Many people across the globe are adopting to raw food diet on a regular basis. At the same time, many farmers across the globe are involved in using pesticides and chemical fertilizers to increase their production and yield to maximise their profit. In between these two groups of people, there are scientists and researchers who keep inventing new types of insecticides to increase food production.
Do these insecticides and pesticides potentially enter our body and lead to harmful health effects? If so, what can be done about it? There are many varieties and types of insecticides and pesticides. Insects which has its roots in equatorial regions are more resistant to these chemicals. Also, these insects start to spread very rapidly.
So, insecticides and pesticides used in countries like India are more powerful over other western countries. These chemicals can stay over the plants for longer duration and protect it from insects and pests.
Pesticides used in these warm countries belong to Organochlorine type. Many types of pesticides are banned in many countries across the world. But farmers in India do not mind about these banned pesticides and use it generously on their crops. Some of them include DDT, BHC, and Endrin.
Organic vegetables and fruits are widely sold in many developed countries. These vegetables and fruits are really expensive over the ones that are cultivated with the help of pesticides. But this type of cultivation is not possible in countries like India.
Indian farmers have to protect their crops from a wide range of insects and pests on a regular basis, and most of them are resistant to chemicals, so they multiply very rapidly. Even if a farmer in India manages to cultivate his crops through organic methods, his production will be really low, which will make his crops really expensive to be affordable by the masses. So it is next to impossible to do farming in India without the use of pesticides. So how should we remove these pesticides and insecticides from these fruits and vegetables?
Recently a study was carried out to find out the most effective way to clean the fruits and vegetables. And the cleaned veggies and fruits are then tested for its toxicity. The results of this study are as follows.
Washing the veggies and fruits in water which contains 5 percentage of Sodium chloride (table salt) for 5 minutes proved to be most effective in removing the remaining toxicity. As the natural groundwater and drinking water contains sodium chloride salt in it, it is enough if you wash your fruits and vegetables with your drinking water for 5 minutes. If needed you can add a tsp of table salt to this water.
This research also revealed no matter how hard and how long you wash off vegetables like cauliflower, and cabbage and grapes belonging to fruit category with water, the toxic levels remained to be high. So if you are buying veggies and fruits next time, make sure to wash it off thoroughly in water for 5 minutes and then use it for cooking to reduce its toxic levels and also to fetch maximum health benefits from it.