Is Organic Fruit Grown with Antibiotics?

When you cough up the cash for organic produce, you expect that it’s all natural. In reality, certain organic fruit farmers use antibiotics just like their conventional counterparts—but not for long: The National Organic Standards Board (NOSB) recently voted to end an exemption that allows organic apple and pear farmers to use the antibiotic oxytetracycline on their orchards.

The USDA organic seal is typically reserved for food that’s raised or grown without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, says Sam Jones-Ellard, a spokesperson for the USDA. But currently, apple and pear growers are permitted to use oxytetracycline as a last line of defense in fighting fire blight, a bacterial plant infection that eats away at trees and can easily wipe out a whole orchard. Because it can take years to grow an apple or pear tree that produces fruit, untreated fire blight can put an organic farm out of business.

The USDA expected growers to come up with a natural way to curb fire blight by 2014, when the exemption implemented in 2002 is scheduled to expire. Unfortunately, experts haven’t found a fire blight cure yet. So while the upcoming ban is good news for organic fruit eaters who want to get what they pay for (naturally-grown fruit), NOSB’s decision puts pressure on growers to find a truly organic solution, fast.

In the meantime, there’s no need to panic about eating the teensy amount of oxytetracycline found in some organically grown apples and pears, says Jones-Ellard, since these fruits contain at least 50,000 times less oxytetracycline than what you’d get if you were on a typical antibiotic prescription. So go ahead and crunch away on your organic apples and pears—with the knowledge that antibiotic-free fruit is coming your way soon.

photo: iStockphoto/Thinkstock

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The Fruit That Could Kill You

Filling up on grapefruit might help you drop a few pounds, but proceed with caution: It could be hazardous to your health. Turns out, eating grapefruit can cause serious—even life-threatening—side effects if you mix it with any of 43 drugs, according to a new study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Many of the meds that have been found to be dangerous are completely necessary for treating important and common medical conditions, according to the study. For women, that could include birth control pills, some anti-anxiety drugs, and sleeping pills, according to Joe Graedon, MS, a pharmacologist and co-founder of the website PeoplesPharmacy.com.

The culprit behind all this trouble? Furanocoumarins. This ingredient in grapefruit deactivates an enzyme in the stomach that breaks down drugs, which can cause the amount of the drug in your blood to go up, says Graedon.

“Because the drug isn’t metabolized the way it normally would be, you end up with a greater potential for toxicity,” he says. So, for example, if you’re prescribed a specific dose of a blood pressure pill, that dose alone is meant to keep your blood pressure in check. But if you take it along with grapefruit or grapefruit juice, you might get the equivalent of three, four, or even 10 more pills, he says.

And this isn’t the first time grapefruit has been busted as a health hazard. More than 20 years ago, the same team of researchers that authored this current study discovered the dangerous interaction. But as new meds and new formulations make their way into your medicine cabinet, the number of drugs that you shouldn’t take with grapefruit has grown from 17 to 43—and this is in the past four years alone.

To find out whether you need to keep grapefruit out of your diet, all you have to do is ask your doctor or pharmacist if the drugs you’re taking would react badly with grapefruit, says Graedon. For a complete list of the 43 drugs that have bad side-effects when mixed with grapefruit, check here.

photo: Stockbyte/Thinkstock

More from WH:
18 Self-Checks Every Woman Should Do
The New Danger in Your Medicine Cabinet
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