Sugar Valley: It All Started With the Need for Clean Food

Simpler Times: When "Organic" Was Just Normal

Back in the day, when we were young, there was only "organic." Organic was normal. Apple juice was made from the apples in the backyard, and there was for sure no need to label apple juice as "vegan" — or to have a discussion about how vegan apple juice is. Simpler days, back then.

Today, convenience products — frozen pizzas, vegan alternatives, and the like — contain up to 120 different ingredients. That was a lot less back then.

It's interesting how the majority of us don't link "processed" foods to the ever-increasing flood of health issues.

Watch & Learn: A Documentary Worth Your Time

Tip: There is a documentary on Netflix — Mo Gilligan: Big Chicken — well worth watching.

In the documentary, they show how the "best" fried chicken burger contains 120 different ingredients, and it's "that" good that people want to go back and have the same food and experience over and over again. There is an entire hidden industry specializing in giving you exactly the experience "you" want. Well, it's not so hidden, but you need to search for:

• food design

• bliss point

• hyper-palatable foods

• engineered hyper-palatability

• sensory science

• flavour engineering

• food reward

One thing is clear: the products sitting on the supermarket shelves are designed for global logistical networks and long shelf life — and, as a side effect, they're safe for human consumption. But whether we should eat them or not, that's each individual's decision.

Education Mission

Go to the nearest supermarket and start reading through the ingredients list of some of your favourite foods from the frozen food aisle. You may also search for an app that scans ingredients and explains them to you in plain language.

Christian Lege is a German food developer who uncovers the "tricks" of the industry. Some of the videos are in English, most in German, but you can switch on auto-translate or subtitles in your preferred language: https://www.youtube.com/ZDFbesseresser

If you feel that eating more "normal" foods will benefit your health and overall wellbeing, welcome to our camp — that's our passion.

Nature Knows Best: Back to Organic, I mean “Normal"

To give you a sense of how complex nature really is, consider this:

• There are approximately more than 100,000 plant compounds in total. 5,000 to 10,000 of them are found in each individual plant that serves as food for us humans, such as fruit, herbs, and vegetables.

• The majority of these compounds are flavonoids, carotenoids, saponins, and similar substances.

• The current state of research is that we don't fully know how these compounds interact inside the human body.

• What researchers do know is that these plant compounds often reinforce or complement each other's effects.

• Now think of eating a salad that contains 20 different ingredients, maybe two or three different types of lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, carrots, some herbs, oil, vinegar and how all of those roughly 200,000 plant compounds interact inside our bodies — differently in each of us, since our body chemistry is individual too.

Amazing, mind-blowing, wow? Yes, it is.

Question: How can we humans even start thinking about interfering with this intelligence? The only "normal" reaction to this massive and vast intelligence at work — even in a tiny spinach plant or rosemary bush — is gratitude, as nature is knowing best.

What is within our control, and what we should focus on, is how we treat the environment that provides for us and keeps us all alive. Adding more chemicals to plants, soil, and our bodies might simply be the wrong way.

Understanding the above is what brought us into organic farming. It's the understanding that clean food — the fuel for the body — gives us not only energy, but also helps cure disease, helps the body rejuvenate and regenerate, and jump-starts its self-healing properties.

Clean Food – Accessible for All

We at Sugar Valley do everything we can to improve soil quality, operating on organic standards with a strict no-chemical approach, aiming to provide the most natural and nutritionally complete product that nature can offer.

And why all the effort? Because we needed it for ourselves — if you don't live near an organic or biodynamic farm or grow yourself, you simply don't have access to it.

Living in the Algarve has all its perks and beauty, but fresh organic fruit and vegetables isn't one of them.

So we're doing it ourselves — and while we're at it, we source and provide the highest-quality products for you to enjoy natural abundance. Because, nature knows best, fresh and at peak harvested product is not only better in taste and smell, it is a joy for body, mind and spirit. You automatically enter into a club of high energy and happy people once you start switching to clean food.

Experience Natural Abundance

Because that is exactly what Sugar Valley specialises in: Organic food, fresh and alive with fantastic taste that support health and wellbeing.

🎵 Song Recommendations for This Read

• Queen – Who Wants to Live Forever

• Dave Moffat & Jade Facer – Forever Young

Copyright Notice: Content on this article is owned by Sugar Valley Lda. Linking and brief quotations with full attribution are permitted. Copying, reproducing, redistributing, republishing, or using this content for AI rewriting or creating derivative content without written permission from Sugar Valley Lda is prohibited. See our full Copyright & Content Use Policy .

Translations of this article are AI-generated from the original English version.