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Pesticides and Food

Page 1

Pesticides and FoodThere's little doubt that the hundreds of different pesticides used on crops ensure a cheaper, steadier supply of produce because they maximize a farmer's yield. After all, pesticides repel any number of intruders that can damage crops, including insects and weeds. Without many of them, we'd be paying much higher prices at the supermarket with less variety to choose from.

Yet, no parent likes to think of his child consuming pesticides, given a child's delicate, developing body. What are the exact dangers of pesticides to a youngster's development? That's tough to say. The EPA says pesticides block the body's uptake of nutrients critical for proper growth and wreak havoc on development by permanently altering the way a child's system functions. Other experts go further, contending that pesticide consumption threatens the normal maturation of the nervous system, which could affect a child's physical coordination, memory, and learning ability. So far, scientists' concerns about pesticides are based on animal studies, however. That's why it's difficult to prove the effects of pesticides on humans.

Even without scientific proof of harm from pesticides, consumer groups have a beef with the EPA's idea of what's safe for children to consume. They say that the government agency hasn't gone far enough to protect kids from harmful chemicals.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG) is one of the organizations that maintains kids are overexposed when it comes to pesticide residues in and on the foods young children consume most often. According to their research, more than a million American children ages five and under every day eat food that contains unsafe levels of thirteen pesticides collectively called organophosphates. Organophosphates are designed to disrupt the normal functioning of a pest's nervous system, effectively killing them off. The group estimates that of the 1.1 million children ingesting dangerous pesticide doses, 106,000 of them exceed the EPA's safe levels for an adult by ten times or more.

The EWG isn't the only organization to object to the EPA's pesticide limits for children. A report by a Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) concurs. Pesticides in the Diets of Infants and Children urges the government to develop new procedures for testing pesticide toxicity in youngsters, to collect detailed information about what kids eat, and to improve the methods of measuring pesticide residues in food. Most laboratory testing done by manufacturers to satisfy EPA requirements assesses pesticide toxicity in physically mature adults, according to the NRC. Among the report's other conclusions: some children could be consuming dangerous amounts of pesticides, and children may be more sensitive to the harmful effects of pesticides than adults.

After investigating the USDAs data on pesticide residues in twenty-seven thousand food samples, Consumers Union, the nonprofit group behind Consumer Reports, conducted its own study of risk. The group found that while the levels of pesticides on certain produce were within legal limits, they were not necessarily safe for children. To boot, some of the foods they have labeled most harmful—apples, pears, grapes, and peaches—are kid-favorites. It may come as a surprise that Consumers Union found imported produce no riskier overall than domestically grown fruits and vegetables. However, they did pinpoint specific imported fruits and vegetables that consistently contained high levels of pesticides: Chilean grapes, Canadian- and Mexican-grown carrots, Mexican broccoli and tomatoes, apple juice from Argentina and Hungary, and Brazilian orange juice all fared worse than their domestic counterparts.

Page 2Moving to Protect Youngsters
Under the 1996 Food Quality and Protection Act, designed in part to protect children in particular from the toxic effects of pesticides, the EPA is required to review the safety of about nine thousand existing pesticides in food. As a result of the new law, the EPA recently banned the use of chlorpyrifos, a member of the organophosphate family, from all domestic consumer products. Farmers may still spray crops with chlorpyrifos, but its use will be significantly reduced. The ban won't make for safer imported produce, however. Foods including New Zealand apples, Chilean grapes, and Mexican tomatoes contained the highest chlorpyrifos residues when tested by the USDA between 1994 and 1998, and there's no reason to think that will change any time soon.

A Pesticide Primer

• Pesticide refers to herbicides, fungicides, insecticides, and other substances that prevent, destroy, repel, or mitigate insects, rodents, weeds, fungi, and microorganisms such as bacteria and viruses. Pesticides also regulate plant growth, defoliate plants, and promote plant death.
• Since pesticides pose harm to pests, including animals and plants, they are, by definition, risky for humans, too.
• According to the EPA, about three hundred and fifty pesticides are used on our foods.
• Drinking water can contain pesticides when the chemicals make their way from nearby farmland to ground water or surface water systems that contribute to a drinking water supply.

Reduce Pesticide Exposure in Children
In spite of their findings that certain foods harbor harmful pesticides, Consumers Union does not recommend banishing fruits and vegetables from the diet. Even with pesticide use, the organization says that the health benefits of produce outweigh the risks from the pesticides they contain. Take the following steps to reduce your child's pesticide exposure:

• Choose foods with the least risk for harmful pesticides. According to Consumers Union, they include: frozen and canned corn, milk, domestic orange juice and broccoli, bananas, and canned peaches. Avoid riskier foods such as domestic and imported fresh peaches; frozen and fresh domestic winter squash; domestic and imported apples, grapes, spinach, and pears; and domestic green beans.
• Wash or peel all fruits and vegetables. Remove the outer leaves of leafy vegetables such as lettuce. Use products such as Fit Fruit and Vegetable Wash (Procter and Gamble) and Wash Dem Veggies (Vermont Soapworks) to remove water-resistant pesticides from produce.
• Eat a wide variety of foods to limit regular consumption of the same pesticide.
• Buy organic produce, particularly peaches, apples, grapes, pears, green beans, winter squash, and spinach when you are able.
• Pesticides can be found in meat. When they are, they are most concentrated in the fatty part of the meat, so trim all visible fat and avoid eating poultry skin.
• Limit home pesticide use and never use products containing organophosphates and carbamates because they can interfere with your child's developing nervous system.
• Need an exterminator? Find one that practices integrated pest management (IPM) to tame unwanted pests.
• Check out pest control policies in your child's school or day care facility and urge them to use fewer pesticides.

What about Water?
Is your water safe to drink? Most likely, yes, unless your community is undergoing an outbreak because of contaminated water. Public water supplies contain the chemical chlorine, which, along with water filtration, reduces the levels of most harmful germs, with one exception: Cryptosporidium parvum, a chlorine-resistant organism, can make its way into tap water and cause illness in thousands of people at a time. Symptoms of cryptosporidosis include watery diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and fever. Children and pregnant women are among those at greater risk for cryptosporidosis. When outbreaks occur, boil your water for five minutes or purchase bottled water for drinking instead.