American Academy of Pediatrics says pesticides aren’t bad for babies – Eat more!

Ethan A. Huff
Natural News
November 14, 2012

For the very first time, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has come forward with an official position on organic foods and their role in childhood health and development. But rather than encourage parents to avoid buying pesticide-laden conventional foods, the group, which openly admits that conventional produce is loaded with toxic pesticides, says parents should keep on feeding their children conventional produce despite the dangers involved.

The duplicitous report by AAP, which reads as though it was written by the chemical industry, concedes that organic produce has significantly lower pesticide levels than conventional produce, and that this variance could be significant for childhood health outcomes. And yet in the same breath, the report concludes that since there is supposedly no “direct evidence” that consuming a solely organic diet leads to better health outcomes than a mixed or conventional diet, the jury is still out as to whether or not pesticides are truly dangerous for children.

AAP: Conventional produce might be toxic, but keep on feeding it to your kids

A primary impetus behind the report’s outrageous conclusions appears to be grounded in the idea that organic produce is more expensive than conventional produce, and that parents might buy less food for their children if it is all organic. Because of this, AAP experts have apparently decided to altogether ignore the dangers associated with pesticide exposure, and instead urge parents to keep on buying fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and low-fat or fat-free dairy products for their families, regardless of how these questionable products are made.

“The pediatric group suggests, as agrochemical manufacturers have for decades, that the question of whether pesticides harm children will remain unanswered until results from experiments provide definite proof of harm,” writes Charlotte Vallaeys for the Cornucopia Institute about the AAP report. “With this expectation, the AAP joins the agribusiness and pesticide lobbyists in setting an impossible standard.”

“When pesticides have been found to be toxic and carcinogenic to lab animals, have been correlated with higher rates of ADHD in children, and have been shown to lead to neurological harm in farm workers and their children, the basic assumption should be that they are harmful until proven safe, not the other way around.”

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Mainstream ‘science’ has made it virtually impossible to prove dangers of chemicals

This safe until proven toxic approach is highly convenient for the chemical and pesticide industries, which are able to easily shift the burden of proof for demonstrating chemical toxicity from themselves to the public. And since it is unlikely that any group will ever be able to construct a study adequate enough to satisfy the impossible criteria of the scientific community in proving chemical toxicity, such chemicals will continue to be used indiscriminately throughout the food supply.

It would take a lifetime, after all, beginning at birth, to properly assess the effects of exposure to pesticide chemicals on human health, not to mention the ethical concerns involved in constructing such a study that would basically bar it from ever taking place. There is no legitimate way, in other words, to ever “prove” that pesticide exposure in the food supply is harmful to childhood development, at least not within the existing paradigm.

“The burden of proof should lie with the pesticide manufacturers, who must conclusively demonstrate that their toxins are safe,” adds Vallaeys. “It should not be the responsibility of our children to prove, decades later, that the pesticides they consumed as kids contributed to their generation’s health problems.”

Sources for this article include:

http://www.cornucopia.org

http://www.aap.org

http://organicfarms.wsu.edu/blog/nutrition/organicfoodkidsaap/