Overview
Pesticides and Herbicides are chemicals sprayed onto food to kill pests and weeds. The real dangers are from the synthetic ones which include Atrazine, Glyphosate, and Neonicotinoids. There is no safe limit for them and I will be explaining the immense harm they cause. You should always minimize your exposure.
How to mitigate risk
The two best ways to mitigate exposure to these chemicals are buying organic and using a good water filter.
- Buy Organic or whatever you can find to minimize chemicals. It's important to note that organic or bio doesn't always mean pesticide free. It does usually mean it excludes the worst of them though. The labels could also be fraudulent so be careful of that as well.
- Use a good Reverse Osmosis water filter to remove all of these chemicals and many others from your drinking water. Some other filters can work too but only ones that need some sort of pressure to work, like if you have one in your fridge you can often buy a good quality filter that gets rid of the key contaminants. Those Brita filters won't cut it. If you buy bottled water then be sure to get it from good sources and avoid plastic.
There are a few things that people often get wrong or don't know which can keep them exposed even if they try and follow the right steps.
- Washing does not remove the chemicals. It does remove a bit but not much. A lot is inside of the plant already and these chemicals don't wash off well, not to mention that people rarely scrub their foods.
- Indirect sources can contribute just as much or more, like from bread. Somehow glyphosate is still allowed to be used to dry out wheat. They do this because it quickly kills and dries the wheat when used in large amounts. This means the white bread you eat probably has a lot of glyphosate. Think of the path and if it encountered these chemicals along the way.
Harms Explained
I'll focus on the two big dogs, Atrazine and Glyphosate. Anything added is usually bad but these two are the worst in my opinion. I'm including some textbook definitions and information first.
Atrazine: “Atrazine is a widely used selective herbicide that belongs to the triazine chemical class and is primarily applied to control broadleaf and grassy weeds. It is most commonly used in corn (maize) production, as well as in sorghum and sugarcane, where it works by inhibiting photosynthesis in susceptible plants. Atrazine can be applied before or shortly after crops emerge and is valued for its effectiveness and relatively low cost. Research has shown that atrazine can increase the activity of aromatase, an enzyme that converts testosterone into estrogen, which may disrupt normal hormone balance. In laboratory and wildlife studies, this disruption has been linked to effects such as altered reproductive development, feminization of male amphibians, and changes in fertility."
Glyphosate: “A broad-spectrum, non-selective herbicide widely used to control weeds in agricultural, industrial, and residential settings. It works by inhibiting an enzyme essential for plant growth, causing treated plants to die over time. Glyphosate is commonly applied before planting crops, after harvest, or on genetically engineered glyphosate-tolerant crops. Human health concerns include possible links to non-Hodgkin lymphoma and impacts on gut microbiota, especially with chronic or occupational exposure.”
Atrazine is the one that “turns the friggin frogs gay” and Glyphosate is the one that messes with your gut health. Both of these are chronic issues plaguing Americans. The main issue is the cumulative exposure to these chemicals. Public health organizations do not consider the all source impact on society, they say well this apple has X amount of atrazine left on it and someone would need to eat 10 apples to pass the threshold for danger. Sure, but then what if they eat 1 apple, a salad, some bread, drink unfiltered water? Well now they could have passed the cumulative threshold in one day. Most people don't realize that their water is deemed safe to drink even though there are no filters in place to get rid of pesticides, herbicides, and chemicals in general. All the medication that gets flushed into the water system upstream still ends up in your tap, just diluted. This includes agricultural run off which is not monitored 24/7, they set an annual limit that is often surpassed during the growing season. For example, communities along the Mississippi River and its tributaries have repeatedly recorded atrazine concentrations that temporarily exceed the U.S. EPA’s drinking water limit of 3 parts per billion (ppb) during this runoff period. In some monitoring events, short-term spikes have reached 10–20 ppb or higher, even though yearly averages later fall back below the legal limit.
What if I'm wrong and why should you care?
The way I see it is this:
- Hormone disruption and gut health are chronic issues that millions of people face
- There's no clear culprit given in mainstream public health, and even if there was and I just don't know about it, it doesn't matter because it still exists and they haven't fixed it.
- The solution is to live an objectively healthier life, at the cost of a few extra bucks. But you can't put a price on health. You can have a thousand problems but when you're sick you only have one.
So why not avoid these chemicals entirely? there's pretty much no downside and only upside.