If we think about a healthy food, the truth is that the apple is at the top. However, a recent published analysis by the NGO Pesticide Action Network Europe, in collaboration with 13 other organizations, has put an uncomfortable reality on the table: a good part of the conventional apples that reach our supermarkets are contaminated by multiple pesticides.
The data. The report was based in this case on the analysis of 59 fresh samples of local production collected in September 2025 in 13 European countries, which also includes Spain. In this case, organizations like Ecologista en Acción have been able to corroborate The results have pointed to the following:
- 93% of the apples analyzed had at least one chemical residue, that is, only 7% were completely free of pesticides.
- 85% contained more than one pesticide, with an average of three different substances per fruit, reaching up to seven in the most extreme cases.
By countries. While in Denmark only 20% of samples had multiple residues, in Spain, France and Italy the figure shot up to a worrying 80%. And when asked where so much chemical comes from, the answer suggests that apples can be sprayed with agrochemicals up to 30 times a year.
The toxic ones. What worries the scientific community most is not only the quantity, but the quality of these toxins, since the breakdown of the substances found ignites several red flag:
- 71% of the apples contained pesticides classified by the European Union itself as “substitution candidates”, that is, the most toxic on the market that should be gradually removed by safer ones.
- 64% had PFAS wasteknown as “forever chemicals” for their persistence in the environment. The most common is fludioxonil, which is a known endocrine disruptor found in 40% of the samples.
The consequences. The data here indicates that 93% of these commonly consumed apples did not comply with the strict legal limits required for the production of processed baby foods, highlighting the risk for children, who are especially vulnerable to these substances because they are much more sensitive as their livers do not have fully developed.
The cocktail effect. If apples have a toxin on their surface, the question seems inevitable: why are they legal? This is where the European Food Safety Authority comes in, analyzing the substances individually, estimating that in the vast majority of cases the concentration of each pesticide separately is below legal limits allowed. In fact, the EU Annual Report on waste prepared by EFSA guarantees that exceedances above the standard are low.
but the problem It’s in the ‘cocktail effect’ because the current regulations ignore the fact that when three or four toxins are combined, their effect is multiplied. However, despite the fact that the EU has had a legal mandate for 20 years to assess cumulative risks, to this day it still does not apply it rigorously, and if that were not enough, at the end of 2025 the European Commission put forward proposals that could further weaken these toxicity reviews.
There are precedents. This study is not an isolated case, since other entities such as the OCU have already published information that pointed to the high level of toxic waste that is in some foods. Even EFSA itself It records this multiple contamination year after year in its databases, although it limits itself to validating that individually they do not break the rule.
Faced with this panorama and waiting for European regulations to be updated to protect consumers from the cocktail effect, experts and environmental organizations agree on a clear recommendation: for those seeking to minimize their exposure to these hormone disruptors and persistent chemicals, organically produced apples, which according to studies are usually free of these residues, are currently emerging as the safest alternative.
Images | Ilham Wicaksono
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