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 ...
I believe you can get a much stronger dose of arsenic from apricot seeds. Some claim this to be beneficial.
Corrections appreciated.
Huh! Where’s the EPA when ya need ‘em? Regulatin’ dust!
Much of the soil in my county contains as much a 5% arsenic, way more than 5 parts per billion!!! We grow much apple juice and rival parts of WA State's apple production in parts this part of CA.
These EnvironMental nut cases, especially the GovernMental EnvironMental nut cases are demanding that air, water and food stuffs be made practically sterile in order to be consumable. They keep moving the goal posts till they shield our children and all other living things from any possible organic or inorganic threat.
I can't prove this but, intuitively I believe there is a direct connection between overly protected children and some of the immunodeficiencies that lead to asthma, cancer and maybe even some of the attention deficit and even autisim which is being blamed on immunizations of all types.
Once again, here comes all that alternative medicine, alternative energy and everyother type hype to tear down the fact that we,ve already cleansed the air, water and dirt to unimagineable levels in just 3 short decades!!! The cost of this speculative and redundant preventive cleansing has sucked up vast sums in a scheme unbased in any cost/benefit basis, but rather hysteria akin to the stupid Alar scare in the decade this all took off... the 1970's!!!
Republican presidents have been the main signers of this politically charged extravagance that has eaten out our substance in this country. They've all been terrified of GANG-GREEN demonstrating outside their re-election headquarters.
This insanity will not stop until enough of Americans show a political will to stop this rush by activists and politicians to stop using our government to make supposed heros of themselves at taxpayer and private sector productivity expense to spend further trillions to push the ball over the last yard, after having moved it the length of the entire rest of the field in a little over 30 years!!!
Merry Christmas to you too, and a Happy New Year.
Thanks for all the pings.
Does that mean they're always wrong? Here's a JAMA article that's not too old.
Arsenic Exposure and Prevalence of Type 2 Diabetes in US Adults
Conclusions After adjustment for biomarkers of seafood intake, total urine arsenic was associated with increased prevalence of type 2 diabetes. This finding supports the hypothesis that low levels of exposure to inorganic arsenic in drinking water, a widespread exposure worldwide, may play a role in diabetes prevalence. Prospective studies in populations exposed to a range of inorganic arsenic levels are needed to establish whether this association is causal.My computer is too old to do a decent and recent search at PubMed. Try entering arsenic and diabetes at Pubmed. The results came up the most recent first when I last used it.
I heard that apply juice naturally contains arsenic.
http://www.fruitjuicefacts.org/apple-juice-facts.html
Its all the medicine from the exponentially increased use of drugs and and hormones from the vast and prolonged use of birth control going into waste water that makes me suspicious.
There’s the crowd which says too much sugar when you’re young makes it more likely to get adult onset diabetes. If they’re right, and if arsenic-tainted juice figures in that, the sugar may be the link, rather than the arsenic itself or at least alone.
Much of the arsenic comes from pesticide IIRC and possibly usage of different pesticides could alleviate the problem. I don’t know why people scream about malathion, for example, but barely give a peep about arsenicals.
They say you have to eat a peck of dirt before you die, in your area would that mean a bird's peck? Why isn't natural dust killing off the fauna?
They’re going after ‘big juice’ here, while giving ‘big liberalism’ a pass. There may or may not be arsenic problems from the juice here, there clearly are major arsenic problems from liberalism in Bangladesh. Unicef - a liberal organization if there ever was one - was criminally negligent resulting in several million cases of chronic arsenic poisoning there. The country had been plagued by diarrheal infections from its surface water supply. In the early 1970s Unicef drilled thousands of deeper wells for them but never tested the result. When the epidemic of symptomatic arsenic poisoning presented 15 years later the water was finally tested and was loaded with arsenic. Arsenic contamination of well water was a well known problem in many parts of the world. Testing for it was standard and cheap. But Unicef wasn’t treated like the French silicone breast company nor as the world’s worst mass poisoners. They were treated as liberals. Their good intentions, not their results, were all that mattered to them.
This article claims 10 ppb of arsenic in juice, which is still at the limit the World Health Organization deems safe. One Taiwan study claims 150 ppb is the level where cancer mortality increases.
My post was prompted by the fact that arsenic is a naturally occurring mineral, and naturally exists in groundwater. Some herbicides contain arsenic, and perhaps that arsenic can be eliminated. But other than that, what can be done about arsenic? How much money would it take to go from 10 ppb to 9 ppb, even though both levels are considered safe? If the arsenic is coming from the water, then it could be very expensive, and with little real improvement in safety.
If the costs of going from 10 to 9 ppb are passed to the consumer, will consumers switch to other drinks which are even less healthy, like soda?
Could the money spent to reduce the arsenic from 10 to 9 ppb be used in some other way which would save even more lives?
” If the juice contains “natural flavors” then it is adulterated.”
If it was adulterated “within the law,” wouldn’t the FDA have shut them down, UnwashedPeasant?
QUICK! How many people can you name that have died of Arsenic in juice, lead in paint or anything (other than bullets), or Mercury in the air?
So what is the sudden panic all about? Remember Alar and how it was gonna kill us all?
There are no Gummint regulations? Oh no! Why aren’t people dropping dead all over the country???
Maybe somebody selling poisoned apples would be out of business faster than you can say “Boycott?”
If it leads to obesity, yes, one type is called Maturity Onset Diabetes of the Young, MODY, otherwise it's usually just dental caries. Both of those types of diabetes are characterized by insulin resistance.
That explains the ever-increasing life span of Americans. It’s Murphy’s Law. The harder you try to kill yourself the longer you live. LOL
When trying to buy apple juice for the grandkids. I had a very hard time finding a brand that did not contain juice from China. Who knew they even had apples in China. There is no telling what is in chinese juice. I refuse to buy it.
I read that story. Those "chemicals" are nothing that is not present in the orange to begin with. It is just the oils of the orange distilled and fractionated to stabilize them and maintain their flavor. No chemicals are created that do not exist in fresh oranges.
That is your choice, and also my point.
My preference is eating the whole fruit, not drinking juice. It is healthier, has a naturally lower glycemic index, and, a big and, you know what you are consuming and from whence it came. If someone serves you juice in a restaurant or you buy a juice box at a store, you do not know the source of the concentrate. You are flying blind. A grocery store discloses the national source of all whole fruit. Also, as we learned recently "Not From Concentrate" is more of a negative.
So my advice is: eat whole fruit from the U.S. and ignore the scare.
What do they propose, testing each grape? Testing juice would not suffice; they would need to test all fruit. The FDA would require thousands of new employees. Perhaps that is the idea!
I’m more worried about the bad stuff in our drinking water that the government is prescribing to us.
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