A few bad apples can ruin students’ health

[media-credit name=”Rashid Hasirbaf/Staff” align=”alignright” width=”235″][/media-credit]Big, juicy, colorful and perfectly shaped fruits and vegetables often appear more appetizing when they have been altered. It’s no wonder the Evil Queen had no trouble tempting Snow White into a bite of her delectable blood red apple. Little did she know, a single bite would lead to her demise.
Just like the oblivious Snow White, some SWC students purchase nice-looking fruits and vegetables, not realizing they maybe biting into poison.
Beloved apples took top spot on a notorious new list by www.thedailygreen.com. “The New Dirty Dozen: 12 Foods to Eat Organic” ranks apples as the most dangerous fruit because they can contain more than 40 different pesticides.
Globally grown and distributed fruits and vegetables can be incredibly unhealthy and some of the most toxic food on the market today.
In order to maintain a healthy and balanced diet, most students rush to local grocery stores, gas stations and campus cafeteria to get a nutritional fix, blissfully unaware of the underlying dangers lurking behind the peel. Modern chemistry makes fruits and veggies look great, but turns a miracle of nature into a myriad of poisons. It is like when morticians apply chemicals to corpses to preserve their appearance unnatural and just wrong.
Starting from the ground up, the chemical fertilizers commonly used to grow our produce are anhydrous ammonia (gas with 82% nitrogen), urea (solid compound with 42% nitrogen gas), superphosphate (proportionate amounts of nitrogen and phosphate), and diammonium phosphate (18% nitrogen and 46% phosphate). These chemicals are great for speeding up the growth of crops, but you might as well be drinking engine coolant.
(Some fun facts: overdosing on engine coolant causes damage to the lungs, kidneys, and liver, not to mention the brain. Similarly the metals in the pesticides can also cripple major organs, even leading to cancer.)
Farmers know to avoid any sort of contact with this calamitous chemical cocktail, wearing chemical-resistant gloves, face shields or masks, overalls and goggles, because it is crystal clear to them, inhaling them could prove to be fatal. So, if simply breathing in these fumes can be a cause of death to a farmer, what would eating the fruits of its labor do to our bodies?
Nutritional sources acquired from organically grown fruits and vegetables, the kind we should already be eating, are completely essential for healthy functioning of the human body. But spray on all those chemicals with all that good stuff and the benefits are cancelled out. Your net gain is nada. Our bodies are missing out on nourishing vitamins, minerals, fiber and health-enhancing phytochemicals all the stuff that’s good for you.
University of Montreal researchers “looked for organophosphate pesticide metabolites, an indicator of pesticide exposure, in the urine of 1,139 kids ages 8 to 15 and found that close to 95 percent had at least one of these chemical byproducts in their system,” according to an article in the Washington Post. A high percentage of those who had higher doses of the chemicals in their urine were diagnosed with ADHD. Now that’s a real piss off!
Organic vegetables to the rescue! In a 2008 study by The National Pesticide Information Center, children who switched over to organic diets, had increasingly lower levels of chlorpyrifos metabolites in their urine.
Chlorpyrifos is a neurotoxin used in crops to kill insects and its side effects are scary, especially for the unborn. Chlorpyrifos increases the chances of challenged motor and mental development. Degenerative effects of the chemicals occur usually from more of a long-term usage. Sick produce breeds sick people. Pesticides have even been linked to Parkinson’s Disease. Chemicals that we ingest in soaps and food are increasing these health risks.
Best alternatives for a healthier and happier lifestyle is to start purchasing produce from community gardens and farmer’s markets. The majority of locally grown fruits and vegetables are not contaminated with sickening pesticides and other harmful chemicals. They are cultivated the way fruits and vegetables were made to be cultivated, au naturel. Better to take a bite of potassium, calcium, iron, zinc and many more nutritious vitamins and minerals, than 40 kinds of poisons. Organics are also grown with a whole lotta love. Now that’s something really worth sinking your teeth into.
Contributions by Jean-Carlo Trujillo and Diego Duran.