10 Food Label Lies

Don’t spend extra money buying into marketing hype and misinformation. Look for food claims and labels you can trust.

Pesticide-free

The lie: Organic foods are soaring in popularity, even in spite of a bad economy, a recent survey found. One major reason for this trend is the increasing evidence on what pesticides such as Roundup and atrazine, the two most widely used pesticides in agriculture, are doing to our bodies: interfering with our hormones, increasing the risk of diseases such as Parkinson's and cancer, and causing birth defects and attention-deficit disorder in children. So naturally, big food producers want a cut of the profits—but they don't want to pay for the added cost of organic certification. So they try to fool shoppers into thinking that "pesticide-free" or "free from pesticide residues" is just as good as organic. Some of those foods even feature certifications from independent third parties attesting to the fact that the produce has been tested and found to be "free of pesticide residues." But the Consumers Union doesn't agree. According to their "Greener Choices" Ecolabel guide, many of the pesticide-free rating and certification programs out there use the same detection limits as the Environmental Protection Agency, meaning that those certified foods contain the same levels of pesticides as all the other non-organic produce in the market.

To get the real thing: Support food companies that support organic. The only way to protect yourself and your family from the damages of synthetic pesticides is to buy certified organic foods that were grown without them.