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We’ve written before at HuffPost UK about how surprisingly possible cross-contamination is in your unwashed, reusable shopping bag.
As a result, I for one have obsessively washed my fruit and veggies ever since. But per a recently released study, that might not be enough (adulthood is so relentless, isn’t it?).
A paper, which was published in the American Chemical Society’s journal Nano Letters, suggested that regular-degular “fruit-cleaning operations cannot wholly remove pesticides.”
What? Why?
The authors of the paper wanted to find a better way to discover and track the amount of pesticides in produce.
As a part of their search, they used imaging on fruits like apples that found “pesticides penetrate the peel layer into the pulp layer.”
This mostly went away when they peeled the produce.
They didn’t seem to test how bad the specific amount of pesticides on the fruit’s skin would have been for a consumer, which is a separate question.
But insofar as pesticides harm humans ― andthe Environmental Protection Agency confirms that they can, though harms vary according to pesticide and dose ―the paper found that “the risk of pesticide ingestion from
fruits cannot be avoided by simple washing other than peeling.”
So what should I do about it?
A co-author of the study, Professor Dongdong Ye, says you don’t need to panic ― if you’re worried about the pesticide levels of your food, you might want to peel.
“Rather than fostering undue apprehension, the research posits that peeling can effectively eliminate nearly all pesticide residues, contrasted with the frequently recommended practice of washing,” he said.
And then, there’s the fact that the peeling method is only necessary if your food has more pesticide residue than is safe.
A 2021 UK study found that only 2.55% of produce contained pesticide residue that was higher than the recommended levels; 48.64% of the 3,530 samples across 29 different foods had no residue whatsoever.
Washing your food is still a great step to remove dirt from your food.
If you’d rather keep the skin on, the National Pesticide Information Centre says, “Washing and rubbing produce under running water is better than dunking it.”