POV: Pesticides and Produce—Ignore the “Dirty Dozen” List of Fruits and Vegetables

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POV: Pesticides and Produce—Ignore the “Dirty Dozen” List of Fruits and Vegetables
While some produce is more likely to have pesticide residue than others, it’s essentially all safe to consume
Every year, the Environmental Working Group (EWG) releases its list of the “Dirty Dozen,” the 12 fruits and vegetables available in the US with the highest levels of pesticide residue on their exterior surface. The media publicizes the list without fully understanding the facts, and unfortunately, this scares some folks away from enjoying Mother Nature’s finest.
(I am refusing to publicize the list here and I will explain why.)
As a nutrition professor and registered dietitian nutritionist, I beg you: Don’t let this list prevent you from eating fruits and veggies. I’d rather you stress over the weather, or even more importantly, the Red Sox bullpen, than the overblown health risks being inferred from eating fruits and vegetables.
There are so many well-documented health benefits of consuming fruits and vegetables (whether fresh, frozen, canned, organic, or conventionally grown), from heart health to weight management. Even the EWG has admitted in the past that “the health benefits of eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables outweigh the risks of pesticide exposure” and that eating conventionally grown produce is far better than skipping fruits and vegetables.
What’s more, there’s already a robust process in place to ensure the produce that winds up on your grocery store shelves—even those landing on the “Dirty Dozen” list—are safe to consume. It’s a science-based, four-step assessment conducted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pesticide Data Program (PDP), which launched in 1991 and manages the sampling, testing, and reporting of pesticide residues on both domestically grown and imported foods.
According to Carl K. Winter, a professor at the University of California–Davis, whose research on how to detect pesticides in foods and evaluate their risk to humans is used to support the PDP’s work on pesticide residues on foods, “The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency applies very stringent criteria to ensure that pesticide residues on foods provide a ‘reasonable certainty of no harm’ to consumers.”
The EPA considers all the ways people could be exposed to each pesticide (food consumption, drinking water, and skin contact) and calculates the cumulative exposure for entire families of pesticides possessing a common toxicological effect, according to Winter. The EPA also applies extra safety factors to establishing acceptable pesticide concentrations in cases where kids and babies may be more susceptible to pesticides than adults. “Only after such criteria are met does EPA allow pesticides to be used on specific crops,” Winter states.
This process is so rigorous, in fact, that the latest PDP report found that over 99 percent of the foods it tested, including produce, had pesticide residues well below the levels that the EPA has established as safe to consume. And get this: This is the very report the EWG used to create its “Dirty Dozen” list.
While some produce is more likely to have pesticide residues than others, it’s essentially all safe to consume. The “Dirty Dozen” report misses that very important point and encourages consuming organic produce, which may not be affordable for many families, especially during the inflationary times that we are experiencing at the supermarket checkout.
Oh, and by the way, EWG has partnered with the Organic Voices Action Fund (OVAF) in the past. We don’t need fear mongering to keep us from eating produce, especially when science tells us that half our plates should be loaded with that very produce.
My advice: Get the most bang for your buck when it comes to buying fruits and vegetables. Buy what’s on sale and wash it before you eat it. Enjoy Mother Nature’s finest, in hefty amounts, no matter how it’s grown.
This article was revised by the author of the original publication where it appeared, U.S. News & World Report. Joan Salge Blake (Sargent’84, Wheelock’16) is program director and clinical professor of nutrition at Sargent College of Health & Rehabilitation Sciences. She can be reached at salge@bu.edu.
“POV” is an opinion page that provides timely commentaries from students, faculty, and staff on a variety of issues: on-campus, local, state, national, or international. Anyone interested in submitting a piece, which should be about 700 words long, should contact John O’Rourke at orourkej@bu.edu. BU Today reserves the right to reject or edit submissions. The views expressed are solely those of the author and are not intended to represent the views of Boston University.
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