By Catherine Roberts, Consumer Reports magazine
When it comes to healthy eating, fruits and vegetables reign supreme. But along with all their vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients can come something else: an unhealthy dose of dangerous pesticides.
Though using chemicals to control bugs, fungi, and weeds helps farmers grow the food we need, it’s been clear since at least the 1960s that some chemicals also carry unacceptable health risks. And although certain notorious pesticides, such as DDT, have been banned in the U.S., government regulators have been slow to act on others. Even when a dangerous chemical is removed from the market, chemical companies and growers sometimes just start using other options that may be as dangerous.
Consumer Reports, which has tracked the use of pesticides on produce for decades, has seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. “It’s two steps forward and one step back–and sometimes even two steps back,” says James E. Rogers, PhD, who oversees food safety at CR.
To get a sense of the current situation, CR recently conducted our most comprehensive review ever of pesticides in food. To do it, we analyzed seven years of data from the Department of Agriculture, which each year tests a selection of conventional and organic produce grown in or imported to the U.S. for pesticide residues. We looked at 59 common fruits and vegetables, including, in some cases, not just fresh versions but also canned, dried, or frozen ones.
Our new results continue to raise red flags. Pesticides posed significant risks in 20 percent of the foods we examined, including popular choices such as bell peppers, blueberries, green beans, potatoes, and strawberries. One food, green beans, had residues of a pesticide that hasn’t been allowed to be used on the vegetable in the U.S. for over a decade. And imported produce, especially some from Mexico, was particularly likely to carry risky levels of pesticide residues.
But there was good news, too. Pesticides presented little to worry about in nearly two-thirds of the foods, including nearly all of the organic ones. Also encouraging: The largest risks are caused by just a few pesticides, concentrated in a handful of foods, grown on a small fraction of U.S. farmland. “That makes it easier to identify the problems and develop targeted solutions,” Rogers says–though he acknowledges that it will take time and effort to get the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates the use of pesticides on crops, to make the necessary changes.
To read the entire article click here.
