Berries are a great addition to a healthy lifestyle…. As long as you go Organic.
Pesticides + Poison Gases = Cheap, Year-Round Strawberries
By Bill Walker, Investigations Editor, and Sonya Lunder, Senior Analyst
Americans eat nearly eight pounds of fresh strawberries a year – and with them, dozens of pesticides, including chemicals that have been linked to cancer and reproductive damage, or that are banned in Europe.
Strawberries tested by scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2014 and 2015 contained an average of 7.7 different pesticides per sample, compared to 2.3 pesticides per sample for all other produce, according to a new EWG analysis.
What’s worse, strawberry growers use jaw-dropping volumes of poisonous gases – some developed for chemical warfare but now banned by the Geneva Conventions – to sterilize their fields before planting, killing every pest, weed and other living thing in the soil.
For these reasons, strawberries are again on the top of the Dirty Dozen™ list for 2017. USDA tests found that strawberries were the fresh produce items most likely to be contaminated with pesticide residues, even after they are picked, rinsed in the field and washed before eating.
If you want to avoid pesticides and don’t want strawberries grown in soil injected with nerve gases, EWG advises that you always buy organically grown berries. We make the same recommendation for other Dirty Dozen™ foods.
See Strawberry Update at EWG.org