Why You Shouldn’t Buy Organic Based on the “Dirty Dozen” List [Updated for 2019]

Switch with organic kale because tapas the 2019 “Dirty Dozen” list of products with the highest amount of pesticides? You may want to reconsider. It turns out that the “d“Dirty” foods are fairly clean, and organic foods are not pesticide-free anyway.

The US Department of Agriculture, which conducted the actual testing of pesticides on product samples, reached a higher level reassuring conclusion on your most recent report (published in December 2018, using data from 2017, which is the basis for the 2019 Dirty Dozen list):

This report shows that when pesticide residues are found in food, they are almost always at levels below the tolerances set by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). More than 99 percent of the products sampled through PDP had residues below EPA tolerances.

But the Environmental Working Group used the same data to create a list of “dirty” and “clean” foods and to encourage people to buy organic products. The implicit message is that non-organic products are somewhat risky to your health … but it is not. Fruits and vegetables are good for you, whether they’re organic or conventional, and you don’t need a $ 15 shopping guide to avoid being secretly poisoned at the grocery store.

The “Dirty Dozen” ratings are not related to safety

The “Dirty Dozen” list, which aims to classify the fruits with the most pesticide residues, comes from the Environmental Working Group, and they publish their methodology in the report website. Basically, they download the USDA test results. Pesticide data program, which produce the samples for pesticide residues, and obtains a ranking score for each fruit or vegetable based on six criteria related to the number of different pesticide residues observed in products of that type, the percentage of samples with pesticide residues, pesticides and the total amount of pesticide detected.

Here’s a problem. Some pesticides are drastically more toxic than others, but the EWG scoring system considers all pesticides equal and does not relate pesticide amounts to known safety standards. Two food scientists did a reality check on the EWG numbers from their 2010 list (which uses the same methodology as this year’s). His analysis was published in the Journal of Toxicology.

They compared the amount of pesticides in each of the Dirty Dozen foods with the chronic reference dose, which is the maximum amount you can consume if you eat that food every day of your life. This level, just to be safe, is one hundred times less than the amount that the experimental animals were able to consume without effects. It’s a pretty big margin of safety. So how many of the Dirty Dozen exceeded this extremely conservative chronic reference dose? None:

All pesticide exposure estimates were well below established chronic reference doses (RfD). Only one of the 120 exposure estimates exceeded 1% of the RfD (methamidophos in bell peppers at 2% of the RfD), and only seven exposure estimates (5.8 percent) exceeded 0.1% of the RfD. Three-quarters of the pesticide / commodity combinations demonstrated exposure estimates below 0.01% of the RfD (corresponding to exposures one million times below chronic levels with no observable adverse effects from animal toxicology studies), and 40.8% had exposure estimates below 0.001% of the RfD.

So even the dirtiest of the dozen had very, very, very low pesticide levels. Which brings us to the other fundamental problem with ranking-based Dirty Dozen: the list will always have twelve items. If farmers increased pesticide use a million times overnight, or if they ditched pesticides en masse, next year’s list would not reflect the change in their actual risk. He would still have a dozen articles, and the “Clean Fifteen” would still back up another fifteen.

The “clean fifteen” are also worth examining: another analysis, the vegetable with the highest pesticide dose was on that list: cauliflower, with more pesticides above 10% of the RfD than other crops. Let’s stop pretending the EWG lists tell us something about what is really safe in our food.

Organic farming uses pesticides, including highly toxic ones

You may want to avoid pesticides. I can back that up. There is no risk less than zero, right? The problem is that the EWG solution (buy organic if you are concerned about pesticides) will not necessarily reduce your pesticide consumption.

Ecological agriculture also use pesticides. In fact, here is the National list of pesticides approved for certified organic farms. It includes some fairly toxic substances, such as copper sulfate, and many are not restricted in terms of how much a farmer can use. Just because “synthetic” pesticides are more strictly regulated does not mean that natural ones are healthier: before rotenone it was banned, it was allowed in conventional and organic crops alike, as it comes from a plant rather than a synthetic source. Organic pesticides they are not necessarily better for the environment anyone.

This would be a moot point if we could compare the pesticides found in organic and conventional produce. You’ll notice that the EWG only mentions pesticides found in conventional products – that’s because the USDA does not test for organic pesticides.

They use a high-speed method that allows them to test hundreds of pesticides at once, but the test cannot detect many organic pesticides, including copper sulfate and BT toxin (famous for its role in transgenic corn and soybeans, but it is also perfectly legal in organic farming).

We know that organic products have less synthetic pesticides than conventional products (not zero, but less). But we do not have complete information on the total load of pesticides, synthetic and organic, so it would be incorrect to say that organic products have less. We just can’t tell.

What you should do

First, keep eating lots of fruits and vegetables. The health benefits of eating them (of any kind) are Well establishedand they vastly outweigh any risk from pesticide residues (organic or otherwise).

But how can we ensure that we are getting as little pesticide residue as possible in our food? Wherever you looked for an answer to this question, the recommendation was always the same: shop local farms where you can ask how they control pests and what chemicals they use. Apple farms are not organic in most of the country, for example, but many of them use sustainable pest management techniques They keep their pesticide use very low. I am happy to buy from those farms.

I am not arguing against organic food in general. The organic movement has many good intentions behind it. However, the USDA organic label does not reflect intentions. It means some specific things, for example that the food has not been irradiated, that the animals are not routinely given antibiotics, and that certain fertilizers and pesticides were not used. Some of these things may matter to youand some may not. You may also find that some things that do For you, it is not reflected in the presence or absence of organic certification.

So, forget about the organic label if you are concerned about pesticide exposure; it just doesn’t tell you what you want to know. Ask questions, or grow your own, if you can, and forget about the “Dirty Dozen.”

Photos by Pete markham Y jetsandzeppelins.

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