How to actually remove pesticides                   from your fruit

Assuming that you should be worried about them in the first place.

There’s a lot to worry about when it comes to food—or rather, there’s a lot that people want you to worry about. Every mommy blogger and natural living life coach with a URL to their name is bursting with helpful tips on how to rid yourself of toxins and chemicals. If you google “how to get pesticides off fruit” you’re greeted by a flurry of blogs all promising the solution.

It’s not unreasonable to want to consume fewer of the chemicals we use to kill off bugs and weeds. You should just make sure that what you’re doing is actually effective. Plenty of people wash their chicken before cooking it, even though that method does nothing to kill bacteria, and in fact spreads potentially dangerous pathogens all over your kitchen sink and such. So let’s look at the evidence:

Store-bought veggie washes don’t work, but baking soda does

Water can remove some of the pesticides from a piece of fruit, so a basic scrub under the tap will help at least a little. The extent to which this rather lackadaisical method works will depends on the fruit itself; some skins will more readily release the pesticides contained therein.

RELATED: How to store every single type of fruit

The most common piece of advice here is to avoid those fruits that pose more of a pesticide risk, often known as the “Dirty Dozen.” An environmental group called the Environmental Working Group has claimed that switching to the organic versions of those 12 fruits and veggies could substantially improve your health.

It’s true that organic versions will generally contain fewer and less harmful chemicals, and there’s certainly no harm in eating organic, but it’s worth noting that EWG’s methodology is far from scientific. Their analysis relied on unproven theories about how pesticides might interact with one another and thus has skewed results.