When you drink sewage, it’s pretty clear what you’re getting: sewage, with all the expect, overt nutritional implications.
When you eat fruit, you expect a tasty and healthy meal.
Unfortunately, as this proof-of-concept study reveals, when you eat fruit watered by sewage, you get a little from Column A and a little from Column B.
This study conducted in Israel evaluated the presence of carbamazapine in healthy university student volunteers. As carbamazapine is recognized to be excreted as an unchanged active drug, it is ubiquitous in untreated sewage – read “wastewater”. Half the recruited students were then randomized to eat a selection of vegetables acquired from producers watering their fields with wastewater, rather than treated or fresh water. Unsurprisingly, the various vegetables and leafy greens from the wastewater farm had elevated levels of carbamazepine – and so did the participants randomized to that group.
Just a happy thought for the day – and a reason to think ever so slightly more about from where your food’s water comes.
“Human Exposure to Wastewater-Derived Pharmaceuticals in Fresh Produce: A Randomized Controlled Trial Focusing on Carbamazepine”
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.5b06256