With the increasing concern for our health, and ever-expanding curiosity for what is going into our food, there is a growing trend to eat local, fresh, free-range, and organically fed and/or grown food items. Urban homesteading is a growing trend where individuals with limited space and finances, mix their labor with their land in order to produce and provide for themselves. Some are growing food on balconies, window sills, even vertically to make more use of space.

Campaigns like Grow Food Not Lawns, and Occupy Monsanto, are encouraging individuals to take an active role in their health, and in what they are eating. These activist outlets operate with a general theme, that we should know what we are putting into our mouths and on our tables. By getting more involved in our food choices, we can have a more secure grip on our overall health and wellness.

There are many benefits to growing your own food at home: you save yourself money, increase availability and convenience (you need only travel to your backyard instead of to a supermarket), better tasting food, and safer food that isn’t covered in pesticides and other chemicals.

Increasingly, individuals are finding themselves open minded towards natural treatment methods. It may come to many as a common experience, that doctors mostly treat symptoms of a problem, instead of getting to the root of the problem itself. For example, with illnesses’ that are rooted in chronic inflammation, the doctors don’t generally focus on their patient’s diet, and they don’t consider the foods which are eaten that would contribute to the cause of increased inflammation in the body.

There is continually new research surfacing which supports the blossoming belief that natural items could cure a variety of health impairments. Many already know that cannabis can be an effective cancer treatment, but even grape seed extract has recently been shown to outperform chemotherapy in destroying and inhibiting the growth of colorectal cancer cells. Mainstream medical practices for the treatment of various types of cancer seem to be more deadly than helpful, with common methods like chemotherapy being ineffective 97% of the time. Our bodies have innate healing mechanisms: when we get an infection or when we cure ourselves, but it needs the proper nutrients in order to heal effectively.