Baking Soda May Be The Best Solution To Wash Off 96 Percent Of Toxic Pesticides From Your Fruits And Vegetables

While rinsing your fruits and vegetables under a running water may be a completely justified process to clean the dirt off your produce, the omnipresence of pesticides makes you wonder if you how much bacteria and pesticide are you actually consuming. 

Even the Delhi High Court has directed the city government to inform citizens on short-term measures to minimise the presence of pesticides in fruits and vegetables before consumption.

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Especially because "high levels of pesticide residues can be toxic enough to cause long-term cancer, damage to the nervous and reproductive systems, birth defects, and severe disruption of the immune system," states the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). 

The Delhi High court noted that "by one calculation, the entire population of Delhi was consuming food items with pesticide residue beyond permissible limits". Their report claimed pesticide components such as chlordane, endrin, heptachlor, ethyl and parathion are used in growing number of vegetables which have the potential to cause serious neurological problems, kidney damage, skin diseases, cancer and other diseases.

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The high court had earlier taken suo motu cognizance on an NGO report that said the amount of pesticides used by farmers in India was as much as 750 times higher than European standards.

Although their report stated that rinsing fruits and vegetables under clean drinking water and then using a cloth towel or paper towel to scrub and clean them was an effective way to minimise the pesticides levels, recent research has given us a better way to doing so. 

The humble baking soda might be perfect solution revealed a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. 

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The study revealed that washing your apples in a solution of water and baking soda for anywhere between 12-15 minutes can remove pesticides, even the ones that had begun to seep beneath the fruits surface, by 80-90 percent. 

"At home, the simplest way to wash is with tap water, but we also found that just tap water is not that effective. To reduce further pesticide exposure, we suggest adding a little baking soda," says study author Lili He, a food scientist at the University of Massachuesetts, Amherst, according to Global News. 

"The fruit peel is what has the highest concentration of nutrients, but it's also what has the most pesticides," He says. "There's always two sides of the story."

Here's how to clean your produce using baking powder and water:

-Mix a few teaspoons of baking powder with a few cups of water.

-Even if you can't let is sit for 15 minutes let is sit for a few.

-Pat it dry with a clean cloth before consuming.