The word pesticide is misunderstood, nearly to the same extent as the word chemical. People have been led to believe, largely by the organic food industry and environmental activists, that pesticides are unnatural, dangerous, and do not belong in the food supply. But this defies a basic understanding of biology.
A pesticide is any chemical, natural or human-made, that is designed to kill another organism.
Using that broad definition, there are probably hundreds of thousands of pesticides in the natural environment. As it turns out, biological warfare was invented and perfected by Mother Nature.
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And guess what? When we eat plants, we’re eating those pesticides, too. A paper co-authored in 1990 by the venerable Bruce Ames found that 99.99% of the pesticides we consume in our diet are produced by the plants themselves.
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According to Dr. Ames’s team, every plant produces roughly a few dozen toxins, some of which (at a high enough dose) would be toxic to humans. Cabbage produces at least 49 known pesticides. Given the ubiquity of natural pesticides, Dr. Ames estimates that “Americans eat about 1.5 g of natural pesticides per person per day, which is about 10,000 times more than they eat of synthetic pesticide residues.”
Furthermore, Dr. Ames estimates that we consume 5,000 to 10,000 different natural pesticides every day, many of which cause cancer when tested in lab animals.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: 99.99% Of Pesticides We Eat Are Produced By Plants Themselves
