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Pesticides: Should You Be Worried?

Summary & Participants

Just about everyone knows they should wash their fruits and vegetables before eating them. But do you know why? Removing pesticides is one of the major concerns. How worried should you be about pesticides? Join our panel of experts to find out, and to learn what you can do to make your food as pesticide-free as possible.

Medically Reviewed On: February 24, 2006

Webcast Transcript

DAVID FOLK THOMAS: Welcome to our webcast. My name is David Folk Thomas. Our topic is pesticides. Do you ever eat fruits and vegetables like you should? The one drawback may be the pesticides that they spray on. But we're going to get to the bottom of it, and if there is a problem, tell you how to minimize that danger.

I'm joined by two people -- on my left is Laura Pensiero. She is a culinary consultant. She has a company called Recipe Works in New York City.

Next to Laura is Heidi Skolnik. She is the team nutritionist for the New York Mets baseball team and the New York Giants football team. She has a company, Nutrition Conditioning, in New Jersey. Ladies, thanks for joining me.

What is the whole pesticide problem and how it revolves around fruits and vegetables?

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.

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