What you can't see CAN hurt you (Part 1)

When I chaperoned Pingree's service trip out to the Rosebud Reservation at the end of June this past summer we purchased strawberries and blueberries and raspberries to have with almost every breakfast. I was usually up early on the trip and often helped prep the breakfast foods. I got a lot of strange looks from students each time I dumped that morning's berries out of their plastic containers and into a collandar and proceeded to wash them with soap and water. Often, someone would say, "I already rinsed them off."

Sadly, in this day and age, rinsing off fruits and veggies with running water is as effective at cleaning them of nasty chemicals as not rinsing them at all. Why? Because farmers are smart and pesticides are expensive. Imagine spraying your crops only to have the rain wash away your hard work one or two days later. The solution is simple--dissolve those chemicals in a liquid wax that will dry onto the fruit and is very water proof. Now when it rains, the chemicals stick tight to the fruit, held there in the wax. Occasionally, you can see this waxy coating on fruit when you buy it (yuck), but most of the time it's pretty invisible. Thankfully, a little bit of soap and warm water will cut right through the wax and take off the chemical coating. You just need to rinse the fruit well after you wash it.

Some crops are more susceptible to insect (and fungal) attack than others and need higher doses of nastier chemicals than others. Grapes, and all the berry crops fall into that category, as do bell peppers but I wash everything if I (or anyone else in my family) is going to eat the outer skin, including vegetables.

So what exactly are these nasty, invisible chemicals clinging to your fresh fruits and veggie? The pesticides are mostly in a class called "organophosphates," and they kill insects because they disrupt neurotransmitters. In other words, they destroy little insects nervous systems. Guess what: they do the exact same thing to our neurotransmitters, but because we have MANY more nerve cells in our brains, we can handle much high exposure rates than our little insect cousins without being killed. Good thing, too, because think of all the food you eat on a given day. Did it have wheat flour in it? That wheat was sprayed with organophosphate pesticides in the fields, and I'm willing to bet no one washed it before milling it into flour. Did you have sauce on your pasta? Those tomatoes (and all the herbs used to spice the sauce) were sprayed as well before being harvested and though they may have been rinsed to remove dirt and dust, they weren't washed to remove the pesticides. Mm, mm, mm. So... every day, you're mega-dosing yourself with all those chemicals that wreck neurotransmitters and kill nerve cells, but heck, you've got plenty to spare, right? And you feel just fine, right?

"Oh, it can't be all that bad," I can hear you saying. "You're blowing things out of proportion." Maybe. But I offer the following abstract of a pesticide dosing study that was conducted by Department of Environmental Health, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA in 2003.

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We assessed organophosphorus (OP) pesticide exposure from diet by biological monitoring among Seattle, Washington, preschool children. Parents kept food diaries for 3 days before urine collection, and they distinguished organic and conventional foods based on label information. Children were then classified as having consumed either organic or conventional diets based on analysis of the diary data. Residential pesticide use was also recorded for each home. We collected 24-hr urine samples from 18 children with organic diets and 21 children with conventional diets and analyzed them for five OP pesticide metabolites. We found significantly higher median concentrations of total dimethyl alkylphosphate metabolites. The median total dimethyl metabolite concentration was approximately six times higher for children with conventional diets than for children with organic diets; mean concentrations differed by a factor of nine. We calculated dose estimates from urinary dimethyl metabolites and from agricultural pesticide use data, assuming that all exposure came from a single pesticide. The dose estimates suggest that consumption of organic fruits, vegetables, and juice can reduce children's exposure levels from above to below the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's current guidelines, thereby shifting exposures from a range of uncertain risk to a range of negligible risk. Consumption of organic produce appears to provide a relatively simple way for parents to reduce their children's exposure to OP pesticides.

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Well, perhaps I am over reacting when I try to buy organic foods and wash all the non-organic fruits and veggies with soap and water, but I know that OP's are only ONE class of chemicals applied to our food crops. Fungicides, herbicides, petro-chemical fertilizers, antibiotics, and even artificial plant hormones are also coating our food. So, if a minute washing with soap and water could help me or my son or my husband or my unborn child not suffer from future neurological disorders or any other unforeseen health consequences then I'll happily take the odd looks, because what you can't see CAN hurt you.