I have bad news, blueberry fans: If you want to avoid pesticides, you’ll need to buy organic.
That’s also true for 11 other fruits and vegetables that made the EWG’s Dirty Dozen list as part of its newly updated Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides.
Blueberries made the No. 5 slot on the Dirty Dozen, a list of the fruits and vegetables found to have the most pesticide residues.
You know those firm, juicy, delicious grapes you’ve been enjoying from Chile?
Are they clean?
Not likely.
Two hot superfoods — kale and spinash — also made the Dirty Dozen.
The EWG recommends everyone buy organic versions of these produce items:
Dirty Dozen
1. Celery
2. Peaches
3. Strawberries
4. Apples
5. Blueberries
6. Nectarines
7. Bell Peppers
8. Spinach
9. Kale
10. Cherries
11. Potatoes
12. Grapes (Imported)
Can’t you just wash off pesticides?
No.
The EWG’s lists are based on residues found on foods as they are “typically eaten,” meaning washed, rinsed or peeled, depending on the type of produce.
EWG: “Rinsing reduces but does not eliminate pesticides. Peeling helps, but valuable nutrients often go down the drain with the skin.”
Also, it wasn’t just a few bad conventionally grown apples that landed the worst offenders in the Dirty Dozen.
More than 96 percent of peaches tested positive for pesticides, followed by nectarines and celery (the dirtiest vegetable of all) at 95 percent, apples at 94 percent and imported cucumbers and potatoes at 84 percent.
Strawberries and domestic blueberries were the worst, with 13 pesticides detected on a single sample. Peaches and apples were next, with nine pesticides on one sample.
Peaches had been treated with more pesticides than any other type of produce, with combinations of up to 67 different chemicals. Strawberries were next, with 53 pesticides and apples with 47.
Yikes.
OK, now, here’s the good news: The EWG also puts out its Clean 15, a list of foods that tested the lowest in pesticdes.
Clean 15
1. Onions
2. Avocado
3. Sweet Corn
4. Pineapple
5. Mangos
6. Sweet Peas
7. Asparagus
8. Kiwi
9. Cabbage
10. Eggplant
11. Cantaloupe
12. Watermelon
13. Grapefruit
14 Sweet Potato
15. Honeydew melon
You can download a printable guide for your wallet — or an iPhone app! — at foodnews.org.
If even that seems like too much work, here’s a rule of thumb: If you’re planning to eat the skin of something, go organic.
Most of the items in the Clean 15 are typically the kinds of foods that don’t require you to eat the skin, with the exception of aspargus (yay!), sweet peas, eggplant and sweet potato.
Though tomatoes and broccoli don’t appear on either list, they aren’t so bad.
- Over half of the tomatoes (53.1 percent), broccoli (65.2 percent), eggplant (75.4 percent), cabbage (82.1 percent), and sweet pea (77.1 percent) samples had no detectable pesticides. Among the other three vegetables on the least-contaminated list (asparagus, sweet corn, and onions), there were no detectable residues on 90 percent or more of the samples.
The EWG based its lists on 96,000 tests conducted between 2000 and 2008 and collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
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