BOULDER CREEK — Organic food matters to Camila Torres, so grappling with its higher prices has made her resourceful.

When the Boulder Creek resident makes baby food for her 1-year-old, Liliana, she tosses prepackaged, frozen organic vegetables from Trader Joe’s into a blender, adds a little water, then purees and warms up the mush before “airplaning” a spoonful into her daughter’s mouth.

Torres wants her two girls to grow up on organic food — and frozen products help her afford it.

“I try to find any way within my means to keep potentially harmful things from entering their little bodies,” said Torres, 28, an independent contractor who works with a company that captions videos.

A new scientific study supports her instincts, documenting that organic food can substantially lower pesticide exposure in children from low-income families in both urban and rural areas.

But traces of pesticides were higher than in previous studies involving middle-income, suburban children, suggesting that kids from cities and farming communities may be getting exposed via their environments as well as their diets.

For the peer-reviewed study, researchers at the UC Berkeley Center for Environmental Research and Children’s Health analyzed pesticides and their breakdown products in the urine of low-income Latino children: 20 from Oakland’s Fruitvale district and 20 from the rural Salinas Valley.

TESTING, TESTING

Researchers analyzed pesticides and their breakdown products in the children’s urine for four days on their normal diet, seven days on an organic one and five more days after reverting to a conventional diet. For the organic phase, the researchers replaced the children’s normal food with organic products: fruits and vegetables, as well as items such as bread, eggs, juices and snacks.

Comparing a conventional diet with an organic one, the researchers found that traces of pesticides dropped substantially during the organic phase of the study. Breakdown products declined up to 49 percent for a class of pesticides called organophosphates.

Past research links these insecticides to health problems, including respiratory disease and higher rates of attention deficit disorder in children.

A 2011 study by the same UC Berkeley research group found that when pregnant women were exposed to organophosphates, their children’s IQs were an average seven points lower than other 7-year-olds.

Whether the pesticide levels found in the latest research levels are harmful is an open question, according to one of the study’s lead authors, Lesliam Quirós-Alcalá, an assistant professor of applied environmental health at the University of Maryland.