Why should you care about pesticides in your food? For starters there may be as many as twenty pesticides on a single piece of fruit you eat. The health effects depending on the type of pesticides, may affect your nervous system, cause cancer or throw off your hormone system. There is no labeling required to indicate pesticides are present in your food, at what quantity and what kind is being used. What you don’t know will hurt you! How pesticides get in your food Natural chemicals break down over time in the environment but most man-made pesticides are designed not to break down and they remain effective for years in soil, water that drains from the soil and in plants raised in the soil. Because pesticides are often sprayed into the air by planes and large trucks and are easily blown in the wind, 50- 75% of pesticides do not reach crops and instead coat soil or water. Why we use pesticides and why we shouldn’t Pesticides are designed to interfere with the life functions of insects. They are used in agricultural areas because there is so little native vegetation available, insects become specialists at targeting fruits and vegetables. In time, the insects become pesticide resistant, so new pesticides are used and often many pesticides are used together. The insect’s natural predators can not adapt as well as the insects because the more insects they eat, the larger the concentration of pesticides in their body, interfering with their natural processes. A few years after the introduction of new pesticides, the insect population can be several times larger than before the pesticides were used. The new insect population is more pesticide resistant and their numbers are greater because there are less predators to keep their population in balance. New pesticides have to be applied in greater numbers. The health effects on humans in the long run is hard to predict since these new chemicals may interact with other chemicals we are already being exposed to. There are already over 900 pesticides registered for use with the U.S. E.P.A. and currently in use in over 20,000 different products. Children and females are particularly vulnerable! Children and pregnant females are more susceptible to pollutants in their food, water and environment because they have smaller body sizes and have more cell growth taking place. Pesticides particularly impact children as their body develops motor skills and intelligence. Women’s bodies use hormones to prepare the body for childbirth making them particularly vulnerable to man-made chemicals that simulate the natural hormones that regulate the body’s functions.