Study after study shows evidence of the benefits of eating a variety of fruits and vegetables — lots of them — to help prevent a host of diseases and promote good health. Loading up on produce is clearly a good thing, but it’s important to make sure you’re not loading your body up with pesticides, too.
Eating organic as often as possible is the best way to keep toxic and persistent pesticides out of your body. But does all produce need to be organic? Each year the Environmental Working Group (EWG) releases the “Clean Fifteen” and “Dirty Dozen” lists to help consumers identify foods with the most and least pesticide residues. Scientists focused on 48 popular fruits and veggies and based their rankings on an analysis of 32,000 samples tested by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration.
Of the thousands of produce samples analyzed, 65 percent tested positive for pesticide residues. EWG’s 2014 Dirty Dozen list includes apples, strawberries, grapes, celery, peaches, spinach, sweet bell peppers, imported nectarines, cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, imported snap peas, and potatoes. These foods showed high concentrations of pesticides relative to other produce items.
The Clean Fifteen, on the other hand, includes the produce least likely to hold pesticide residues. Avocados, sweet corn, pineapples, cabbage, frozen sweet peas, onions, asparagus, mangoes, papayas, kiwis, eggplant, grapefruit, cantaloupe, cauliflower, and sweet potatoes made the list. Only 5.5 percent of samples of these foods had two or more pesticides, and not a single fruit tested positive for more than four types of pesticides.
If you’re being choosy about which foods to buy organic, keep this list handy. (Read the full report and download a pdf of the lists at www.ewg.org.) Choose organic versions of the Dirty Dozen whenever possible, and know that conventionally grown varieties of the Clean Fifteen are likely to have low concentrations of pesticide residues.