How many apples can you eat in a day before any pesticide residue poses a health risk?

If you’re a man, you’d have to eat 571 apples in a day, according to a new website launched by a not-for-profit organization of conventional and organic fruit and vegetable growers called the Alliance for Food and Farming.   

The website — safefruitsandveggies.com — is designed to provide the unemotional, non-hysterical  facts on pesticide residue, a subject that receives a lot of alarming, high volume news media coverage which is evidently scaring people away from eating ANY fruit or vegetables.

This is a passage from the website’s “about us” tab:

Issues like pesticide residues have an impact on both organic and conventionally grown produce. Recent surveys show that 29% of consumers are buying less fruits and vegetables due to concerns about pesticide residues. Health experts around the world agree that consumers should be eating more fruits and vegetables of all kinds. This is why the Alliance adamantly encourages consumers to eat more produce, whether it is organically or conventionally grown.

The website states 60-percent of American consumers to express a high concern about pesticide residues, much of it based on misleading information like EWG’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides.

The Alliance’s information is based on peer-reviewed science from major universities, former government regulators, and nutritional experts and takes on the lists and shopping guides that are causing consumers to turn their backs on fresh, nutritional and safe food.    

Their pesticide residue calculator that computes the amount of a fruit or vegetable a man, woman, teenager, or child would have to consume to become impacted by residue is well done and puts the issue in proper context.

Great to see conventional and organic producers lay aside any differences they have  to get the truth out about the safety of our food supply.

By the way, a man can consumer more than 133,000 servings of celery in a day without any effect even if the celery has the highest residue for celery ever recorded by FDA.