WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Favorite children's foods like apples and grapes have high levels of toxic residues from pesticides, Consumers Union, a nonprofit advocacy group, said on Tuesday, urging the U.S. government to do more to ban the use of dangerous chemicals.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected on Thursday to ban most home uses of the pesticide Dursban, a staple of many American gardeners, because of health risks including blurred vision and memory loss.

Consumers Union spokesman Adam Goldberg said his group would applaud such a decision, but underscored the need for tighter control of about 20 specific chemicals that he says are responsible for the lion's share of residues found in foods.

The group on Tuesday released an update to its 1999 report on food safety, concluding that pesticide residues in foods children eat every day often exceed safe levels.

The group said parents should not stop feeding their children fruits and vegetables, including some tips on limiting exposure to pesticides by peeling fruit and washing it well before eating.

It also encouraged consumers to consider buying organically grown varieties of foods with the highest pesticide residues.

Congress in 1996 passed a food safety law, which required EPA to set pesticide tolerances to protect children, who are particularly susceptible to toxic chemicals.

The law could potentially require the agency to ban or severely restrict many high-risk insecticides.

The group, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine, said it based its conclusions on an independent analysis of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1998 tests of thousands of fruit and vegetable samples, domestic and imported, fresh and processed, for pesticide residues.

It said it found that some foods contain high levels of relatively toxic residues, including winter squash, peaches, apples, grapes, pears, green beans and spinach, as well as strawberries and cantaloupe.

Other foods like bananas, broccoli, canned peaches, canned and frozen peas, canned and frozen corn, milk, orange juice, apple juice and grape juice had few residues.

In the report, Consumers Union said Dursban, the most commonly known brand name of the chemical chlorpyrifos, was found in 22 foods tested by USDA's Pesticide Data Program (PDP) from 1994 through 1998.

The highest chlorpyrifos residues showed up in apples from New Zealand, grapes from Chile, tomatoes from Mexico, and domestically grown soybeans, according to the report.

Chloripyrifos is used to kill insects that attack crops, termites and cockroaches, and is used in pet collars to kill ticks.

Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE:DOW - news), which manufactures Dursban, says more than 3,600 scientific studies have proven it to be harmless when used as directed.

In Tuesday's report, Consumers Union also expressed concern that organochlorine pesticides banned in the 1970s were still showing up in foods that children eat today.

For instance, the chemical dieldrin remains in soil, and crops such as squash, cantaloupe, soybeans, sweet potatoes and spinach contained residues, the report found.

The whole report is available on http://www.ecologic-ipm.com/PDP/Update-Childrens-Foods.pdf.

Separately, the Washington Post reported in Wednesday editions that the Clinton administration had decided to sidestep a major political quagmire by rejecting the use of human experiments in setting regulatory limits for pesticides.

Worried about a resurgence in human experiments by pesticide companies -- some of which have been testing products on students and other volunteers for decades -- the EPA will adopt a policy of officially ignoring such studies in establishing legal limits for pesticides in food and water, the paper quoted agency officials as saying.