Pesticides on your plate – New study warns of need to better understand health effects
Using data sets generated by US government researchers, a
team that includes scientists from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and
the Brown University School of Public Health said in the study released Wednesday that they found the
foods that had the highest pesticide loads included spinach, kale,
strawberries, potatoes, nectarines, peaches, apples and raisins.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), says
that fruits and vegetables “provide essential vitamins and minerals, fiber, and
other substances important for good health.”
“Eating fruits and vegetables as part of a healthy eating
plan may reduce the risk of some types of cancer and chronic diseases,” the agency states on its website.
But the new study, published in the International
Journal of Hygiene and Environmental Health, looked
at the relationship between consumption of pesticide-contaminated foods and
levels of pesticides showing up in human urine, and warns that consuming
certain pesticide-laden foods leads to higher levels of pesticides found in the
human serums. Better tracking of the potential health impacts is needed, the
study states.
“The findings reinforce that what we eat directly affects the level of pesticides in our bodies,” Alexis Temkin, Ph.D., EWG vice president for science and study lead author, said in a press release. “Eating produce is essential to a healthy diet, but it can also increase exposure to pesticides.”
The study cites research linking to pesticide exposure to a
range of health problems, including increased risk of cancer, adverse birth
outcomes, neurological harm, respiratory toxicity, reproductive toxicity, and
disrupted hormonal function.
“Biomonitoring for pesticides is essential for public health
protection,” the study states. “Development of analytical methods to measure
internal exposure to a broader range of pesticides, would also aid in
understanding health effects associated with these exposures.”
The researchers said they created a “pesticide load index”
to rank produce based on national pesticide residue testing data collected by
the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) mainly between 2013 and 2018 for 44
types of produce.
Dietary pesticide exposure scores for 1,837 individuals were
then calculated based on produce consumption information taken from the CDC’s
2015–2016 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
Pesticide load indices were calculated based on detections of 178 unique parent
pesticides, or 42 parent pesticides with matched urinary biomarkers in NHANES.
The researchers said that the study adds to doubts about the
Environmental Protection Agency’s approach to pesticide residues in foods, as
the agency sets limits for individual pesticides but does not account for the
fact that people typically consume residues from an array of pesticides
contaminating food products.
Dr. Philip Landrigan, a pediatrician and expert on
environmental toxins and director of the Global Observatory on Planetary
Health at Boston College, said exposure to pesticides in the diet can be
particularly concerning for children.
“It may be true that a low level of a particular chemical
may be of no concern to an adult. But all bets are off when it comes to
children and unborn children in the womb,” he said.
“Monitoring is very important. As a pediatrician I always
get irritated when people who haven’t studied medicine say that the presence of
a toxic chemical in the human body is no cause for concern,” Landrigan
said.
Carey Gillam is Editor in Chief of The New Lede. Gillam is a veteran investigative journalist with more than 30 years of experience covering US news, including 17 years as a senior correspondent with Reuters international news service (1998-2015), and several years as a contributing writer for The Guardian. She is the author of “Whitewash- The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer and the Corruption of Science,” an expose of Monsanto’s corporate corruption of agriculture. The book won the coveted Rachel Carson Book Award from the Society of Environmental Journalists in 2018. Her second book, a narrative legal thriller titled "The Monsanto Papers", was released in 2021. Gillam is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.