GotGarlic
Chef Extraordinaire
We had a great discussion recently on this topic, but it was removed at the OP's request. This site has a lot of influence and the discussion had an important educational aspect to it, so I'm posting part of it here.
The subject was the Environmental Working Group's annual Dirty Dozen list of fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of pesticide residues. Their list was reviewed by scientists who published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology; here is the abstract of their paper:
While the Environmental Working Group claims to be a research organization, they are actually an anti-science lobbying group. Their "research" does not pass scientific muster.
The subject was the Environmental Working Group's annual Dirty Dozen list of fruits and vegetables with the highest levels of pesticide residues. Their list was reviewed by scientists who published a paper in the Journal of Toxicology; here is the abstract of their paper:
Probabilistic techniques were used to characterize dietary exposure of consumers to pesticides found in twelve commodities implicated as having the greatest potential for pesticide residue contamination by a United States-based environmental advocacy group. Estimates of exposures were derived for the ten most frequently detected pesticide residues on each of the twelve commodities based upon residue findings from the United States Department of Agriculture's Pesticide Data Program. All pesticide exposure estimates were well below established chronic reference doses (RfDs). Only one of the 120 exposure estimates exceeded 1% of the RfD (methamidophos on bell peppers at 2% of the RfD), and only seven exposure estimates (5.8 percent) exceeded 0.1% of the RfD. Three quarters of the pesticide/commodity combinations demonstrated exposure estimates below 0.01% of the RfD (corresponding to exposures one million times below chronic No Observable Adverse Effect Levels from animal toxicology studies), and 40.8% had exposure estimates below 0.001% of the RfD. It is concluded that (1) exposures to the most commonly detected pesticides on the twelve commodities pose negligible risks to consumers, (2) substitution of organic forms of the twelve commodities for conventional forms does not result in any appreciable reduction of consumer risks, and (3) the methodology used by the environmental advocacy group to rank commodities with respect to pesticide risks lacks scientific credibility.
While the Environmental Working Group claims to be a research organization, they are actually an anti-science lobbying group. Their "research" does not pass scientific muster.