Who would have thought the sweet peach and the humble celery would be two of the worst culprits to dress themselves in pesticides. To be fair, they themselves have not grown from seeking the chemical nourishment, but rather those that feed and tend to them have chosen big and quick over nature's chosen size and development time.
We can't always buy organic products. You have to have carrots if you're making carrot soup but if there are no organic carrots left or the non organic variety sourced closer to home is cheaper and available you're more likely to go for that. What if you knew however that 82.3% of carrots test positive to pesticides? Perhaps you'd make onion soup instead if you know that 90 percent or more of onion samples do not test positive to pesticides.
The Environmental Working Group have released their 5th edition of the ‘Shopper's Guide to Pesticides' which ranks pesticide contamination for 47 popular fruits and vegetables. It's a useful guide to help us formulate our ‘absolutely must be organic' and ‘non-organic is ok' shopping list.
The EWG say that ‘people can lower their pesticide exposure by almost 80 percent by avoiding the top twelve most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least contaminated instead'.
The worst offenders:
- Peach
- Apples
- Peppers
- Celery
If you buy these be sure to choose organic.
The safer kids are:
- Pineapples
- Mangos
- Avocados
- Onions
To view the complete list vist the EWG website. The tests used to determine these findings used fruit and veg that had been rinsed and peeled - quite scary when you read that some peaches were found to contain a combination of up to 53 pesticides.
Designed to kill living organisms like insects, other plants and fungi pesticides are inherently toxic. Pesticides have been found to seriously damage the nervous system, hormone system, have carcinogenic effects and irritate the skin, eyes and lungs.
