How carcinogens come in life saving herbs?
Herbs are considered as medicines, superfoods or plant based ingredients which are used across several industries in millions of products to make lives better. The benefits of herbs are limitless but sometimes, some of them comes with carcinogens of different kind which makes their benefits reverse to losses to human beings. Here is the story of how the life saving plants are contaminated with deadlly carcinogens!
Contamination at Farm, While the Plant grows
Herbs are grown in farms and while growing them, the plants encounter with hundreds of plant diseases either by fungus, viruses, pests or bacteria. When farmers are not aware about the organic ways of controlling them then they use chemicals to save their crops and these chemicals are called as pesticides. These pesticides contain compounds which are poisons and they kill the pests or the animals which are destroying the crop. but the residues of these pesticides stay with the plant and the soil and these go with it. Also during the cultivation, some weeds grow in the field which disable the growth of the herb plant and to control these, farmers spray chemicals which are called weedicides. These weedicides kills the plants as these are poisons as well. and some residues stay with the herb plant. Farmers do these because weed control is expensive if they do it manually and because if they don't get the better price for their organic produce then they opt for low cost techniques to control the weeds. These residues stay with the herbs and causes several types of cancers and other similar diseases.
During the handling and processing, While it is processed into a product!
The herbal raw materials are travelled thousand miles from farms to different factories around the world and in bull-cart to trucks to trains to planes to ships, and they encountered with multiple different goods along with way which sometimes contaminate them and some heavy metals get into them. At factories, if the herbs are not handled well then excessive micros development may lead to myco toxins and heavy metals which causes many ill effects to consumers including cancers of different kind. In several geographies, local food saftey laws as being less effective and due to the economic interests of people by making more efficient factories, the herbs are handled with less care which leads to these kind of contamination.
How Carmel Organics is making a difference?
At farm: Carmel organics works with farmers directly and follow organic standards of farming. our presence at root level creates awareness among farmers that leads to proper ways of handling of crops while harvesting and post harvesting as we train the farmers for doing the organic farming in a right way!
While processing: We have a certified organic and USFDA inspected processing unit in India where we follow the global standards of processing and keep hygiene at every step to avoid any kind of contaimination. Our machines are built by SS 306 materials and are safe to use.
Laboratory involvement: We send a sample of every batch to world class laboratories for analysis of residues of pesticides, heavy metals and micros to ensure we control the quality at the first stage of value chain and thus all our raw materials are safe till it reaches consumers.