Pesticides in our Vegetables

Unfortunately, in order for farmers to grow more food while protecting crops, certain level of pesticides is necessary. However, since people began to notice significant negative effect of pesticides, organic crops started to become more popular during early 2000s. In a perfect world, we would all be only eating organic food, but it’s not that easy and accessible for most due to the (often extreme) price differences.

The prices between organic and non-organic foods could range from 10% to 134%. And as you might have guessed, the foods that don’t have that much difference in price are foods like oatmeal, while something that we eat daily (like milk) can be about 94% higher in price for the organic version.

When we go to grocery store, we all have experienced putting stuff back after checking the price and walking towards discount section. Sometimes we chose not to believe certain facts because we simply can’t afford it and start to rationalize because we don’t see people die from eating vegetables with pesticides right in front of us. But I can tell you it is toxic and it is on most of our food.

The effect can be acute or chronic, and unfortunately, there’s no clear way to prove if it’s linked to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, ADHD, or even birth defects, but there are countless studies claims that it may.

First let’s see how many pesticides are there

There’s about 17,000 pesticide products that are registered in the market and roughly about 5.6 billion pounds are used worldwide. Mainly there are 4 different types of pesticides: Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and rodenticides. In U.S., the EPA(Environmental Protection Agency) sets a limit on how much pesticides can be used and how much should be on the food that we buy to make sure it’s safe to eat, yet the U.S. uses 85 more pesticides that have been banned in other countries. We all know it’s necessary to use pesticides to keep up with the demand and reduce the cost as much as possible, but we can’t just keep eating toxic food because it’s more affordable.

Effects of pesticide on body

The EPA claims that the amount of pesticides we consume is safe, but it’s not really ideal to eat something toxic even if we are at this so called “safe level,” and there are more research about how toxic it is than how safe it is. UC Berkeley Research Center found that women who are heavily exposed to the pesticide DDT(Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) during childhood are five times more likely to develop breast cancer. Scientists have found a clear decline in breast cancer incidence in Israel after the pesticides DDT and (PCB)organo-chlorin were banned from dairy production.

The amount we consume from the food is obviously much smaller than the level these women were exposed to, however, we don’t know how these small amounts will add up and affect our body after 10-20 years. Although the regulation is more strict now, how can we be sure any diseases that we have or any health condition that we have now or in the future is not related to pesticides that we’ve eaten and have been exposed to over a longer period of time. We can’t say for sure we wouldn’t be the victim of a disease related to pesticides that scientists might find decades later.

So, what is the best way to remove pesticides from our crops and food?

Typically, most of people just wash their fruits and veggies with running water. Some people do soak it in the water, and of course you can go even further by using vinegar, lemon, salt, or baking soda. But even with all of these precautions, we still don’t know if it worked and how much pesticides we actually washed it off. We can’t even touch the pesticides that have seeped into the produce after all.

Luckily, there were group of scientists in Korea who tested and found the best way for us to remove as much as possible at home. Still It will be hard to get rid of pesticides 100%, but the paper published from Korean Journal of Pesticide Science claimed that there is actually not much difference between using tap water, vinegar, or special vegetable cleaner. So, we can actually use the tap water to clean our vegetables and as they’ve shown there’s no huge benefit of using fancy vegetable cleaners. However, they did find that washing the vegetables with flowing water is not enough. Most of the pesticides on produces needs time to be dissolved in water, so the best way to wash them properly would be soaking them in water for about one to five minutes and then washing them with flowing water.

As you can see from the table below, the removal rate almost doubled when they did soaking and running washing compared to just running wash.

Other studies have found that the skin or peel of the fruit contains higher amounts of nutrient than the peeled produce does. For example, apples with skin contain up to 332% more vitamin K and 142% more vitamin A. If you are consuming a lot of raw vegetables and fruits, especially with the skin, then learning how to clean your produce properly can help you to be healthier.