I’m guessing … um… no.
But for those of you who aren’t already just a little bit on the organic-food bandwagon, there’s some really fascinating food for thought to be found in the Seattle P-I.
It’s a story about a year-long Mercer Island study — funded by the Environmental Protection Agency and published this month in Environmental Health Perspectives — that compares the chemicals found in kids when they ate organic versus conventionally grown food.
What did Chensheng Lu, the principal author of the study, find?
According to the story, urine and saliva of children eating a variety of conventional foods from area groceries contained biological markers of organophosphates, (the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II).
Yum!
When the same children ate organic fruits, vegetables and juices, signs of pesticides were not found.
“Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets,” Lu said in the story. “The transformation is extremely rapid.”
Of course the effect of pesticides on children begs more study.
And even Lu, who has two children, isn’t suggesting everyone switch to 100 percent organic diets.
But he does recommend and increased awareness of how our food is grown, particularly food imported during the winter months.
He said: “Consumers should be encouraged to buy produce direct from the farmers they know. These need not be just organic farmers, but conventional growers who minimize their use of pesticides.”
Read it all here to learn more about commonly used organophosphates such as chlorpyrifos and the theories about their effects on brain development and behavior.
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