Fruits and vegetables have always been considered as a healthy food option but now a new report says they cause 48 million Americans to get sick every year with food-borne illnesses, according to a report.
Together, fruits, nuts, and vegetables accounted for 46.1 percent of food-borne illnesses from 1998 to 2008, the Center for Disease and Control said. Produce accounts for nearly half of the illnesses, and the norovirus is often to blame. Norovirus causes about 20 million cases of "stomach flu" each year. A new strain is going around the U.S.
Leafy greens accounted for 2.1 million cases, or 22.1 percent of the total, often by carrying viruses. Fungi were responsible for only 4,542 cases, which were due mostly to toxins produced by the food and chemicals such as pesticides.
"There is food-borne illness caused by a wide variety of foods," says researcher John Painter, DVM, an epidemiologist at the CDC.
"We didn't attempt to assign any risk for [specific] foods in the study," he says. The report does not mean people should avoid any foods, especially healthy choices such as produce, he says. The foods most often involved in outbreaks are often the foods we eat frequently and are part of a healthy diet.
The report is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.
Also, greens such as lettuce and spinach cause illness more frequently because they are consumed more, not because they are grown or harvested in a riskier way than other vegetables, says Scott Horsfall, chief executive officer of the California Leafy Green Products Handler Marketing Agreement, a program under the state's Department of Food and Agriculture.
