The real danger of smoothies

The Guardian’s front page skyline caught my eye straight away. ‘The truth about juices and smoothies,’ it read. ‘Should you down them or ditch them?’ At last, I thought as I turned to the G2 section, someone’s going to highlight the hidden dangers in these products. And there at the top of a two-page feature was another promising headline: ‘Is juice actually a health hazard?’

It’s a topic I’d been writing about for much of my working life – the poisons lurking in everyday foods. Back in the 1980s, working as a freelance reporter, I even managed to get an item on BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour. Now finally, this long-running food scandal, ignored by the mainstream media for nearly half a century, was being brought to public attention in a national newspaper, or so I thought. I’m talking, of course, about the hidden dangers of pesticides.

I’d long had worries about juices and smoothies. If you’re marketing product aimed at the health-conscious section of the community, shouldn’t you, at the very least, include only organically-grown fruit and vegetables? Pesticides have been used so widely across our land – and for so long - it’s now impossible to guarantee a food will be free of them. But there’s good science to show organically-grown produce has far fewer of them. Organic foods also contain more health-protecting phytonutrients which bolster immune systems and help the body deal with the bad stuff.

Most juices and smoothies are made from chemically-grown produce, which means many will come laden with a range of toxic chemicals. These can include endocrine-disrupting chemicals, which mess with human hormone systems, cancer-causing carcinogens, PFAS, or ‘forever chemicals’, and developmental or reproductive toxins. The campaigning organisation Pesticide Action Network uses UK government figures to draw up an annual ‘Dirty Dozen’ list featuring the foods most likely to be contaminated with multiple pesticide residues. The 2024 list features peaches, nectarines, strawberries, cherries, apples, apricots, tomatoes and cucumber, all common ingredients in smoothies.

The health hazard investigated by Rachel Dixon in the Guardian article on juices and smoothies turned out to be sugar; whether the risk of a ‘sugar rush’ was outweighed by the benefits in nutrients and phytochemicals such as polyphenols. Researching the piece Dixon talked to a dietician and a nutritionist, along with the author of a book on unprocessed foods. No one seems to have mentioned the benefits of using organically-grown foods with their reduced pesticide load. The omission is surprising, coming as it did just a couple of weeks after a shocking revelation about the world’s most widely used weedkiller, glyphosate.

Originally sold as Roundup, the chemical has been used on farms and market gardens since the mid 1970s. For decades its manufacturers Monsanto (now Bayer) declared it to be harmless to human beings. New research in which the chemical was fed at low doses to laboratory rats now shows it’s very far from harmless. Even at low doses it induces multiple types of cancer, including leukaemia and cancers of the liver, thyroid, ovary, mammary gland, kidney, bladder, spleen and pancreas. Other diseases, too, are linked to this pesticide that has become integral to the whole western food system.

Research by Stephanie Seneff of Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows the chemical to be linked with a number of debilitating neurological, metabolic and autoimmune diseases, in addition to cancer. She describes the pesticide, to which we’ve all been exposed for half a century, as ‘a slow killer’ with ‘an insidious mechanism of toxicity’. In the body the glyphosate molecule substitutes for the amino acid glycine in protein synthesis, leading to many seemingly diverse diseases.

Since this chemical, along with other pesticides, is likely to be present in many of the ingredients routinely included in popular juices and smoothies, you’d expect organic foods to have got a mention in the Guardian article. Perhaps also a reference to the US study showing that when children were switched temporarily to organic food, pesticides levels in their urine dropped. Pesticides included organophosphates - developed from nerve gasses - and nicotinoids, which damage the nervous system.

A reasonable question might have been: ‘Why are we cheating our kids by giving them supposedly healthy foods that happen to be contaminated with poisons?’

Pesticides are the health hazards that stay hidden in plain sight. Though they’re in our everyday foods no one ever mentions them. Or if they do it’s something meaningless from the pesticide industry playbook, such as ‘without pesticides fruit and veg would be unaffordable’. In reality, farmers only use them because there are so many hidden subsidies underpinning them. For example, we all have to pay the cost of diluting their concentration in drinking water and treating chronic diseases caused by pesticides like glyphosate.

Contrary to popular belief, chemical farming – legacy of the mis-named ‘green revolution’ – is hugely wasteful, inefficient and damaging to the environment as well as to human health. Its evasion of media scrutiny tells you all you need to know about the wealth and lobbying power of global chemical companies. Their success in keeping chemical farming out of the headlines must put them up there with the fossil fuel and tobacco industries in the league table of dark arts.

Almost 30 years ago my book, The Killing of the Countryside, set out a robust and reasoned case for making organic farming the default system in Britain. The book got a lot of media attention, mainly because the chemical takeover of farming had largely gone unnoticed until then. I well remember being presented with the leading award for environmental writing by none other than David Attenborough, now Sir David. The book was based on my 20 years as an agricultural journalist, when I’d witnessed the demolition of the UK’s trusted and sustainable mixed-farming system and its replacement with a much-hyped and little-researched fossil-fuel based chemical system from the US.

Mine wasn’t the only voice raised in the defence of sustainable agriculture and a diverse, living countryside. I was inspired by earlier writers including Marion Shoard and Tory MP, the late Sir Richard Body, who became a good friend. Sadly none of us were a match for the power, wealth and influence of a handful of global agribusiness companies. Today it’s clear that for our very survival, we need to fundamentally change agriculture – and fast. Making organic food available to all, rich and poor, young and old, might be a good place to start. If that’s going to happen the media – especially those concerned with nutrition and health – will have to develop some bottle.