LAURA PENSIERO, RD: Pesticides attribute to less than 1 percent of cancers, yet they are a big concern. So the idea is to minimize them. Nobody would select a food on purpose that has pesticides, but it is a program that's done, and that's the way our food is farmed. So there are ways to minimize your risk, and the ways would be basically washing, using light detergents to get off excess pesticides, cutting foods into portions that can be easily washed, especially if they have a lot of crevices in the food. There are all different solutions to minimizing the risk, but the risk does not outweigh the benefit of eating fruits and vegetables.
DAVID FOLK THOMAS: Why are the pesticides on there? To keep bugs from eating the crops? Heidi, you chime whenever you like also.
HEIDI SKOLNIK, RD: I think that, again, what you ended with Laura is really important; to understand that the benefit of eating fruits and vegetables far outweigh any scare. We can find something wrong with almost every single food possible to eat if we want to. The important thing is to realize that our bodies are pretty resilient, and we can very capably handle small amounts that we may find on fruits and vegetables. Wash your fruits and vegetables. Scrub them if you really want to minimize the risk or you're afraid of them. But in fact, what pesticides do is help to keep crops healthy and avoid the risk of having insects and other diseases really invade crops.
LAURA PENSIERO, RD: The other option is to buy some organic and some not. I think that the rule of thumb here is that if buying organic limits your fruit and vegetable intake and the variety of fruits and vegetables that you eat, then you should reconsider buying exclusively organic.
DAVID FOLK THOMAS: Is it generally pesticide-free?
LAURA PENSIERO, RD: Pesticide, herbicide, fungicide. But basically what this is going to mean is what farmers can put "Certified organic" on their foods and sell them as such.
