Best Veggie and Fruit Wash Solutions - Salt Water and Pure Vinegar

I used to wash fruits and veggies by soaking them in diluted vinegar until I read Dr. Greger's book, How Not to Die.  He compared the results of using different solutions to wash vegetables and fruits.

Here are the results:

Using plain water:

Soaking potatoes in water removes between 2% to 13% of pesticide residues

Using diluted vinegar:

Diluted vinegar only seemed marginally better than tap water in removing pesticide residues.

Using 5% acetic acid solution (aka full strength plain white vinegar!):

Using undiluted plain white vinegar removes up to 100% of pesticide residues.

Vinegar (Source)

What's another alternative to pure white vinegar that yields the same effective results and is cheaper? Salt water!  

Using salt water:

A 10% salt solution removes up to 100% of the pesticide residues.  

The indicated time for soaking is between 5 to 20 minutes.

Salt (Source)

So how do you make this best ever veggie and fruit wash?  Mix up about one-part salt to nine-parts water e.g. 1 tbsp salt to 9 tbsp water, 1 cup salt to 9 cups of water.  That easy! :)  Just make sure to rinse the vegetables and fruits thoroughly after soaking them in salt water.

When I went grocery shopping, I couldn't find rock salt in store shelves. There were only iodized salt and table salt.  I googled what kind of salt you can use for cleaning and found out that any salt - rock salt (unrefined salt), table salt (refined salt) and iodized salt can be used for cleaning (excluding Epsom Salt since this has a different composition).   (Source: FoodMatters) 

NutritionFacts.org, which Dr Greger founded, recently published an article that comprehensively talks about this topic including some studies on commercially available fruit and vegetable washes.

So pure white vinegar and salt water are the best vegetable and fruit wash solutions you can use.  Though pure vinegar costs more than salt, pure vinegar is more practical if you want to save on time since it's just soak and rinse. Whereas for salt water, it requires you to follow certain measurements, you need to dissolve the salt first and you need to thoroughly rinse the fruits and vegetables with plain water after soaking since too much salt residue is bad for the health especially if you're prone to UTI.  But either yields the best results so it really just depends on your preference. :)