Since pesticides and herbicides are routinely in the news, lately because of the “Glyphosate Wars,” (2) I thought it might be interesting to examine a review article that Ames and colleagues wrote nearly three decades ago in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). If you are dwelling under the illusion that you can prance into Whole Foods and overpay for a bunch organic stuff without pesticides, this article will disabuse you of that fallacy. If you don’t want to consume pesticides, then you better stop eating, because you are consuming them with each bite. Plenty of them. According to Ames:
- 99.99% (by weight) of the pesticides consumed by the American public are made by the plants themselves as a defense mechanism.
- Synthetic and natural pesticides are equally likely to be carcinogenic.
(You are unlikely to see this information posted in a Whole Foods.)
https://www.acsh.org/news/2018/06/07/9999-pesticides-we-eat-are-made-plants-12962