Given the wide variety of different active ingredients used in food production, pesticides almost always appear in mixtures, commonly referred to as ‘pesticide cocktails’. These mixtures appear in our food, water and soil and can contain residues of as many as fourteen different pesticides.
There is a growing body of evidence that pesticides can become more harmful when combined, even when each individual chemical appears at levels at or below its “no-observed-effect-concentration”. This phenomenon is known as the ‘cocktail effect’.