Recap: The top foods high in pesticides | Prof. Tim Spector
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Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're talking about pesticides, and more specifically about the surprising levels of pesticides found in some common foods. Professor Tim Spector is here to tell us how to avoid giving these to our families. Let's start by finding out which foods we should worry about. And spoiler, avocados are safe, but what isn't?

Breakfast cereals that contain oats. Okay, that's incredibly surprising. I thought you were going to give me a fruit. Tell me about oats. So oats, because they're often raised in damp countries, they are sprayed just before they're harvested to dry them out. Okay. And so this gives them massive amounts. And because they're wet, they absorb all that glyphosate. And so their levels are

five to ten times more than many other grains. So that is something that is not particularly a health food that I think...

People should go out of their way if they do love oats. And I know you used to be a big oat eater, although you're not anymore. And you can afford it. Either switch to something else or go jump. Particularly if you're trying to give your kids something which you think is healthy. I think that you could be giving them high levels of particularly this herbicide glyphosate. Rice is another one that came up interestingly in some surveys as being healthy.

quite high in pesticides. And we do know that if you get certain areas of India and Pakistan do a problem with runoff of arsenic into rice paddy fields. So, you know, if you're getting cheap rice from certain places, you may be ingesting a lot of chemicals. And in general, fruits and vegetables that contain a lot of water...

will tend to absorb these chemicals more than others and where they particularly attract insects as well. So cucumbers, pears, nectarines, these tend to have quite high concentrations. And everyone loves strawberries. I love strawberries. But in tests in the US and the UK, they commonly get tested as being above the safety levels. So

We have these standard safety levels. And this is again for these herbicides you're talking about? This is pesticides and herbicides. So these are the insecticides and the herbicides, so the organophosphates and the glyphosates, really high levels. That's the sort of thing you should be wary of. If you have strawberries just once a year, it's probably not worth worrying about it. But if this is like part of your diet,

Just see if you can get organic strawberries because... Or presumably swap to a different fruit that has lower levels. Yes, and other berries. I didn't used to, but I now try and get organic blueberries if I can. You can often get them frozen, interestingly, and they're not very expensive if you buy the frozen organic berries and you stick them in the freezer. I was just thinking about this this morning.

I get a lot of organic tinned food and a lot of organic frozen food because after podcasts that we've done in the past where I've discovered that actually like frozen vegetables and tinned vegetables are good, we now cook a lot of that at home. And what's interesting is that, you know, the price of still like organic tinned beans is still incredibly cheap. So is that one of the areas that again... Absolutely, yeah. I know you picked up on three really good tips for people is...

Yeah, organic frozen food is really good. They don't have the same costs because it probably costs more to transport organic food because it does go off quicker, so you've got to be much faster. You can't just leave it around in warehouses for as long as possible. You don't tend to store them in those chemical bags and things.

So that's a good tip about frozen foods, canned foods. I think beans do come up in some surveys as being high in pesticides. So paying 10p extra or whatever for an organic bean can is good value compared to the fresh one. It's all a bit scary. You're talking about these pesticides and herbicides.

What can I do if I've got this? Can I wash this? I was always brought up by my mother, interestingly, like I should wash the fruit. Washing helps, but it doesn't...

Get it down to organic levels. But it doesn't get it down anywhere near to organic levels. So you remove a little bit of it, but often it, and you can peel them. That will remove some more. Particularly these, you know, that's probably one reason to peel cucumbers, which I never used to do, by the way. I'm not, you know, too lazy. But if you can't get an organic one, you know, probably peeling it

gets rid of perhaps half, but you still, a lot of it might go beyond the skin. So another little trick is if you're washing stuff, add some sodium bicarbonate, baking soda, that is very good at removing... Does that take a lot more of this away? Yes, a lot better than just water. So that's a little tip that doesn't cost anything. But there are certain fruits and vegetables that are actually pretty safe. Zoe's favourite fruit, the avocado...

which we know is pretty generally healthy, seems to absorb the herbicides and insecticides on the skin. So you don't eat the skin, so you're eating the flesh, and that's pretty free of any nasty problems. Similarly, an onion, you peel away, you don't eat the onion skin, so that's really well protected.

And there are other examples like that, that are more the drier fruits and vegetables that don't absorb the water, that have got a skin. Mango is another one. They're actually pretty good because, again, you're not eating the skin. So there's a list of ones you don't have to worry about. And there are lists in the US has a list of these,

Each year they do produce a list of the 15 best and the 15 worst offenders that people can look at, although each country is going to vary. And locally, you know, the amount of spraying and things will vary a lot. We know that certain parts of the UK, just like if you live in Norfolk,

The spraying is enormous, so it's very hard to avoid some of that on most of the produce, whereas other bits of the country, the produce has much less. And I definitely have this vision that this is particularly bad in the States. Is this true? Rules are much laxer in the States. They allow more organophosphate use, more chemicals that are banned in Europe. And I think there's generally much less

checking of these levels. So the levels are generally higher in the US. And we've talked about antibiotic levels. They're also much higher still. And the general chemicals used in agriculture, it's still a bit the Wild West. So your differential to moving to organic is going to be even higher there then? It is, yes. And there are different big differences between countries as well and the pricing as well. It's interesting there are

Many countries in Europe where perhaps 25% of the produce is organic, places like Sweden, Austria, etc. In this country, we're probably below 3% in the UK. I think it's similarly low levels in the US, but luckily, it is really growing fast. So it is sort of doubling fast.

every 10 years. So I think it's a movement that's not going to go away. And I think it's something that everyone needs to know about. Well, Tim, you're definitely convincing me that I should be buying more organic food next week than I was last week. We asked this question right at the beginning, and I just want to get the clear answer to it. We said, you know, if there was one food that you were going to buy organically, what would it be? And I'd love to get the answer.

It would probably be tomatoes, actually, because I eat tomatoes nearly every day. And so I think to me that's more important. I was going to say strawberries because I love strawberries, but I only have them every day. So I'm less concerned about it. So I think it would be – that would be my main answer because you've got to think of that long-term exposure of foods and –

Getting high-quality tomatoes, I've tasted Italian and Spanish ones, and not only do they taste better, but if you can get the organic versions of those, they are pretty incredible. But again, you can get a can of organic tomatoes for not much more than the non-organic version. So it's about people thinking for themselves what they would change, what do they have regularly changed.

What could they improve that would make a much bigger difference to their long-term health? That's it for this week's recap. If you're listening to this, you're already on your way to living healthier through better nutrition. And at Zoe, we're doing everything we can to help you on your way. So we've developed Daily 30, a delicious dietary supplement to add to your meals. Because with Zoe, we ran a clinical trial testing Daily 30. The results were staggering.

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