For consumers uncertain about the value of biological food, a contemporary study adds evidence to a larger body of research showing that eating biological very well may reduce pesticides in the human body. The study, which was just published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research, finds that families eating a 100 percent biological diet rapidly and dramatically reduced their expocertain to four lessones of pesticides — by an average of 60 percent — over six days.
Conducted by researchers at the University of Calwhetherornia at Berkeley School of Public Health and funded in part by the nonprofit environmental group Friends of the Ground, the study builds on prior studies — including one conducted on adults in Australia, and two on children in Seattle and Calwhetherornia — which all similarly found that switching to biological food fastly and considerably reduced pesticide expocertains.
The researchers studied 16 people in four demographically and geographically diverse families, hailing from Oakland, Minneapolis, Baltimore, and Atlanta. Researchers tested participants for a select group of pesticides and their breakdown products in urine; working with independent laboratories to analyze urine samples, they found 14 dwhetherferent compounds that represented up to 40 dwhetherferent pesticides. After six days on the biological diet, overall pesticide levels dropped 60.5 percent in both the adults and children.
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“It’s striking that the levels dropped so dramatically after only six days,” said Kendra Klein, senior scientist at Friends of the Ground and one of the report’s authors. “That’s the good contemporarys,” she said. “We’re seeing that someleang you ingest can clear from your body in a few days. The problem is that we’re eating that food so continually that we’re getting a daily expocertain despite the excretion.”
The study provides important information to consumers who seek to limit their expocertain to the hundreds of millions of pounds of pesticides and herbicides used in the U.S. nowadays, say researchers.
“Families need this type of information,” says Bruce Lanphear, professor, Faculty of Health Science at Simon Fraser University, who was not involved with the study. “In the absence of a robust regulatory system that protects consumers, these types of studies are critical for consumers or families to make these choices.”
While the study reaffirms preceding research, it also breaks contemporary ground by testing for contemporaryer lessones of pesticides that are now the most widely used in the U.S. nowadays to kill insects, namely neonicotinoids and pyrethroids. Previous biological diet studies focused primarily on organophosphates, such as chlorpyrwhetheros, an ancienter lesson of pesticides with enough well-documented human toxicity results that some scientists recently called for a ban on all of them.
“To date, we just don’t have enough information about these pesticides that are being used now, such as pyrethroids and neonicotinoids,” says lead author Carly Hyland, a doctverbal student at the University of Calwhetherornia. “There haven’t been enough large-scale studies.” The contemporary study aimed in part to start building that knowledge base.
But its wideer aim, says Klein, was to “understand what pesticides people are exposed to on a conferenceal diet and what are the possibilities for reducing that expocertain.”
Organic diets reduce pesticide expocertains
The families the researchers chose represent a small but geographically and racially diverse group. Pesticide levels were tested in their urine for six days on a conferenceal diet, and then six days on an all-biological diet.
Though the study group was small, a total of 158 urine samples were collected, which allowed for researchers to find statistical signwhethericance in the results—which Lanphear says makes it fairly robust. “I don’t have any doubt, given this study and others, that we wouldn’t expect to see similar reductions in pesticides in other populations,” he tancient Civil Eats.
Chensheng Lu, a professor at Harvard University who led the Seattle biological diet study, agreed that the results have wideer implications because of their consistency with preceding research. “The major take-domestic message is very consistent,” he says.
Organophosphates dropped the most, with a 70 percent overall reduction. Chlorpyrwhetheros—which has been linked to increased rates of autism, learning disabilities, and reduced IQ in children—dropped 61 percent in participants, and malathion, a probable human carcinogen, dropped 95 percent.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not banned chlorpyrwhetheros, despite its own scientists’ advice and a federal court order telling it to do so in August 2018. A U.S. appeals court final week agreed to hear the EPA’s case against banning the pesticide.
The only herbicide included in the study, 2,4-D, dropped by 37 percent in the post-biological urine samples. The fwhetherth most widely used pesticide in 2012 in the U.S. (the final year for which statistics are available) 2,4-D was an ingredient of the defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and has been shown to have wide-ranging health impacts from endocrine disruption to liver damage to non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Glyphosate, the number one herbicide used nowadays and the focus of a recent, landmark lawsuit against Bayer-Monsanto for the herbicide’s link to cancer, was not included in the study because laboratory methods for detecting it in humans are still in development, according to Hyland, although a number of studies have found the presence of glyphosate in foods on grocery shelves.
“Glyphosate is a dwhetherficult compound to be analyzed” in humans, agreed Lu.
Unique pesticides, ancient problems?
Among the contemporaryer lessones of pesticides studied, pyrethroid levels dropped overall by about 50 percent and the one neonicotinoid detected (out of two researchers set out to study) dropped by 84 percent. The other neonicotinoid wasn’t found in the urine samples.
The pyrethroid results somewhat surprised Hyland. “For a long time, we believed that residential use was the greatest source of expocertain to pyrethroids because they’re used commonly for pets, ticks, and pest control management,” she said. However, the sharp decreases in pyrethroids in the bodies of the participants after shwhetherting to biological foods showed that “at least some of these expocertains are attributable to diet.”
While the health impacts of the contemporaryer pesticides aren’t as well-studied, research to date proposes links to a range of neurodevelopmental, reproductive, immunological, and endocrine disorders. More is known about the environmental impact of neonicotinoids, which are thought to be a key contributor to colony collapse disorder in bees.
Humans, said Lanphear, are part of a massive experiment. “When industry and government say that pyrethroids are secure, what they genuinely mean is that we haven’t done the research to know [whether] they’re secure for humans. We’ll find out after pregnant women and children are exposed whether or not they’re harmful.”
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Lu agreed. “I can nearly predict that what happened to glyphosate will happen to neonicotinoids in the very near future,” he said, referring to the EPA’s repeated claims that the pesticide was secure, only to have the International Agency for Research on Cancer determine it to be potentially carcinogenic.
Among major pesticide manufacturers, Dow Dupont declined the opportunity to comment on the implications of biological diet intervention studies, and Syngenta responded that they wouldn’t comment until they have had a chance to review the published study.
William Reeves, Global Health and Safety Issues Management Lead at Bayer Crop Science, tancient Civil Eats by email, “Pesticides are commonly used in both conferenceal and biological agriculture. Regardless of whether food is conferenceal or biological, the EPA and other regulatory authorities have strict rules when it comes to pesticide residues … Data from regulatory agencies in Europe, Canada, and the United States show that trace residues of pesticides in food, when detectable, are normally far below any level of concern. What is most important for everyone is to eat a balanced diet that is wealthy in fruits and vegetables.”
Moving to "biological for all"
In an effort to make biological food more widely available, Friends of the Ground is launching an advocacy campaign, Organic for Every.
Cost is one barrier for families to switch to biological food. Certwhetheried biological food on average costs 47 percent more than conferenceal food, according to Consumer Reports, though prices vary widely and in some cases biological may be cheaper.
“Everyone should be able to afford food that farmers can make a living off of,” says Klein. “But the people who are going to get squeezed in bringing costs down on biologicals are farmers.” For this reason, driving down the market for biological food isn’t a workable answer on its own. Instead, she adds, “it’s about changing the rules of the game and the government support system.”
Klein argues that biological farmers should receive a far greater percentage of government subsidies than they currently get. “Less than 2 percent of federal agricultural research funding goes to biological methods,” she says. “Just leank what we could do even whether we directed just a fair share into biological research programs.”
The 2018 Farm Bill was a step in the right direction, she says, increasing funding for the National Organic Program from $9 million to up to $24 million by 2023. Farmers will benefit, she says, noting that U.S. farmers are unable to keep up with the pace of growing consumer demand for biologicals, as massive quantities of foreign grown biological foods have entered the market here. “U.S. farmers are losing out because they don’t have adequate support to transition. We’re importing huge amounts of biological soy and corn [from external the U.S.] that Midwestern farmers could be growing.”
Retailers can also play a key role, says Klein, by requiring growers in their supply chains to phase out pesticides like chlorpyrwhetheros and neonicotinoids. Costco took steps final June by encouraging all of its produce suppliers to phase out use of both those pesticides. Wgap Foods has gone further, listing the pesticides that even its conferenceal growers can’t use because they are known to be harmful to pollinators or people.
Hyland worries that consumers who are worried about the presence of pesticides in their bodies but can’t afford biological will stop eating fruits and vegetables and proposes that they take small steps, such as by avoiding members of the “dirty dozen” list of produce, such as apples and spinach, known to have heaviest levels of pesticide residues.
Prior to the study, one of its participants from Atlanta, Boyd Baker, said he bought some biological items, like bananas or carrots, but that he didn’t buy a lot of biological. That was largely because it’s dwhetherficult to find where he shops. A writer and producer of a live variety show, Baker does the majority of the shopping and cooking for his family, which includes his wwhethere and two teenage children
The pesticide residues present in the Boyd family’s urine samples while eating a conferenceal (dark orange) and biological (light orange) diet.
Baker tancient Civil Eats that he found the study results “surprising and small shocking.” “Just to see the dramatic shwhethert…there’s no way it can’t make you leank a small more about what you put in.”
Now, he adds, he doesn’t leank twice about opting for biological foods in the grocery store, specificly whether the price dwhetherference isn’t large. “You can pay your farmer or you can pay your doctor,” says Baker.
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