We all ingest lots of chemicals, one way or another. We breathe them, we drink them, and we eat them. The most troublesome are pesticides in produce. It makes me uncomfortable to think that while we are eating fruits and vegetables in reality we are also ingesting poisons that can accumulate in our bodies and make us very sick. This is food that supposes to be healthy and good for us!

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Even if the most toxic chemicals have already been banned for use in agriculture, peticides in general are poisons designed to kill insects, weed, small rodents and other pests. The long time effects of these poisons on people are not completely known. Even the minimal risk with these pollutants is too much, when we think we may expose children. We should try to do every effort to minimize our intake of these adverse chemicals.

Education is the key. Knowing which produce contain more pollutants can help us make the right choices, avoiding the most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating the least polluted, or buy organic instead. In simulation of consumers eating habits has been demonstrated that changing a little bit the eating practices can lower considerably the ingestion of pesticides.

The results of an investigation on pesticides in produce by the USDA Pesticide Data Program (*), show that fruits topped the list of the consistently most contaminated produce, with eight of the 12 most polluted foods. The dirty dozen are: apples, bell peppers, celery, cherries, imported grapes, nectarines, peaches, pears, potatoes, red raspberries, spinach, and strawberries.