Dirty Produce

Environmental Working Groups DirtyProduce application gives you a handy guide to the fruits and vegetables with the most and least pesticide residue. When your budget is tight or organic’s not available, you can use the "Clean 15" and "Dirty Dozen" lists to determine which conventionally-grown produce items have the highest and lowest amounts of pesticides. Or check out the full list of 47 fruits and veggies to see how dirty (or clean) that spinach or grapefruit or whatever you’re buying is.

There is growing evidence that that small doses of some pesticides and other chemicals can cause lasting damage to human health, especially during fetal development and early childhood.

Environmental Working Groups analysis has found that consumers can reduce their pesticide exposure by 80 percent by avoiding the most contaminated fruits and vegetables and eating only the cleanest.

If youre eating your recommended 5 daily servings of fruits and vegetables from the 15 most contaminated list, you are consuming an average of 10 pesticides a day. If you eat from the 15 least contaminated conventionally-grown produce list, it’s less than 2 pesticides.

The Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides has been developed by EWG based on data from nearly 87,000 tests for pesticide residues in produce conducted between 2000 and 2007, and collected by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Nearly all the studies used to create these lists assume that people rinse or peel fresh produce. Produce samples were all sold in the U.S. but may contain both domestic and imported varieties.