Posted on 12/25/2011 8:02:27 PM PST by neverdem
Arsenic has long been recognized as a poison and a contaminant in drinking water, but now concerns are growing about arsenic in foods, especially in fruit juices that are a mainstay for children.
Controversy over arsenic in apple juice made headlines as the school year began when Mehmet Oz, M.D., host of “The Dr. Oz Show,” told viewers that tests he’d commissioned found 10 of three dozen apple-juice samples with total arsenic levels exceeding 10 parts per billion (ppb). There’s no federal arsenic threshold for juice or most foods, though the limit for bottled and public water is 10 ppb. The Food and Drug Administration, trying to reassure consumers about the safety of apple juice, claimed that most arsenic in juices and other foods is of the organic type that is “essentially harmless.”
But an investigation by Consumer Reports shows otherwise. Our study, including tests of apple and grape juice (download a PDF of our complete test results), a scientific analysis of federal health data, a consumer poll, and interviews with doctors and other experts, finds the following:
Roughly 10 percent of our juice samples, from five brands, had total arsenic levels that exceeded federal drinking-water standards. Most of that arsenic was inorganic arsenic, a known carcinogen. One in four samples had lead levels higher than the FDA’s bottled-water limit of 5 ppb. As with arsenic, no federal limit exists for lead in juice. Apple and grape juice constitute a significant source of dietary exposure to arsenic, according to our analysis of federal health data from 2003 through 2008. Children drink a lot...
--snip--
The form of arsenic in the examples above is inorganic arsenic. It’s a carcinogen known to cause bladder, lung, and skin cancer in people and to increase risks of cardiovascular disease, immunodeficiencies, and type 2 diabetes...
(Excerpt) Read more at consumerreports.org ...
sounds like the beginning of another “Alar” scare. When the truth came out it was that a person would have to drink gallons of Alar a day for decades to get cancer, not the few parts per billion that stuck to the apple skins. Yes I know that a teaspoon or less of arsnic can kill you, but here we are talking about 10 parts per billion — levels that need the most advanced equipment to measure.
The media went ballistic. Bush was poisoning our children! He didn't care! People would die!!!
And here we have a faceless, bloodless, federal bureaucracy ignoring arsenic in juice. Who's fault is that? Oh, I dunno, but they will probably blame the Tea Party.
The food in this country is killing us. The hormones, additives, non-natural ingredients created in labs. All horrible and people eat it like candy.
Type 2s, get tested for inorganic arsenic if you have any doubts about your water supply, and if you're an apple or grape juice junky, it's time to quit.
Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah & Happy New Year!
HoHum indeed. I’ve weathered the Alar scare, too, and I am NOT playing scare-me ever again. Who is behind this? Who stands to profit? Who are they trying to do in? Might just be growers who don’t use union fruit-polishers? Maybe it’s some Organic Union Somebody trying to boost organic sales? I am just not available to be whupped up.
How about rat droppings? There’s a level of acceptability in product specifications for just about any kind of contaminant; most of these can be presented in hysterical form to drive Moms up the wall. Responsible news organizations (that leaves the NY Times out) don’t pounce on reports like that and build stories around them.
Yep, we’re all stupider than you and we’re all gonna die.
You DO know that CR is a Naderite pub, right?
If you’re diabetic, you avoid apple juice for the sugar, not the arsenic.
Yep! And dihydrogen monoxide! Buy only dihydrogen monoxide-free juice!
Damn “Big Juice.” Let’s drive them out of business and let the kids drink soda pop. Its for the children.
Damn “Big Juice.” Let’s drive them out of business and let the kids drink soda pop. Its for the children.
CR has been begging me for at least 6 years to resubscribe. They has some ugly socialistic editor hag for a while that was pushing hard for single payer healthcare. That was the final straw for me.
Ping
Other stuff in “100% juice”:
Not-from-concentrate orange juice contains “flavor packets” that are chemicals derived from orange byproducts and are not listed on the label. This is because not-from-concentrate orange juice loses its flavor in storage.
“100% juices” like Juicy Juice are made with a corn-syrup-like sweetener derived from junk juices (apple, grape and pear), then flavoring is added. The juice syrup is not listed on the label as such. That is how Juicy Juice can taste like “Kiwi-Strawberry” when the first ingredient is Apple juice. If the juice contains “natural flavors” then it is adulterated.
We are talking PARTS PER BILLION people. You can find anything you want at these concentration levels, and the technology isn’t even precise nor accurate. It’s the new “technology” with which to scare the masses. Everything used to be in parts per million. Now we have progressed by a factor of 10^3 over night. This is the fairy tale land of Al Gore. It is currently stealthly being employed to crush our industry, e.g. Hg emissions. To put things in perspective, your chances of winning any existing lotory is in the millions... not billions. Don’t buy into anything reported in PPB.
Increasingly, a lot of apple juice sold in the US comes from China. They might use arsenic as a pesticide, but the other pesticides they use are likely worse. My recommendation is to avoid all food products from China.
I died from Arsenic Poisoning a few years ago but I got better.
I believe you can get a much stronger dose of arsenic from apricot seeds. Some claim this to be beneficial.
Corrections appreciated.
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