Strawberries are about to Become More Toxic

by Kim Evans, citizen journalist




(NaturalNews) On most dirty produce lists, strawberries make the cut for pesticide contamination. Currently, California strawberry growers use millions of pounds a year of a chemical called methyl bromide. Methyl bromide is banned in many parts of the world and is being phased out because it damages the ozone layer. Like every chemical pesticide, methyl bromide comes with health risks. Respiratory, nervous system, and neurological problems are common with the chemical - and it's especially dangerous to people working on or living near the farms. Now, we're getting this dangerous chemical out of strawberry fields, but it'll be replaced with another chemical that can damage our DNA, as well as cause miscarriages, cancer and brain damage. The new chemical, methyl iodide, is actually considered more toxic than the chemical it's replacing.

The current debate is over how much of this chemical farm workers and town residents will really be exposed to and how severe the health problems they'll have as a consequence. However, the debate really should be: how do we move away from dangerous chemicals as solutions to agricultural problems? Just as we need to move away from dirty oil, we need to move away from polluting our earth and our food growing communities with pesticides. With this choice, we'd also take a step away from polluting the entire human race that ends up eating chemically contaminated crops and drinking contaminated water. Scientists say that using this chemical in agriculture ensures that it will end up in the air and groundwater.

Part of the problem with attempting to figure low end ranges of exposure to known poisons is that no one is accounting for what other poisons people already have in their bodies. For example, if you were to eat a strawberry sprayed with chemical pesticides and you'd never been exposed to chemicals before in your life, the chemical-laced strawberry would probably make you immediately ill. This is because your immune system would be much more active and therefore mount a greater response to threats than most people's do today. However, because you weren't already so chemically polluted your body would be able to detoxify this chemical out of your body.

But today, that isn't the case. It's now being widely documented that pesticides and many other chemicals are backing up in people's bodies and never really being eliminated. When this is the case, no chemical is safe. It's like trying to determine what degree of spanking to give a child that's just been in an accident and has 16 broken bones and severe burns all over the body. Even if you could somehow argue that hitting a child is helpful, or that pesticides in our foods are okay, the damage that's already been done is too great to even consider it reasonable to inflict more - especially when non-toxic, natural solutions are available for anyone who looks into them.

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"We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals." ~Immanual Kant~