Everything has chemicals and side-effects these days, the times that we live in. A health expert once said that to eat a conventional apple in America, with the 50 or more chemicals used in soils, insecticides, pesticides, preservatives; you would have to be insane. and even the organic varieties are loaded with supposedly less harmful chemicals.
For shelf-life in all foods, everything is irradiated. It works. The pseudo-food will look great and remain on the shelves with no infestation until the next ice-age. And, I know this from experience. I was macrobiotic for many years. My mainstay was grains and beans. I did not always buy organic, so I would go to the local A&P (some of you guys remember them, The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Trading Company) and buy such a variety of beans. Easily, I would soak and sprout anything off the shelf and wow, nature would take over and the hearty little beans would be ready to eat or replant. But, now, NOTHING will sprout. They have been irradiated for shelf-life and the seed is dead, no longer able to reproduce itself. So, I went to Whole Foods and bought certified organic. Same results. Just as dead.
Radiofrequency energy is lighting us up from every direction and we remain unsuspecting victims. All the drugs in our pharmacopeia have hundreds of serious side-effects, including impotence. And, even a simple aspirin, taken too often will give you an ulcer. Hormones injected into meats. Water is chemicalized and over-treated. Plastic containers have estrogenic compounds that disrupt our hormones. Not to mention harmful fuel emissions and too many others that I am not even aware of, including the allowable amounts of rat feces allowed by US standards to remain in your food products.
And, there are traces of lead and mercury in some herbal products. That is just the world we live in. And the remarkable thing is that our bodies adapt to many of these harsh changes and men and women oftentimes live into their nineties.