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Misconception Number 1: Pesticide residues in conventional foods are always within safe levels.
Summary of Counter-Arguments:
- A significant percentage of conventional food products contain pesticide residues in excess of legally-defined, maximum, authorized residue limits in Europe and the US.
- As a result, most people carry pesticide residues in their bodies (100% of the people tested in the US), but the level can be drastically reduced by the adoption of an organic diet.
- Legally defined “maximum residue limits” are by no means a guarantee of zero health risk.
- In developing countries, pesticide residues in food are uncontrolled by the government most of the time. |
Details of Counter-Arguments:
In industrialized countries, the great majority of conventional food
products admittedly exhibit pesticide residues below the legally-defined,
maximum authorized residue limits. However, there is always a small percentage of conventional food produce
that exceeds these levels. For instance, the 2002 through 2004 annual
and quarterly reports of the Pesticides Residues Committee of the UK consistently
show that approximately one percent of conventional food samples contain
pesticide residues above the maximum permitted levels. [1] The annual pesticides monitoring reports of the Food and Veterinary Office
of the European Commission also report elevated levels of pesticide
residues. Specifically, the 2001, 2002, and 2003 reports (corresponding to
a total of approximately 46,000 food samples) show that 3.6, 5.2, and 5.1
percent, respectively, contained pesticide residues above the maximum
residue limit (MRL). Similarly, in the US, the 2001 through 2003 annual
reports of the Pesticide Program Residue Monitoring of the U.S. Food and
Drug Administration (FDA) shows an overall “violative” level of pesticide
residues between one and two percent for domestic food samples and between
four and six percent for imported food samples.
Legally defined “maximum
residue limits” (MRL) are not a
guarantee of “zero health risk.” First,
MRLs set by governments are not always set on the basis of health criteria.
For instance, in the EU, MRLs (expressed in mg/kg) are based on Good
Agricultural Practice (GAP) data. Therefore, foods derived from
commodities that comply with the respective MRLs are INTENDED to be
toxicologically acceptable. In this case, MRLs are just indicators of the
violation or non-violation of Good Agricultural Practices, not an
indication of health risk. In Canada, the regulation
establishes 0.1 ppm as the “General Maximum Residue Limit.” This limit was
based on the analytical capabilities of pesticide residue detection at the
time the regulation was established. In practice, this means that the
authorized concentration of pesticide residues is mainly the concentration
level that our methods are capable of measuring, rather than the
concentration above which human health is jeopardized!
The direct consequence of this lack of connection between the MRLs
and real human health impacts has been revealed by a report released by
Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA). This report shows that many US residents carry toxic
pesticides in their bodies above government assessed
"acceptable" levels. Analyzing pesticide-related data
collected by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on
levels of chemicals in 9,282 people nationwide, PANNA reports that 100 percent of the people tested had
pesticides in their body and that the average person in this group
carried a toxic cocktail of 13 of the 23 pesticides analyzed. [2] Bioaccumulation is a serious problem as toxic substances tend to be stored
in fat and concentrate in important organs such as the brain, kidneys, and
liver, as well as in breast milk. However, a recent study has shown that
an organic diet provides a dramatic and immediate protective effect
against organophosphate insecticides (the riskiest class of insecticides),
which was demonstrated by detectable decreases in organophosphate
insecticides in urine samples of children just five days after switching
to an organic diet [3].
Another problem with the pesticide residue analysis is that we only find what we are looking for. In
any given study, researchers must decide to confine their analysis to a
limited number of pesticides. Therefore, residues of all the other
pesticides are not measured and could well be above so-called “safe levels.”
For instance, for the report of the
EU commission in 2003, the samples were tested only for 519 active pesticide
ingredients, whereas the pesticide manual for 2005 through 2006 [4] contains 858 active pesticide ingredients.
When looking at the product level, there is a large "gray area"
between levels that are clearly harmful and far lower levels that are
"reasonably certain to cause no harm." Many legal limits for
residues and the doses resulting from exposure to residues in conventional
foods fall in this "gray area." They are below the "clearly
harmful" level, but higher than the "almost certainly safe"
level. [5] In fact, recent
studies show that there might be no such thing as “perfectly safe” levels
of pesticides. Yet the whole concept of toxicity thresholds is based on
the assumption that chemical products become dangerous only beyond a
certain concentration level and are assumed innocuous below that
concentration. The more we understand the effect of toxic substances, the
more this assumption seems to be wrong. For most toxic substances, risk exists as soon as there is
contact with the first molecule and continuously increases with
increased exposure to the toxic substance. [6] Therefore, claiming that any officially defined level is “safe” only means
that the risk associated with such a level is considered “acceptable” by the
scientists, politicians, or public officers deciding on these levels, not
that it is non-existent. The risk also varies according to the development
stage of the individual. Recently, a conference [7] attended by 200 scientists of various disciplines called for the need to shift the focus of toxicology and
chemical regulation from the centuries-old paradigm of "the dose
makes the poison" to "the timing of exposure makes the
poison." In particular, they called for urgent action to minimize
fetal chemical exposure, since at that “timing” (human developmental
stage) the risk is higher.
The above arguments focus on health impacts of isolated pesticides.
Equally important is the fact that human beings are permanently exposed to
a cocktail of dangerous chemicals. Everyday people absorb pesticide
residues through food, breathe polluted air, drink polluted water (which
also contains pesticide residues), and use house and personal care
products that contain other toxic substances. It is now widely
acknowledged that these different toxic substances often have a
synergistic effect on human health. In other words, you might be within
so-called “safe levels” for each of the chemicals to which you are exposed,
yet your total exposure is much
more dangerous than the sum of the individual exposures. This total
exposure undeniably increases our risk for developing serious conditions such
as fertility loss, cancer, congenital disorder, asthma, allergies, and
others.
In developing countries, official safe levels of pesticide residues often do not exist or are unrealistic, which, in addition to insufficient public resources and technical capacity, results in a lack of monitoring and control of pesticide residues in food by governments much of the time. Therefore, there is absolutely no guarantee that they are within safe levels. Moreover, the application of pesticides in developing countries is definitely not done within safe levels. For example, pesticides are applied without the necessary precautions by farmers who due to improper training and entire villages are air-sprayed with pesticides while kids and other people are outside without protection.
[1] See http://www.pesticides.gov.uk/prc.asp?id=824.
[2]Source:Chemical Trespass: Pesticides in Our Bodies and Corporate Accountability, Kristin S. Schafer, Margaret Reeves, Skip Spitzer, Susan Kegley, Pesticide Action Network North America, May, 2004.
[3] Chensheng Lu, Kathryn Toepel, Rene Irish, Richard A. Fenske, Dana B. Barr, and Roberto Bravo, 2006, Organic diets significantly lower children's dietary exposure to organophosphorus pesticides. Environmental Health Perspectives. February 2006. 114(2)260-263. http://www.ehponline.org/members/2005/8418/8418.pdf
[4] Reference: A world compendium: The e-pesticides Manual Thirteenth Edition, Editor: C D S Tomlin 2005-2006
Brooks, G.T and Roberts, T.R. (Editors) (1999). Pesticide chemistry and bioscience. The Royal Society
of Chemistry, Cambridge.
[6] See the French article “Peut-on contrôler la pollution?” by Teddy Goldsmith, p. 4-5 in L’Ecologiste, n. 18, Mars-April-May 2006, for an excellent overview of this argument applied to toxic chemicals in general. A related discussion from The Ecologist can be read on http://www.edwardgoldsmith.com/page37.html in English, under the title “Can pollution be controlled?”.
[7] International Conference on Fetal Programming and Developmental Toxicity, Torhavn, Faroe Islands, June 2007.
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