What kind of produce you eat makes all the difference in your pesticide exposure, says a paper out by Consumer Reports. For example, “eating one serving of green beans from the U.S. is 200 times riskier than eating a serving of U.S.-grown broccoli.”
Likewise, apples grown in Washington State are often heavily sprayed, while the same crop from New Zealand is relatively pesticide free. In some cases (e.g. avocados), conventional produce was nearly as pesticide-free as the organic version.
The report offers a guide to what fruits and vegetables to eat, as well as results from a survey of 1,050 Americans about their perceptions of organic food and pesticide use in farming. One third of respondents believed that there were legal limits to the number of different pesticides farmers could spray on their fields. But no such regulations exist. Instead, nearly a third of produce in USDA tests showed residue from two or more pesticides. Experts have little idea how those chemicals interact in the body.
“Tolerance levels are calculated for individual pesticides, but finding more than one type on fruits and vegetables is the rule—not the exception,” says Urvashi Rangan, a toxicologist and the executive director of the Food Safety and Sustainability Center. “The effects of these mixtures is untested and unknown.”
Whether you eat organic or not, pesticides are traveling though the air and water, and show up in our bodies. According to the CDC, the average American has 29 different pesticides in their system.