Why You MUST Wash Produce!
Learn why properly washing fruits and vegetables is essential for your health. Discover what may be lingering on your produce and simple steps you can take to protect yourself and your family.
It’s becoming a regular pattern in the news where we hear of an outbreak that sickens hundreds. In fact this April there is a mysterious outbreak of E. coli that has sickened 95 people across 5 states. It has also caused 11 to be hospitalized. As someone who worked as an Environmental Health Specialist Supervisor for several years it is disturbing the trend of people who don’t wash their produce. Even more disturbing is the professionals who claim it isn’t necessary when it’s the easiest line of defense against these nasty microbes.
Let’s dissect the process for produce to get transferred. It usually comes from a farm, is placed into crates or boxes and loaded into a truck (often a flat bed open air truck). Then it is taken to a warehouse where it is stored in piles exposed to people and rodents, flies, and insects. From there it is transported to the store where it is then stored, handled, and placed out for the consumer aka you. There are so many exposure points where it can be exposed to pesticide, germs by dirty fingers, dusty roads, coughing, etc.
If you take that produce home, you expect for it to be clean and healthy to eat. We get it, and in the perfect world it would be. But we live in a world where we have to be concerned with glysophates, GMO’s, and the other pesticides that can impact your health. This shift in focus makes it easy to forget about the microbes that can lead to some very serious health conditions.
So how do you wash produce? It isn’t this master science. You turn on your sink and you rinse it off under running water. Or, if you are into the filtered water like we are, we take water from our Berkey water filter* and clean the produce by rinsing it and scrubbing off any dirt that is visible. Then we eat it.
The germs today are changing, they are mutating to become more resistant to pharmaceuticals. The CDC, FDA, NAID are all aware of this current trend. Toxic chemicals are not the only thing we need to be aware of. The microbe world is changing and we need to change with it. That starts with you and doing the simplest and easiest thing you can do to protect your family. Wash your produce!
Check out these articles:
https://medlineplus.gov/magazine/issues/winter18/articles/winter18pg8-11.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/health/drug-resistant-candida-auris.html
*(We will talk about the Berkey in our next blog)
Continue Reading
More from Lindsay's Blog