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Harmful Pesticides Humans Are Digesting When Shopping For Vegetables and Fruits In Supermarkets
If you strive to stay in good health, then you have likely heard that non-organic vegetables and fruits are covered in unhealthy pesticides, but you may not know what the specific pesticides are and how they affect your body. Like many other health-conscious people who have not yet made the switch to eating organic produce, you may be under the impression that rinsing your produce well removes most, if not all of the pesticides on them and makes them just as healthy as organic fruits and vegetables. Read on to learn more about the common pesticides used today by farmers of non-organic crops, how they affect your body, and why rinsing produce doesn’t eliminate the health concerns.
Why Can’t You Just Rinse the Pesticides off Your Produce?
Before we get into produce pesticides used today and how they affect your body, let’s take a look at why rinsing produce often only removes very little, if any, pesticide residue.
First, realize that even if pesticide residue only remained on the surface of fruits and vegetables after they are picked at farms, many pesticides used today are not water-based. As you likely know, water and oil don’t mix, and rinsing fruits and vegetables covered in oil-based pesticides just doesn’t remove the residue.
However, pesticides are not just located on the surfaces of most non-organic fruits and vegetables, but they penetrate through the surfaces and deep down into the produce. That means that even if you wash your produce with a product that can break down oil, you are barely “making a dent” in the pesticides that remain in the produce and then enter your body when you consume them.
3 Popular Pesticides Used By Non-Organic Farmers & How They Affect Your Body
Before we get into the specific pesticides and their affects on your body, realize that this is far from an all-inclusive list of the pesticides used by non-organic farmers today.
In fact, scientific studies have shown that by the time a piece of fruit or a vegetable reaches the supermarket, it can contain over 30 separate pesticides!Here are three common pesticides used by farmers today and how they affect your body:
Glophysate
While Glophysate is technically an herbicide used to kill weeds that sprout in farms, it is not only sprayed on the weeds — to save time, farmers spray it on weeds and crops.
GMO crops can be sprayed with tremendous amounts of glophysate, because GMO crops are genetically engineered to withstand large amounts of this chemical, even when enough is sprayed that would kill non-GMO crops.
As you can imagine, such a potent weed killer can take a toll on your body when you consume it. However, before you even consume that produce and are simply touching it, it can cause skin irritation called photo-contact dermatitis.
Consumption of produce treated with glophysate is believed to cause many diseases. Most importantly, it can lead to many forms of deadly cancer. In a laboratory setting, human cells, including human placental cells, die shortly after they come into contact with just minute quantities of glophysate.
Due to just how deadly it is to human cells, consumption of this pesticide is believed to cause many chronic health problems, including autism, infertility, depression, Chrohn’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and much more.
Atrazine
The second most common pesticide used by farmer’s today is atrazine. This is also used to kill weeds, but is also sprayed directly onto fruits and vegetables while they are growing.
This pesticide was banned in Europe over a decade ago, but unfortunately, now only is it still legal in the US, but it is being used more and more by farmers.
Even the US EPA knows that this pesticide is an endocrine-disruptor, which means it disrupts the natural balance of healthy hormones in a human when consumed. When your body’s natural hormone balance is disrupted, it can lead to infertility and many types of cancer, especially breast and ovarian cancer.
In addition, this pesticide is also believed to cause cancer.
Chlorpyrifos
Chlorpyrifos is sprayed onto fruits and vegetables to kill insects. The US government knows that this is hazardous to the health of humans, so it outlawed the sale of it for use on home gardens in 2000. However, farmers are still allowed to spray it on their fruits and vegetables that humans consume!
Scientific studies have shown that consumption of chlorpyrifos can lead to autoimmune disorders, such as Lupus and Rheumatoid arthritis, and neurological problems, such as Parkinson’s disease, in people of all ages.
However, this pesticide is especially harmful to fetuses and children. When women eat it during pregnancy, it can cause their child to develop childhood developmental disorders, ADHD, and nervous system disorders.
If you care about your and your family’s health and currently consume non-organic fruits and vegetables and feed them to your family, then you need to know the dangers of consuming the pesticides they are often filled with. While these are the three most common pesticides used by farmers today, realize that there are many more, and most are harmful to your body.