Pesticides In Produce: Shopper’s Guide

Eating organic produce can be expensive, especially depending on the time of year, and where you live. Although I advocate to eat as much organic produce as possible, sometimes that just isn’t possible. Organic foods, overall, will have higher nutrition because the soil they are grown in is more mineral dense, and they are not sprayed with chemicals that are harmful to the human body.

You have probably heard of the “dirty dozen” and “clean 15″ at some point in your life. The Dirty Dozen are the fruit and vegetables that are most contaminated with pesticides, and should always be bought organic (you would never catch me eating one of these plants non-organic). The Clean Fifteen are those plant foods which are least likely to test positive for pesticides, thus, you can safely buy these foods non-organically.

Analyses of American produce have shown that if you choose five servings of fresh produce from the Clean Fifteen rather than the Dirty Dozen, you can lower the amount of pesticides you consume by 92%!

Below is a shopper’s guide to pesticides in produce which you can print out and bring with you to the grocery store to help guide you on which fruit and vegetables to buy organic. By clicking on the image below, you will be brought to another page which will bring up a much larger version of the shopping list. 

Click the image above to get a full-sized PDF that you can print out and bring with you to the grocery store!

Article source: Live Love Fruit