Nothing’s more wholesome than a shiny ripe apple in your child’s lunch, right? Apples are the epitome of healthy snacks.

But with modern farming practices, you’re getting more than you bargain for when you bite into one.

The Environmental Working Group’s 2011 “Dirty Dozen” list is out, and apples top the list for most pesticides remaining in the fruit. They’re the dirtiest produce available, even after they’ve been washed and peeled. Ew. That’s a lot of chemicals in a food we think of as safe to feed our kids.

For picky eaters, apples are often one of the few things they will eat. If your kids live on apples, like mine do, you may want to make shelling out for organics a priority.

Here’s the full list of foods to avoid, plus the “Clean 15″ list of foods that DON’T soak up pesticides.

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How safe are your veggies?

Need more reasons to shell out the extra bucks for organic produce?

A trio of new studies appears to prove that eating organic really is the smart choice. Turns out, being exposed to pesticides in the womb can lower a child’s IQ.

The exposure doesn’t even have to be that high. These studies track normal levels of pesticides in women, and compared the development of their children as they grew up. Those with the highest pesticide exposure in utero scored lower on IQ tests, even after other factors like maternal education and home environment were taken into account.

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If you’ve been on the fence about buying organic fruits and vegetables, the latest report may push you over.

Kids with higher levels of a common pesticide found on fruit and vegetables had twice the risk for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) than children with less exposure, a nationwide study suggests, according to CNN/Health.com.

“These findings support the hypothesis that organophosphate (pesticide) exposure, at levels common among US children, may contribute to ADHD prevalence. Prospective studies are needed to establish whether this association is causal,” authors of the study wrote. Continue reading »

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Interest in natural foods has grown tremendously over the last decade.  The Associated Press reports that market share of organics increased “14 to 21 percent annually with sales of $24.6 billion in 2008.”  Organic baby food items like Stonyfield Farm’s YoBaby are available at mainstream retailers such as Wal*Mart, and anyone who watches Sesame Street on the regular knows Earth’s Best Organics are a ‘proud sponsor’ of the show.  But the AP says watchdogs think the National Organic Program “has not been restrictive enough in what it allows to be labeled as organic,” so in an effort to crack down on Bush administration leniency, President Obama announced this week that the additives ARA and DHA “will no longer be permitted in infant formula or baby foods certified as organic because (they) have not received legal approval for use in organic products,” according to The Washington Post.  The article goes on to say that ARA and DHA, thought to promote brain and eye development, “are present in 90 percent of organic infant formulas.”

A quick search on Amazon shows that Earth’s Best Organic and Similac Organic formulas both contain the fatty acids.  The problem is not that omega-3 and omega-6 are bad for infants; the acids themselves occur naturally in breast milk.  But these beneficial omegas are produced chemically “using a potential neurotoxin known as hexane,” then added to formula. Presumably non-organic formulas like Enfamil Premium will continue to include ARA and DHA, begging the question, if they’re not safe for organics, why should they be added at all?  Continue reading »

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Any who’s seen Food Inc. (or checked out the list of ingredients in a favorite sugary cereal) knows how important it is to be aware of where your food comes from and what’s in it.

But this does not mean that one should confine herself to raw broccoli and cauliflower–which is exactly what Kristie Rutzel started doing in high school and college, obsessed with a need to avoid anything considered unwholesome. Continue reading »

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Like everyone else with a greenish and foodie-ish bent, I read The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food recently. Loved them both, but it was Omnivore’s Dilemma that was pretty much a life-changer for me. We’ve decided to try, whenever possible, to make sure our meat and eggs come from farms that raise and kill their animals humanely, which means having meatless days a few times a week so we can afford it.

However, I find it really hard to sort out all the claims on food labels. It’s not always feasible for me to buy meat at the farmer’s market (and it’s not always available there, either) where I can ask the farmers themselves questions, and many of them have pictures of the farm itself at their stalls. When I am forced into the grocery store to buy meat, I’d love to know where I can buy humanely-raised products and which of the dizzyingly huge variety of labels out there actually means something.

The World Society for the Protection of Animals has a new site, Continue reading »

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There’s a great piece on MSNBC this week about all the horrible things we went through as kids that OUR kids will never have to survive.

It says if you grew up in the fifties, sixties or seventies, you’re pretty darn lucky to have made it out alive. What with chomping on the lead painted bars of your cribs and the family tanning sessions in the backyard, some of us are pretty screwed.

So what was missing from the article? Continue reading »

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