What's the big deal with consuming some Pesticides???

In the United States, more than 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides and herbicides are sprayed on or added to food crops each year. That's roughly five pounds of pesticides for each man, woman, and child. There is a growing concern that in addition to these pesticides directly causing a significant number of cancers, exposure to these chemicals through food consumption damages your body's detoxification mechanisms, which increases your risk of getting cancer and other diseases.

Once inside the body, these chemicals in pesticides can act like the hormone estrogen. They are thus suspected to be a major cause for the growing epidemic of estrogen-related health problems, including breast cancer. Some evidence also suggests that that these chemicals increase the risk of developing lymphomas, leukemia, and pancreatic cancer, as well as play a role in low sperm count and reduced fertility in men. And we wonder why our girl's keep maturing earlier. Add that to the hormones found in our meats and dairy and we have a huge problem on our hands.

Personally I try to cut down on this by eating organic when we can.  There are the some foods worse than others when it comes to pesticide levels.  See my post on fruits and veggies to find out the dirty dozen.