promotes animal welfare, ensures a safe and healthy world for future generations , reduces the presence of pesticides, tastes better than non-organic food and prevents cancer.
Seems like a good idea to me.
I would guess that Cockatiels in the wild are not eating very near to the diet we loving pet owners are providing them. Same goes for our dogs, cats and other pets. However, we can be sure they are not eating genetically modified foods when they live in their natural environment. Dogs and cats are dying by the thousands every year from cancer now days. .
I never even heard of a dog or cat having cancer when I was a kid. As a matter of fact, I didn't know any people dying of cancer either.
If you look at the research on the facts of the pet food industry process it will sicken you. All due to the corporate food industry marketing practice. Then take a look at the research on the human corporate food industry. It's all about the dollar. In my opinion, life is a higher priority.

Modern agriculture is unsustainable and that applies equally to organic and conventional. Both use pesticides and fertilizers. There's more fertilizer runoff with conventional agriculture but the runoff from organic farming is a problem too, and it's all devastating to the aquatic environment. Organic has lower crop yields which means that you have to put more land under cultivation to get the same amount of food, and that's devastating to land-based habitat. If humans don't start curbing their population growth and their desire to overeat (and there's no sign that either one is going to happen) we will ultimately have to go to a different form of agriculture, probably one involving food that can be grown in vats in high-rise buildings. Hydroponic vegetables instead of soil-grown, bugs instead of meat from vertebrates, GMO algae and yeast products that look, taste and nourish like real food. Those last two sound like a lot of fun, don't they?

I belong to several conservation organizations like the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and the Audubon Society. None of them talk very much about organic versus conventional in their magazines and there's little mention of GMO either. When they do talk about farming it's mostly about stuff like preventing fertilizer runoff and management techniques that minimize the impact on wildlife.

Many GMOs do help minimize impact on wildlife since they're designed to let us use the least-toxic pesticides and herbicides possible. But I can see why the conservation organizations don't want to talk about it lol. If they discussed the upside of GMO a lot of their readers wouldn't be very happy about it. There are other GMOs aimed at making food more nutritious, for example "golden rice" has been engineered so it contains beta carotene. It's expected that this would have huge health benefits in underdeveloped rice-eating nations where many people are too poor to afford vegetables, but it's not being implemented much because of anti-GMO agitation by well-fed people in rich countries.



Eating fruits and vegetables does all that. It doesn't matter whether they're organic or not. Antioxidants are a double-edged sword by the way, they're basically toxins at heart. Some of them are beneficial in the right amount, but too much can cause problems.



Eating vegetables does not do these things. Organic pesticides are less effective than conventional ones, so many organic farmers compensate by slathering on more of it in order to get the same end result. There currently isn't a way to test for organic pesticide residues so we don't know how much of it there is on food. Only synthetic pesticide residues are tested, and organic produce has slightly less synthetic pesticide residue than conventional produce. But even on conventional produce, this adds one tenth of one percent to the total toxin load. 99.9% of the toxins in veggies were produced by the plant itself, and some of them are quite nasty.


That's a matter of opinion. Some people think it tastes better and others can't tell the difference. Home-grown vegetables can be a lot different than store-bought, whether the store-bought is organic or conventional and whether the home-grown is organic or not. Store-bought vegetables are usually picked before they're fully ripe and home-grown is picked when it IS fully ripe. Store-bought vegetables choose their seed variety according to how well the produce will survive the long trip from the field to the grocery store shelf, and taste is secondary. Obviously home gardeners have different priorities and can make taste their first priority. Although personally I think home-grown tomatoes are vastly overrated and like store-bought better. That's how much of a barbarian I am lol.


When it comes to food hype, cancer-prevention claims are a huge red flag of quackery and exaggeration. It has NOT been demonstrated that eating organic instead of conventional has any effect on cancer rates. It HAS been shown that when pesticides are used carelessly or incorrectly it can cause disease in agricultural workers, but this has only been studied in synthetic pesticides not organic. If they took a closer look at organic practices they'd probably find some disease caused by improper use there too. Farming uses a lot of dirty materials and even if there are no herbicides or pesticides used at all, it can't be healthy to be out in a field inhaling manure dust when the fertilizer is being spread.

Cancer risk is directly related to age - the longer you live the more likely you are to get it, and a large percentage of cases are caused by a spontaneous internal malfunction, not by damage from something you did. People and their pets are living longer than they used to so automatically there will be more cancer cases. They're living long enough for cancer to become a problem instead of succumbing to something else at an earlier age. Scientific reports say the rate of new cancer cases is holding steady but the death rate is dropping due to improved treatment.

I always think it's funny when people talk about the rate of some disease or some other phenomenon seeming to be higher than when they were kids. How much attention were they paying back then? How much access did they have to news sources? My mother says things like this a lot, but she was a kid living in a semi-rural area with a small social circle and no source of news but radio and newspapers, and she didn't pay much attention to either one. She doesn't know what was going on outside her own limited field of observation. There's also the fact that diagnosis techniques are much better now so it's easier to identify diseases than it used to be. How many people died of cancer in the past without ever knowing what it was that killed them?

That's seriously how I feel. People are having kids when they don't even what them or are suitable to have them. And then, they have more than one. Look at a particular couple on mother's side for instance. 2 parents with no job, lazy, rude and bouncing back and forth between in-laws houses when nobody wants them and living off welfare. My aunt gave them a home as long as they worked her business and they lied to her customers, embezzled money from her and didn't do squat, so they were kicked out. They have 4 children with no discipline and no regard for other people's possessions. They should have been fixed, both of them.

Unfortunately, this is common nowadays. Maybe not as extreme as my cousins, but still, the world is too over populated.

I always worry about this kind of stuff. I feel like they are soon going to start doing whatever China is doing and limit people to have 2 children or else they have to pay high taxes. I feel like that's the only way.

Edit: Do you know they are starting to make cow free milk? Its called "Muufri" - get it? "Moo Free"

They are making it in labs (GMO). They predict that in a 100 years, we humans will be drinking that instead of milk. They say it tastes exactly like milk but without being dairy. Its not out in stores yet but they say its coming out in 2015. I just realized I'm lactose intolerant so i did my research on some dairy free milks and thats when i read about it.

Too overpopulated and growing. The developed countries have mostly stabilized their populations at a replacement rate or even slightly less than replacement, but the underdeveloped countries are breeding like mad. Maybe when they achieve a better standard of living they'll stabilize too, but it obviously isn't going to happen anytime soon and how many people will there be on the planet when it finally does happen? Obesity is a bigger problem worldwide now than hunger is so a lot of people are obviously eating a lot more than they need, plus there's a lot of food waste. If we could cut back on overpopulation, overeating and waste there would be a lot less need for massive food production, but so far it isn't happening and we need to find ways to increase the food supply without wrecking the environment. A large-scale switch to organic farming isn't going to do it because it's too much like conventional farming and has a lot of the same disadvantages.

Intuitively it seems like organic food ought to be better than conventional, and I was surprised when I found out that the available objective evidence says that there's very little difference between them and they're about the same in terms of nutritional value, consumer safety, and environmental unfriendliness. But I'm not one to argue with the evidence, and there's too much of it coming from too many places for it to be likely that a major mistake has been made.

So you get to choose based on what factors please you the most. Does one make you feel safer than the other? I actually feel slightly safer with conventional since a tiny increase in E. coli and salmonellla risk is scarier than a tiny increase in toxin exposure, and GMO seems preferable to mutagenesis. Do you think one tastes better than the other? Do you prefer a possible slight increase in antioxidants or a possible slight increase in protein? More water pollution or more habitat destruction? Lower prices or emotional appeal?

I just buy whichever one looks like the best tradeoff between price and quality, which means conventional most of the time but occasionally organic wins. Buying organic makes me laugh because it feels like I'm flirting with death, when I know there isn't actually a lot of difference in the risk of bacterial infection. BTW salmonella and E.coli can actually be taken up by the plant's roots and end up inside the plant where you can't wash it off.

I thought that rate of cancer is kind of lower in the eastern countries (like China)... is it incorrect? My mom likes to blame huge consumption of icy stuff (like soft drinks with tons of ice, which is junk by itself) for the high rates of cancer in the US. In general, eating habits here are killing me... I try to feed my daughter healthy but she just demands junk all the time (it's not that she gets it but I am extremely concerned what she is going to choose to eat when she is independent). I show her articles about harm of this and that (of lots of stuff banned everywhere but in US) but she says she doesn't care... she wants that food. And that's only because that food is everywhere around her.

Haimovfids, adult people don't need milk. Oh well, I am not sure when the adulthood starts.

They recommend milk as you get older.

Well, I love milk and dairy products in general so it won't really matter if I'm old or young to drink/eat it. Im actually on a dairy free diet now and I really like this diet. My skin is starting to clear up now. (I have mild teenage acne and dairy caused most of it.)