How To Reduce Your Exposure to Pesticide Residue

Many of your favorite fruits and vegetables carry two to three times the pesticide residue when grown out of season. That’s why some produce should only be bought in the organic aisle.

During winter, much of the produce you love is out of season. Yet, summer fruits like blueberries, red raspberries, and strawberries are still in the supermarket’s produce aisle. Why is that?

While certain vegetables like tomatoes can be grown in local greenhouses, summer fruits can’t. But they’re in season somewhere, most likely South America, Central America, or Mexico. That means your favorite produce was probably trucked in from thousands of miles away, creating a huge carbon footprint.

But there’s also another problem with that produce, one potentially more insidious. Fresh fruits and vegetables grown outside of the United States typically carry two to three times more pesticide residue than produce grown inside the U.S. That’s because imported produce is not subject to the same pesticide standards as food grown stateside.

How do you know what produce is safe to buy?

The Organic Center, a non-profit organization that conducts research and education focused on the science of organic food and farming, has released a pocket-sized shoppers guide, Organic Essentials, designed to help you reduce your pesticide risk and avoid GMO’s. According to the official press release, “The pocket guide was developed using The Organic Center’s “Dietary Risk Index“ (DRI), which calculates the dietary risks associated with pesticide residues found in different foods tested by the U. S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).  The rankings are determined after analyzing the frequency of pesticide residues on a given food, the average level of residues found and their toxicity.”

Organic Fruits and Vegetables pocket guide

Which GMO foods should you avoid?

The Organic Essentials pocket guide also contains a list of veggies and fruits to avoid because they’re likely to have been genetically modified or contain GMOs (unless labeled otherwise): Corn, Canola, Soy Beans, Cotton, Hawaiian Papaya, Sugar Beets, Yellow Crookneck Squash, and Zucchini. As the long-term health effects of GMOs and genetically modified foods are still unknown, it’s safest to avoid them.

Sara Snow, green lifestyle expert and board member of  The Organic Center, said: “The pocket guide is meant to be a go-to resource for shoppers to more easily maximize their intake of health-promoting foods while minimizing their exposure to toxic synthetic pesticides and GMOs…Families can more easily stay within budget while still eating foods that are both good for their health and good for the planet.” Sara Snow has appeared on the Discovery Health Network and has been featured in numerous magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Natural Health, and Lucky magazines.

You can download the Organic Essentials pocket guide here.