Welcome to the Shaline Show. Shaline is a New York Times best-selling author, celebrity fitness trainer, and obsessed with helping you live your dream life.

Hey there, welcome to this edition of the Shaline Show. My guest today is Laura Klein.

She is the co-founder of Organic Authority dot com, the ultimate online resource for all things organic.

Now Laura also happens to be a trained chef with roots in the organic food movement.

And today we'll be talking about why you need to choose organic food, what you really need to know about the difference between organic and conventionally-farmed produce, as well as tips for buying organic on a budget.

All that and more today on the Shaline Show.

Laura Klein, thank you so much for joining us today here on the Shaline Show.

Thank you so much for having me Shaline. It's great to be here.

Really excited to have some of your authority, no pun intended on the show.

I think the first thing I want to ask just because I'm really curious myself is, how and why did this become such a passion for you?

Well, kind of really inadvertently. I always had a passion for food. That's really where it started.

I grew up with a fabulous mother who was an excellent cook and taught me a lot just about the fundamentals of cooking.

And after I got married and I got a job and living in LA and I was working at an agency.

And I kind of realized I was in the wrong spot when I would come back from a weekend and talked to all my buddies at the agency and they would say, hey, what scripts did you read over the weekend?

And I'd be like, scripts. I'm reading cookbooks and cooking magazines and reading scripts.

That was kind of my first clue. I was in the wrong job and I decided to a local culinary school opened up and I decided to enroll as an assistant.

And I liked it so much. I enrolled full time after two years. And that experience was really eye-opening.

I grew up in Colorado and I was surrounded by nature. But I was never into the organic thing. I thought it was very hippy-dippy. I thought it was for the birds.

I thought it was just like a little bit crazy kind of hoo-ha out there.

But in culinary school, they taught us the difference between how organic food is grown and how conventional food is grown.

And that really opened up my eyes. I was really stunned.

And I also discovered a secret behind the fine shops of the world at the time and that they were all cooking with organic ingredients.

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