Organic Diets Keep Kids Pesticide Free

Researchers have shown that children who switch their diet for just a few days to organic food from non organic food lowered the levels of pesticides in their bodies dramatically and immediately.

Chensheng Lu of Emory University found that even after only five days, a diet of only organic food, pesticide levels in children plummeted.

Once the diet of the children returned to normal, the levels of metabolites (evidence of pesticides) in the children’s blood rose back to previous levels.

Published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, the study focused on organophosphorus pesticides, or OPs, which are not found elsewhere in the kids’ environment so the kids definitely ingested these pesticides from eating conventional foods.

Lu points out that there’s no getting around the fact a pesticide is a neurotoxin which disrupts enzymes in the brain governing communication, and that exposure to pesticides could damage a child’s brain.

Pesticides are developed, after all, to kill bugs by paralysing or otherwise disturbing their neurological systems.

Study co-author Richard Fenske said it is really important to understand what is the impact on a developing brain of neurotoxic pesticides. (see Kids and Chemicals: Don’t Mix ).

Currently researchers are concerned with possible links between exposure to pesticides in-utero and in the first two years of life and ADD, lowered IQ, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

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Adapted for byronbodyandsoul.com by Mark O’Brien

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