Are Strawberries Bad Now?

FIRST OF ALL, THE STRAWBERRIES

Maybe you saw Driscolls strawberries are "bad" because they "
contain 12 different pesticides". While berries are sprayed with pesticides, and organic berries are sprayed with different pesticides (we knew this), and local is always the way to go, here's why this current internet buzz isn't a big deal.

ALL of this was because a wellness blogger, Mamavation, bought one container of conventional and one container of regular strawberries once on the same day and sent them to a lab, then wrote a wellness blog post on the topic. For context, a true scientific study would use a third party/unbiased person to buy the berries and would do this with 100s of containers for like, months. This gives us enough data to determine what is actually true and what happened on that day.

Mamavationclaims high levels of 'PFAS pesticides' -this is not a thing. They took two buzzwords and slapped them together because of one atom. This does not create a 'forever pesticide', that is clickbait.

Toxicologists agree that its about the dose. I say this with a lot of different foods; we have a cup and when that cup overflows with a trigger, we experience symptoms. In the case of these pesticides, you would need to eat like over 100lbs per day for life to even exceed international thresholds which are marginally lower than US thresholds.

So, eat your strawberries. Buy local if you can. Wash them with water/baking soda (proven to remove the highest % of pesticide residue) before you eat but the consequence of being afraid to eat fruit is much higher than the consequence of agricultural exposure.

I am in Integrative Functional Approaches to Detoxification class in my doctorate program this summer and already I have learned a LOT.

My favorite tidbit from week one: If you do a 'detox' (think pills or a drink that aggressively break up anything in your tissue) it may have some effect on 'detoxifying' some stuff, but it may also cause more problems if done at the wrong time.

(almost) Everyone who I speak with feels the itch for some kind of detox when they feel constipated or bloated. As you may know, constipation and bloating are symptoms of other stuff going on. Imbalanced gut bacteria, gut barrier permeability ("leaky gut"), low stomach acid, nutrient imbalances, bile issues, you know I could go on forever.

But if you liberalize lets say, a bunch of pesticides or microplastic PFAS from fat cells, some of that will end up needing to be processed by your gut bacteria. If your gut bacteria isn't in good shape? Well, you're opening the door to making the original problem worse.

MORE bloating, constipation, and overall imbalance in the gut 🙄

Add to that your drainage pathways. How's your liver, kidneys, bile flow? Are you sweating and urinating enough? Do you move around or are you sitting all day?All of these things matter.

What's the point of this email? Great question...

You do not need an unsupervised detox "protocol" to make you poop a lot if you are uncomfortable after eating or just in general. There are a lot of moving parts with detox which we shall uncover this summer (So, save your money).

I am absolutely going to do something fun with this later in June, so stay tuned!

xx, Molly