Many farmers are using insecticides to ensure that their crops of free from worms etc, but this impacts the healthiness of the fresh products.
Ask the crops, if they like pesticide. And ask your self what is a crop. Is it a plant you possess, or can it survive on its own?
The real question is what evidence are you using to assert that insecticides impact the "healthiness" of fresh products? I'm not contradicting; simply asking if that is an assumption rather than an evidence-based statement of fact? I do know of lots of evidence about misuse of chemical pesticides being dangerous to the farmer who applies them. I don't know of much rigorous evidence that links a pesticide with a defined metric of nutritional value (the 'healthfulness' that comes from food).
There are lots of perceptions about lack of food safety. One of my projects in Bangladesh is asking consumers about perceptions of impact on food in markets of pesticides and other food adulterants - but that's perceptions. You will find a lot of unqualified advocacy websites online claiming many harmful outcomes with little good data. Consider the WHO site on this topic from 2018 (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/pesticide-residues-in-food) - the focus is on self-harm via chemical use, not evidence of residue harm on the quality of the food. And the body of evidence that organic production techniques result in foods of higher nutrient or health value than non-organic approaches remains small. High quality evidence that more nutrients are available to the consumer if no pesticides are used (despite potentially higher food losses due to pests) is also limited.
So, yes it could be that pesticides reduce the nutrient quality of certain foods (to be determined rigorously under multiple farm conditions), but does it do so at a level that offsets net gains to health from consuming the nutrients that remain? I would humbly suggest that this remains an open question.
Thanks for this interesting exchange. I do also agree that there is still lots to research to be done to answer properly what is the evidence on pesticides impact on the healthiness of fresh products and diets? In honesty, I am not updated on the current literature on this regard; yet, I would like to share two papers that at the time when I read them to me were important hints on the food quality/healthiness as a result of the agricultural management applied, specifically about the use of synthetic inputs, either pesticides or fertilizers. Concerning synthetic pesticides, Bohn et al. (2014) report compositional differences among soybeans produced under three different approaches (GM, conventional and organic) showing chemical differences in terms of pesticide residues in grains ready for commercialization as well as in the concentration of nutrients. About synthetic fertilizers, Mitchell (2007) reports the difference in bioflavonoids concentration in tomatoes produced organically vs. conventionally. Perhaps I am sharing papers you already know (they have been published quite some time ago), if yes apologies for that. I thought they may contribute to the point that we need more research on the effects of synthetic inputs (e.g. agricultural pesticides) on the healthiness of diets.