Environmental Working Group

Share what the EWG has to offer!

Since about 2004, the Environmental Working Group published a list of produce that test for high amounts of pesticides, naming them “the dirty dozen”.  If you’re going to eat products on this list, it’s advisable to buy organic.  The list is updated annually, and includes strawberries, spinach, kale collard and mustard greens, grapes, peaches, pears, nectarines, apples, peppers, cherries, blueberries, and green beans. This list, and its counterpart, “the clean fifteen” is well known among health-conscious shoppers.  The EWG was founded in 1993, and its mission is “to empower you with breakthrough research to make informed choices and live a healthy life in a healthy environment”.  They have been criticized by big food and chemical manufacturers as alarmist and fearmongering, which is pretty much the strategy for the propagandizing that passes as lobbying and advertising.  However, if the EWG’s stance on chemicals in food and personal care products has no merit, why do we see decisions like this one the FDA made in 2018?

The EWG strikes me as apolitical, as any organization promoting health education and healthy choices should be, although it must be noted that they do accept donations from organic food producers.  But if you believe that organic produce and ingredients are preferable to “spray whatever the government doesn’t ban” food, we can probably accept that the funding provided by organic producers has to come from somewhere for the EWG to continue their work.  And consumers can benefit from this work, as information is easily accessible at the EWG website, where you will find product reviews, water test reports for many areas across the country (type in your zip code), and other information at no cost.  

News articles will quote attorneys and lobbyists as criticizing the EWG, as if they only exist to interfere with manufacturing out of misguided activism.   And those individuals can be convincing wordsmiths.  Add to that our busy schedules, and who has time to sort through all the information?  The EWG has a lot of that for us.  I’m going to follow their recommendations as close as is feasible for me and my family.  I will be buying sunscreen that uses zinc oxide or titanium dioxide to protect me from the sun, rather than ingredients that don’t even pass the low bar of generally recognizes as safe (GRAS).  Lets use the information the EWG provides, and share it with others who are in the process of deciding whether to take the blue pill or the red pill.