Pesticides on your plate – New study warns of need to better understand health effects
Eating plenty of fruits and veggies is recommended as key to a healthy diet, but new research underscores how consuming family favorites such as strawberries, peaches, spinach and kale commonly comes with side of pesticide residues that could be harming your health.
Using data sets generated by US government researchers, a team that includes scientists from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Brown University School of Public Health said in the study released Wednesday that they found the foods that had the highest pesticide loads included spinach, kale, strawberries, potatoes, nectarines, peaches, apples and raisins.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says that fruits and vegetables “provide essential vitamins and minerals, fiber, and other substances important for good health.”
“Eating fruits and vegetables as part of a healthy eating plan may reduce the risk of some types of cancer and chronic diseases,” the agency states on its website.
But the new study, published in the International Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, looked at the relationship between consumption of pesticide-contaminated foods and levels of pesticides showing up in human urine, and warns that consuming certain pesticide-laden foods leads to higher levels of pesticides found in the human serums. Better tracking of the potential health impacts is needed, the study states.
“The findings reinforce that what we eat directly affects the level of pesticides in our bodies,” Alexis Temkin, Ph.D., EWG vice president for science and study lead author, said in a press release. “Eating produce is essential to a healthy diet, but it can also increase exposure to pesticides.”
The study cites research linking to pesticide exposure to a range of health problems, including increased risk of cancer, adverse birth outcomes, neurological harm, respiratory toxicity, reproductive toxicity, and disrupted hormonal function.
“Biomonitoring for pesticides is essential for public health protection,” the study states. “Development of analytical methods to measure internal exposure to a broader range of pesticides, would also aid in understanding health effects associated with these exposures.”
The researchers said they created a “pesticide load index” to rank produce based on national pesticide residue testing data collected by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) mainly between 2013 and 2018 for 44 types of produce.
Dietary pesticide exposure scores for 1,837 individuals were then calculated based on produce consumption information taken from the CDC’s 2015–2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Pesticide load indices were calculated based on detections of 178 unique parent pesticides, or 42 parent pesticides with matched urinary biomarkers in NHANES.
The researchers said that the study adds to doubts about the Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to pesticide residues in foods, as the agency sets limits for individual pesticides but does not account for the fact that people typically consume residues from an array of pesticides contaminating food products.
Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and expert on environmental toxins and director of the Global Observatory on Planetary Health at Boston College, said exposure to pesticides in the diet can be particularly concerning for children.
“It may be true that a low level of a particular chemical may be of no concern to an adult. But all bets are off when it comes to children and unborn children in the womb,” he said.
“Monitoring is very important. As a pediatrician I always get irritated when people who haven’t studied medicine say that the presence of a toxic chemical in the human body is no cause for concern,” Landrigan said.
(Featured photo by Engin Akyurt on Unsplash.)
