When not to eat your vegetables
Unless they are relatively pesticide-free, vegetables may actually be bad for you
Here’s how to pick the safest!
You cruise through the produce department of your supermarket, feeling virtuous as you line your cart with green, leafy produce and several helpings of orange and red vegetables. You’re thinking about antioxidants and flavanoids. What’s more, you’re looking out for your family’s health, and you know that these foods are going to be good for them.
Unfortunately, you may be wrong. It’s not that the foods themselves are not good for you; they may be coated with pesticides that endanger the health of your family (especially small children, though the elderly are probably also at greater risk than the general population). Normal washing, peeling, and other preparation simply doesn’t remove them according to studies done by the U. S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
The data, as compiled by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), lists fruits and vegetables from the most contaminated (peaches) to the least (onions). Note that none of these fruits or vegetables are completely pesticide-free—for that, you have to opt for organic produce, which costs more, but may save money in the long run if you take into account medical bills.
Also note that the order presented here is a bit rough in that it doesn’t take into account the relative harmfulness of the pesticides in question, merely the actual number of pesticide residues. Unfortunately, that means you could conceivably consume a fruit or vegetable from the least contaminated list that is in fact more harmful than another one coated with a greater number of pesticide residues. You can always achieve the greatest safety by emphasizing organic meats and produce in your diet.
The EWG and other sources emphasize that you can work out a compromise that improves health and safety while minimizing the impact on your wallet by avoiding the most contaminated fruits and vegetables while eating the safest. More specifically, you can cut your exposure to pesticides 90 percent by avoiding the top twelve most contaminated fruits and vegetables and favoring the twelve least contaminated.
Since spinach, for example, is unfortunately on the most contaminated list, you should therefore buy organic spinach but feel free to buy non-organic onions if you can’t find organic onions or consider them too expensive. That way, you get to eat organic spinach with zero pesticides and non-organic onions, which contain the lowest quantities of pesticides in non-organically grown produce. If you were to limit yourself to those two vegetables (just an example—we’re not recommending it!) you would have cut your exposure to pesticides by at least 90 percent.
In this way, avoiding the “dirty dozen” and choosing your non-organic fruits and vegetables from the twelve least contaminated, you bring your pesticide exposure well under control. Before going into more detail, let’s show you the list of the top 12 and bottom 12:
The Dirty Dozen—Produce to Avoid
- Peaches
- Apples
- Sweet bell peppers
- Celery
- Nectarines
- Strawberries
- Cherries
- Lettuce
- Grapes (imported)
- Pears
- Spinach
- Potatoes
The Swell Twelve—Cleanest First
- Onions
- Avocado
- Sweet Corn (frozen)
- Pineapples
- Mango
- Sweet Peas (frozen)
- Asparagus
- Kiwi
- Bananas
- Cabbage
- Broccoli
- Egglant
To be safest, choose freely from the second list (the Swell Twelve) and avoid buying the first list (the Dirty Dozen) unless they’re organic. Anything not on the list is suspect, since it falls between, but you can refer to the complete data we mentioned earlier to get a better idea of the risks.
Why should you care?
In case avoiding pesticides sounds like yesterday’s news, let’s briefly review the risks. First off, pesticides are generally aimed at killing insects, which are—in case you haven’t noticed—extremely hard to kill. Most insecticides work by attacking the insect’s nervous system using agents that interfere with the choline/acetylcholine cycle that is essential to proper neurotransmission.
Unfortunately, in that regard our own nervous systems differ little from that of the insects; we too are susceptible to the same kind of nervous system damage brought on by the same chemicals. So pesticides, which as the EWG data show can be present in alarming amounts on the produce we eat, not only accumulate in our systems over time, they can assert themselves at relatively low concentrations.
Why is this allowed to happen? Why isn’t their use simply outlawed?
Well, that’s where economics and politics come in. It’s simply easier to produce commercial crops if you can spray them with pesticides rather than having to worry about reducing the proximity of the plants (and therefore the potential yield) either to intersperse insect-repellent species or simply to slow the spread of insect pests.
And since most safety testing is performed using large quantities of the chemical agents involved on animal populations, when the results show that a certain pesticide is likely carcinogenic, the manufacturer can simply argue that such results have not been demonstrated on a human population exposed to much lower concentrations of their product. That argument is often enough to keep a product on the market, since no one actually studies the effects of low concentrations of pesticides on human populations.
The bottom line: pesticides are simply not good for you and contribute to cancer and chronic diseases such as autoimmune diseases even when consumed in the relatively low concentrations found on supermarket produce.
Russell Blaylock, MD, author of the Blaylock Wellness Report, says, “eating pesticide saturated vegetables can increase your risk of cancer or at least severely blunt the vegetables’ cancer-preventing effectiveness.”
So buy organic when consuming the Dirty Dozen.
