Eating five fruits and vegetables every day will not necessarily be good for your health. The consumer association UFC-Que Choisir is once again sounding the alarm: More than half of the fruits and vegetables from intensive farming are contaminated with pesticides that pose a health hazard.
To reach this conclusion, I looked at official data from scans conducted in 2019 on samples taken at random. The result is alarming: the pesticides identified are known to be carcinogenic but also toxic to reproduction or DNA.
A classification is made by category. As for the fruit, cherries come out on top: 91.9% of the samples showed a trace of pesticides, including fertility-impairing phosmite. Grapefruit comes next at 90%. The most common substance is pyrroxyphene, an endocrine disruptor (EP). Next come peaches, apples and grapes.
Membership is much less affected
For vegetables, celery is the most polluted with 91.2%. Brussels sprouts have also been blacklisted, particularly for the presence of boscalide, a widely used fungicide. Okra (or okra) is in third place, followed by green beans and celery.
However, the study revealed that organic produce was less affected: six times less for organic tomato samples and seven times less for green beans. If this last point is reassuring news, UFC-Que Choisir decries this position: “It is not acceptable to force consumers to switch to a more expensive offering, when these worrying global outcomes are the result of a particularly lax regulatory framework,” She explains in the press release that publishes these findings.
It requires strengthening the national and European regulatory framework, in particular through reform of licensing procedures for the use of pesticides and an immediate ban on the marketing of the most dangerous particles in the application of the precautionary principle.