We found unhealthy pesticide levels in 20% of US produce – here’s what you need to know
When it comes to healthy eating, fruits and vegetables reign supreme. But along with all their vitamins, minerals and other nutrients can come something else: an unhealthy dose of dangerous pesticides.
Though using chemicals to control bugs, fungi and weeds helps farmers grow the food we need, it’s been clear since at least the 1960s that some chemicals also carry unacceptable health risks. And although certain notorious pesticides, such as DDT, have been banned in the US, government regulators have been slow to act on others. Even when a dangerous chemical is removed from the market, chemical companies and growers sometimes just start using other options that may be as dangerous.
Consumer Reports, which has tracked the use of pesticides on produce for decades, has seen this pattern repeat itself over and over. “It’s two steps forward and one step back – and sometimes even two steps back,” says James E Rogers, who oversees food safety at Consumer Reports.
To get a sense of the current situation, Consumer Reports recently conducted our most comprehensive review ever of pesticides in food. To do it, we analyzed seven years of data from the US Department of Agriculture, which each year tests a selection of conventional and organic produce grown in or imported to the US for pesticide residues. We looked at 59 common fruits and vegetables, including, in some cases, not just fresh versions but also canned, dried or frozen ones.
Our new results continue to raise red flags.
Pesticides posed significant risks in 20% of the foods we examined, including popular choices such as bell peppers, blueberries, green beans, potatoes and strawberries. One food, green beans, had residues of a pesticide that hasn’t been allowed to be used on the vegetable in the US for over a decade. And imported produce, especially some from Mexico, was particularly likely to carry risky levels of pesticide residues.
But there was good news, too. Pesticides presented little to worry about in nearly two-thirds of the foods, including nearly all of the organic ones. Also encouraging: the largest risks are caused by just a few pesticides, concentrated in a handful of foods, grown on a small fraction of US farmland. “That makes it easier to identify the problems and develop targeted solutions,” Rogers says – though he acknowledges that it will take time and effort to get the Environmental Protection Agency, which regulates the use of pesticides on crops, to make the necessary changes.
In the meantime, our analysis offers insights into simple steps you can take to limit exposure to harmful pesticides, such as using our ratings to identify which fruits and vegetables to focus on in your diet, and when buying organic produce can make the most sense.
What’s safer, what’s risky, and why
Sixteen of the 25 fruits and 21 of the 34 vegetables in our analysis had low levels of pesticide risk. Even children and pregnant people can safely eat more than three servings a day of those foods, Consumer Reports’ food safety experts say. Ten foods were of moderate risk; up to three servings a day of them are OK.
The flip side: 12 foods presented bigger concerns. Children and pregnant people should consume less than a serving a day of high-risk fruits and vegetables, and less than half a serving a day of very high-risk ones. Everyone else should limit consumption of those foods, too.
To come up with that advice, we analyzed the USDA’s test results for 29,643 individual food samples. We rated the risk of each fruit or vegetable by factoring in how many pesticides showed up in the food, how often they were found, the amount of each