Are you purchasing produce that is making your healthy or sick? If you are still eating produce grown with pesticides, please consider the following:

• pesticides are known to accumulate in the body over time
• pesticides tend to accumulate in the fat tissue of the body, such as breasts and prostate glands, which can affect healthy tissue in these areas
• studies have linked the amount of pesticides eaten to emotional stability

You may consider eating organic to be more expensive, but in the long run you are saving much more in health problems and future medical bills.

The first thing I recommend to my clients is removing genetically (GM) modified foods from their diet. Not only are GM fruits and vegetables grown with the highest amount of pesticides/ herbicides, they have also been genetically altered so that your body can react to them in a negative way.

The list of GM foods currently includes: corn, soy, sugar beets (and the sugar made from them), canola, cotton (cotton seed oil), alfalfa, zucchini and yellow squash, Hawaiian papaya. . . The list now includes GMO salmon too!

Since these foods are genetically engineered to withstand higher concentrations of pesticides, it is virtually impossible to “wash off” the residue. The chemicals are in the soil and are inherent to the plant itself.

These same chemicals create havoc in our bodies and in the animals that eat it. To learn more about GM foods and how to purchase non-GMO foods, you can go to my previous blog articles. You will want to stay way from meat and eggs derived from animals that eat GMOs too.

The next step would be go buy only organic produce. However, if that is too much to handle all at once, you can refer to EWG’s (Environmental Working Group) food lists to help you determine the most important fruits and veggies to purchase organic: The Clean 15 and the Dirty Dozen.

Use the links provided to see the updated 2016 lists. Stay away from conventional produce on the Dirty Dozen list, making sure you are purchasing organic when ever possible. Use the Clean 15 list to know which conventionally-grown fruits and veggies you can feel better about purchasing non-organic.

This article was written by Sharon Harmon, founder of Life Design for Health. She has a passion for helping people find their way back to optimum health. Please contact her if you would like to know more. There is a great deal of health-related information in her blog articles and on her website.