It seems the classic fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, who ate a poisonous apple, is closer to reality than we may have realized. Apples ranked second, right behind peaches, on the Environmental Working Group’s updated “Dirty Dozen,” the list of 12 foods shown to contain the highest amounts of pesticides.

Click here to download the complete Dirty Dozen list, along with its counterpart, the “Clean 15,” fruits and vegetables found to contain the lowest amount of pesticides.

According to the Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide, if you regularly eat the 12 most contaminated foods, you’ll be subjecting your body to 10 different pesticides each day. The EWG tells us we can lower our pesticide exposure by almost 80 percent by avoiding (or buying organic versions of) the top 12 most-contaminated fruits and vegetables.

I’m happy to say that for the past year-and-a-half (around the time I found out I was expecting my first child) I’ve been buying mostly organic foods. It can get expensive, though, especially if you don’t live near farm stands or a food collective, where you can get locally-grown, organic fruits and vegetables at low prices.

This list can help you decide what foods you should absolutely buy organic, and what areas you may be able to cut corners. And because pesticide amounts change frequently, the EWG’s updated list is a huge help. For instance, spinach, which ranked number one on the previous list, moved down to a modest number 14, just ahead of potatoes at 15. But where do you draw the line of when to buy organic?

It’s a personal decision, so you may want to study the entire list of 47 fruits and vegetables when you make your shopping list. For instance, if you consume a lot of a certain food that is halfway down the list, it might make sense for you to buy an organic version of that food. You can save money by looking for sales at your store, stocking up, and even freezing quantities of certain vegetables when they are on sale.

Learning about the methodology behind the study will also help you make informed decisions about buying produce. For instance, you’ll find out that pineapple, mango and avocado are largely pesticide-free, with fewer than 10 percent of the samples found with any detectable pesticides on them at all. Fewer than one percent of those fruits were found to contain residue from more than one pesticide.

Buying fruits and vegetables free of pesticides is even more important when you are feeding children. According to the EWG report, even small doses of pesticides can cause lasting damage to human health, especially during fetal development and early childhood. Their smaller size means the amount of pesticides they ingest can do even more damage to their tiny systems.

Since I started feeding my infant daughter solid foods, mostly homemade, I buy even more organic produce. I’m happy to see two of her favorite foods, sweet potatoes and avocado, near the bottom of the list.

Even so, I’ll be printing out the EWG shopper’s guide and putting it in my OnTray (www.ontray2go.com) along with my weekly coupons, so I can refer to it as I navigate the produce aisle of my local grocery store.

Planning meals can be a challenge at the best of times. Add picky eaters to the mix and it can sometimes become even more difficult.

Making a menu plan for the week can really help you become organized in the kitchen. Not only does it take the pressure off each day from deciding what you will serve, but it also helps you keep organized with grocery shopping and time management too.

If you decide to menu plan, you will find a groove that works best for you. I tend to plan on the weekend for the following week and do my groceries at the beginning of the week in order to have all of the ingredients in the house needed to cook each meal. I also do a 5 day plan instead of 7 days. I do this in order to maintain some flexibility in our schedule for leftovers, eating out and choosing weekend meals as a family (or to allow the opportunity for my husband to cook–lucky me!).

One idea to help picky eaters in your family is to dedicate one night each week for them to be in charge of the meal. Depending on their age, they can either choose the meal, assist in food preparation or take over all together. This will teach the children how to work in the kitchen, become more independent and give them life skills that are important later on. It will also allow them to have control of one meal and will in turn teach them about healthy eating (as you will guide them to include healthy choices in every meal).

Another suggestion to include children in meal planning and preparation is to allow children to make a healthy choice at the grocery store, perhaps in the fruits and vegetable section. When it comes time to prepare their choice, allow them to help either by washing it or giving them a butter knife or a small spreader knife to “cut” the food in preparation for a meal. Children love to help in the kitchen and when you give them control over a food item, it will often increase the changes of them consuming the food.

One website that I have found to be very helpful with regards to meal planning is Menus 4 Moms. You can sign up for their weekly newsletter where they will send you a meal plan for the following week along with recipes. If anything, it gives you some good meal ideas to add to your repertoire.

Monsanto are a happy company in the USA. They sell genetically modified seeds for crops grown in the US (banned in most other western countries) and are allowed to sell Bovine Growth Hormone, rBGH, for use in dairy cows (banned in most other western countries).

Cows injected with rBGH produce 10-25% more milk, making farmers very happy, considering the recent high prices they can sell milk for. The cows, however, are less happy. rBGH makes cows more likely to have foot problems and lameness, fertility problems, reactions at the injections site, and more likely to get mastitis. (Nursing moms, did you ever get mastitis? it’s AGONY.)

And what about consumers? By-products of rBGH do pass into milk. Heath Canada studies have concluded that rBGH cannot “biologically plausibly” affect humans, and Monsanto claims that pasteurization render it harmless to humans, but feeding growth hormones to adult animals has been shown to increase the risk of some cancers in animal studies. The drug is banned for use in Canadian cattle on animal welfare grounds.

Currently, milk from cows not injected with rBGH is labeled as such, so consumers can make a choice. Monsanto is hoping to change that though. A supposedly independent group of farmers called Afact is lobbying for changes in the law which will prevent labeling of rBGH-free milk as such. Turns out that Afact was organized by Monsanto. So far they haven’t succeeded. And in Pennsylvania, lawmakers actually tightened the regulations on milk labeling to make it more accurate as to whether hormones had been used.

rBGH-free milk is sold everywhere from Walmart to health food stores, so it’s available for almost every consumer for about the same price as rBGH milk. I’ve just been to SuperTarget: A half-gallon of Target brand milk (may contain rBGH) is $2.19, Kemp’s brand milk (no rBGH) is $2.39.

It’s an easy decision for me to choose which one to buy for my family, especially considering how much milk my toddler drinks.

And what about baby formula? The main ingredient of formula is milk. Enfamil, Good Start and Similac’s websites are devoid of any information about rBGH.

A Similac customer representative read me a statement that said Similac “have no control” over whether the milk they use in their formula has rBGH in it. She also told me “there are no traces of rBGH in formula” because it is inactivated in the formula making process. She also said “rBGH is turned into inactive fragments in the digestive tract”.

Enfamil and Nestle Good Start emailed me lengthy statements saying much the same thing – cows are injected with rBGH, we might be using some of their milk, but no rBGH ends up in our formula.

No studies have shown any risk to humans from drinking rBGH milk. Although, to be fair, not many studies have been done, and none on a large scale, so it’s probably not wise to claim it’s totally safe just yet.There’s other food issues that are proven to be harmful – like trans fats, or mercury in fish, pesticides in fruit and vegetables, and lead in our water, that’s it’s much more important to be aware of. But since I can avoid rBGH milk cheaply and easily, for my family’s sake and for the welfare of dairy cows, I’m certainly going to.