Eat five fruits and vegetables a day… but not just any.
UFC-What to Choose alert this Thursday, March 24 on the proportion of food, from conventional agriculture, contaminated by at least one risky pesticide.
The consumer association analyzed 14,000 official health checks and found “among the pesticides detected no less than 150 substances suspected of being carcinogenic, mutagenic, reprotoxic or endocrine disruptors”.
The balance sheet is “particularly disturbing”, insists UFC-Que Choisir. “For fruits and vegetables from intensive agriculture, the presence of one of these risky pesticides is revealed in more than half (51%) of the controls and at least two risky pesticides for 30%” of them.
“Far from only involving infinitesimal, non-quantifiable traces, in nearly one out of two cases (43%), the authorities were able to measure the doses of these substances.”
Cherry, celery, grapefruit
The product presenting the greatest risk is cherries (92% of contaminated samples), followed by celery (91%) and grapefruit (90%).
Almost all of the cherries checked in France are contaminated in particular by phosmet, “an insecticide suspected by the European Food Safety Authority of being toxic to reproductive function”.
We detect “frequently” in apples (80% contaminated samples) “fludioxonil, a fungicide suspected of being an endocrine disruptor”.
And in more than a quarter of the grapefruits analyzed, we find “pyriproxyfen, strongly suspected to be an endocrine disruptor and to have contributed to malformations of the head and brain observed in Brazil”.
Conversely, the products with the least contamination are asparagus (2%), kiwi (3%) and cassava (3%).
The more careful organic
Unsurprisingly, foods from organic farming have “much less” contamination “due to the ban on synthetic pesticides for this mode of production”indicates the UFC-Que Choisir.
“Compared to their equivalents from intensive agriculture, there are practically six times fewer samples of organic tomatoes contaminated with risky pesticides (1 sample in 10 in organic compared to nearly 6 in 10 in conventional), seven times less for organic green beans and eight times less for apples.”
In cases where organic is contaminated, the levels of risky pesticides are much lower than in conventional agriculture.
Faced with this observation, the consumer association contacted the National Food Safety Agency (ANSES) to formulate “concrete proposals for improving regulation”.
