Safer and More Nutritious?

More than one million children between the ages of one and five ingest in excess of a dozen pesticides daily from conventional fruits and vegetables. It’s the accumulation of exposures to these toxins that is concerning. For a list of the foods containing the highest and lowest levels of dangerous pesticides, visit www.ewg.org. Scroll down to download a handy “Shoppers’ Guide to Pesticides in Produce.”

The foods your infant may enjoy most are often at high risk for pesticide contamination. Baby food is typically made of condensed fruits or vegetables, which can concentrate pesticide residues from nonorganic produce. Because children consume more of these foods per body weight than adults do, they’re at greater risk.

USDA-certified organic foods are grown according to strictly regulated standards. Organic products contain only foods grown without toxic and persistent pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, synthetic growth hormone, and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Handle With Care

We bathe our little ones in bubbles, lather them with shampoos, and treat their skin with creams and lotions—natural and organic products can help protect their sensitive skin as well. Since skin comprises the body’s largest organ, harsh or unwanted ingredients in body care products can easily pass through the skin’s porous layers, enter the bloodstream, and eventually end up in vital organs.

Look for natural ingredients and try to avoid multisyllabic “chemicals” in products for babies and young children. Also choose natural household cleaners whenever possible to reduce your and your family’s risk of unwanted exposure to harsh or toxic chemicals.

A Greener Legacy

Concerned about carbon emissions—or interested in leaving a better world to future generations? Research at the Rodale Institute shows that organic farming practices can remove approximately 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air annually. If all U.S. farms followed organic practices, the environmental impact would be the rough equivalent of taking 217 million cars off the road. That’s more than one-third of the autos in the world today. The 2008 Farm Bill has a number of provisions that help encourage conversion of acreage to organic.

Interested in improving drinking water quality—or access to tasty seafood? Run off from chemical fertilizers in the Mississippi and other rivers that feed into the Gulf of Mexico has created an oxygen-starved “Dead Zone” the size of New Jersey. Already this year, runoff from chemical fertilizers elsewhere in the U.S. has led to algae blooms in a number of smaller rivers and Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay. “People may not think they care about dead zones,” says Beth McGee, PhD, senior water quality scientist at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, “but they certainly care about rockfish and crabs and oysters,” just some of the seafood that can be negatively impacted by chemical farm runoff.

Organic farming also protects soils and valuable wildlife, according to a four-year study by more than 400 scientists for the World Bank and the U.N. The good news is that other research suggests that organic agricultural methods are as productive in terms of crop yields as conventional farming techniques.