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Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

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Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#181

Post by scns »

outworlder wrote: post #139
Baloo wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a nice anecdote, but I've lived and travelled in various African countries and never been sick from consuming fruit, vegetables or pressed juice. I'd be much more worried about eating poorly butchered and stored meat. The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong. Again, after living in rural communities, they largely eat what they can get - which includes a lot of r…

> It's a nice anecdote, but I've lived and travelled in various African countries and never been sick from consuming fruit, vegetables or pressed juice. That's all and good, but how do you even know that? One can live with parasites for quite a while before noticing any symptoms. I come from a 'third world' country. We really wash our fruits and specially our vegetables. Even though they might come from large farming…

> Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans).

Maybe less of a chance, still deadly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echinococcus_multilocularis

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#182

Post by TFYS »

andai wrote: post #178
TFYS wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't you think leaving education to the free market would make it harder for kids from poor backgrounds to go up in life? When everyone uses the same system, it's in everyone's best interest to fund it and make it as good as possible. You won't get the best results, but at least everyone gets a decent education.

My expectation is that a free market of ideas would allow superior modes of education to rapidly emerge, which would then be slowly and poorly copied by the mainstream. If I'm understanding you right, you're saying that by allowing a parallel education system with freedom of choice, all the smart and rich people would abandon the old one to die. (It would be kept alive, of course by taxes, in body, if not in spirit!)…

Letting the people with wealth and power use an alternative system would be the same thing as killing the public system. No one with the ability to improve the system would have the incentive to. It's the reason public schools aren't improving. In a privatized system you'll get a divided population with some being very well educated and while some get no education at all.

There's nothing preventing a public system from being changed and improved. Take Finland as an example. Everyone goes to the same public schools there, rich or poor. The result is one of the best education systems in the world. New methods are regularly tested and teachers have a lot of freedom to choose the ones that suit them.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#183

Post by fuzzfactor »

Hot running water is actually quite effective.

Some solid and oily toxins are considered technically insoluble in water since so few milligrams will dissolve in a liter. Unlike familiar things that are obviously soluble in grams like salt or sugar.

Now the pesticides are developed to be highly toxic in milligram amounts, but the advantage is that there is likely only to be a few milligrams on the farm produce that needs to be washed off.

Solubility is a function of solvent temperature and volume, so the hotter and the greater number of liters or gallons, often astronomically more of an "insoluble" material can be taken up into a solvent compared to the very minuscule amount soluble when cold.

Naturally thorough flushing and/or repeated rinsing with fresh hot solvent will be more effective than a single bath, since the first bath sees the highest concentration of solute. Which can re-deposit upon evaporation.

I'm sure people have not thought it was that bad and have occasionally eaten something like an unwashed grape or strawberry, or even quite a number of them whether focusing much awareness on it or not.

Take fruit from that same batch and run it under good amounts of hot water and see if you can taste the difference too.

Carefully using an appropriate vegetable brush is a good idea as well.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#184

Post by gameswithgo »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #183

Hot running water is actually quite effective. Some solid and oily toxins are considered technically insoluble in water since so few milligrams will dissolve in a liter. Unlike familiar things that are obviously soluble in grams like salt or sugar. Now the pesticides are developed to be highly toxic in milligram amounts, but the advantage is that there is likely only to be a few milligrams on the farm produce that ne…

No post body was provided.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#185

Post by mikkelam »

aaaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #119
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, absolutely not everything is a tradeoff, many things like eating meat or going to a casino are a total waste of resources

Yeah well, not sure about that meat thing buddy, not sure...

Other than taste and perhaps vitamins, what other good things do you get from the murdering of animals?

It definitely is a "waste" of resources, when looking at it from a rational perspective. Humans like to enjoy life though.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#186

Post by andai »

TFYS wrote: post #182
andai wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My expectation is that a free market of ideas would allow superior modes of education to rapidly emerge, which would then be slowly and poorly copied by the mainstream. If I'm understanding you right, you're saying that by allowing a parallel education system with freedom of choice, all the smart and rich people would abandon the old one to die. (It would be kept alive, of course by taxes, in body, if not in spirit!)…

Letting the people with wealth and power use an alternative system would be the same thing as killing the public system. No one with the ability to improve the system would have the incentive to. It's the reason public schools aren't improving. In a privatized system you'll get a divided population with some being very well educated and while some get no education at all. There's nothing preventing a public system fr…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmcubp2szg

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#187

Post by ldiracdelta »

lathyrus_long wrote: post #180
ldiracdelta wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless the farmer is a moron, IPM is how most farmers try to use pesticides. Pesticides and chemical applications can be very expensive. Farmers try to use the least possible amount they can for purely economic reasons. My wife's grandfather was using IPM back in the 70s. Farming is competitive. If your costs are too high, you eventually go bankrupt during bad years. For the most part IPM is the rule, not the excepti…

A matter of degree, maybe. Certainly there's a degree of understanding that's cheaper than just blind heavy spraying, and that any grower would thus be foolish not to obtain. I've often seen "IPM" used to refer to systems that went beyond that though, incurring higher cost for lower ecological impact. For example, the guidelines linked below note explicitly that > Practices contained in this protocol are considerably…

Conventional IPM programs use more toxic, but muuuch less volume of pesticides.

Organic programs user "better" pesticides, but much much more.

Which is better? We'll, it depends on how fast those pesticides break down and what those degraded molecules are. It depends on how much volume is applied to the produce. It depends on if it accumulates in the flesh of the produce.

What if a pesticide outrageously lethal to humans, but breaks down in 2 days and you only apply it in the first 25% of the produce growing window?

Which is worse? 400 lbs of feathers accumulating on your chest at 100 lbs/week for 4 weeks or 400 lbs of steel on your chest applied once.

Silly metaphor, but the answer to incredibly difficult system problems is really "it depends". Conventional vs organic is not clear cut.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#189

Post by daniel-cussen »

malfist wrote: post #82
daniel-cussen wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yeah. Well in Europe one reason the food tastes so good is there's running water there. In USA you only get brine unless you're on a farm, or collecting rainwater.

What are you talking about? There's plenty of rivers in the US.

Yeah but in the city they get fluoridated first, ie turned into brine.

Re: Pesticide residues could negate the health benefits of fruits and vegetables

#190

Post by minsc_and_boo »

biorach wrote: post #110
minsc_and_boo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organic dangerously commits the natural fallacy. Up until very recently, organic included the use of rotenone , which is a 'naturally occurring' poison that causes parkinson's in mammals. Modern synthetic pesticides are far, far from great but they're still better than their natural counterparts.

> Modern synthetic pesticides are far, far from great but they're still better than their natural counterparts. Far too much generalisation there. There are thousands of synthetic pesticides, and dozens (hundreds?) of "natural" ones (ranging from gelatine to roteome). A broad brush comparison is useless

It's not a pointless comparison when organic farmers used harmful rotenone so much that it had to become banned outright.

Needing to ban a 19th century pesticide in the 21st century is not a broad brush, but proof of the growing common misconception that naturally occurring means safer than synthetic - the entire basis of the Organic label.

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