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Tired of antibiotics in your food? Oranges are next
In the past 20 years, we’ve taken big strides toward antibiotic-free food. Just think about it….
You can get antibiotic-free chicken from Panera, Chipotle, Subway, Taco Bell, Chick-fil-A and KFC. When fast food giants like these are eliminating antibiotics from their food, you know the tides are turning!
But just when you’re starting to feel safe biting into a chicken breast again, another food is getting infiltrated by antibiotics — oranges.
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EPA gives the greenlight to mass antibiotic use on oranges
In case you haven’t heard, citrus trees in Florida have been struggling. For over the decade, they’ve been fighting for their life against a bacterial disease called citrus greening.
That means the citrus industry has been struggling too. Citrus farmers are desperate. And you know the saying: desperate times call for desperate measures. Well, that includes widespread use of antibiotics at a time when antibiotic resistance is a serious health threat.
Antibiotic resistance, in case you forgot, is when the antibiotics we need to fight minor and serious infections no longer work because we’ve overused them, and bacteria have developed resistance to them.
The EPA has released a proposal that would allow citrus growers to use two antibiotics on a mass scale to fend off citrus greening—streptomycin and oxytetracycline.
Now, both are currently used in human medicine. But the amount approved for use on citrus groves will be much higher—it could be over 942,000 pounds!
All in all, the proposal would increase the use of streptomycin in agriculture by 26 times and allow citrus farmers to spray trees three times per year.
This proposal has scientists concerned, because the EPA hasn’t fully evaluated the repercussions of dousing citrus fruits in antibiotics.
Michael Hansen, Ph.D., senior staff scientist at Consumer Reports, says it’s too big of a risk. He’s concerned it’s going to contribute to antibiotic resistance, making both antibiotics far less effective when people need them for health reasons.
Steven Roach, senior analyst at a coalition of research and advocacy groups called Keep Antibiotics Working, also has serious concerns about the safety of using mass amounts of antibiotics on oranges.
“They are doing a huge experiment with limited monitoring,” Roach told Nature journal.
How to eat antibiotic-free oranges
Considering that more than 2 million people in the U.S. get antibiotic resistant infections per year, and 23,000 of these people die, it’s scary that the EPA is allowing farmers to spray antibiotics all over our oranges.
Related: 12 fruits and veggies you need to buy organic (and 15 you don’t)
But, as you know, you can’t rely on anyone else to protect you. You must take your health into your own hands. And in this case, that means buying organic oranges. Oranges have a thick peel that offers some protection from pesticides, so they’re not typically the first fruit that you think to buy organic.
But at this point, there’s no way to know if antibiotics can permeate the peel. So, play it safe… unless you want a heaping dose of antibiotics in your morning orange juice.
Sources:
- EPA proposal will allow antibiotic spraying of citrus crops — MedicalXpress
- The Best Chain Restaurants for Antibiotic-Free Meat — Eating Well
- EPA proposal to allow streptomycin to treat citrus disease poses unacceptable risk to health and the environment — Consumer Reports
- Antibiotics set to flood Florida’s troubled orange orchards — Nature
By Jenny Smiechowski
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