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Friday, September 21st, 2012

Waiter, There’s Arsenic in My Rice

Author:     TOM PHILPOTT
Source:     Mother Jones
Publication Date:     Wed Sep. 19, 2012 3:00 AM PDT
 Link: Waiter, There’s Arsenic in My Rice
Stephan:   Here is the latest on the deteriorating American food system -- deteriorating in the sense that profit increasingly trumps actual nutrition and health. Once again, I urge all of you to choose organic food and, where possible, locally produced food. Rice obviously isn't grown everywhere, but many organic centered food venues offer bulk organic rice at reasonable prices. This business of picking carefully what you and your family eat is becoming evermore urgent.

As I’ve reported before [1], the US poultry industry has a disturbing habit of feeding arsenic to chickens. Arsenic, it turns out, helps control a common bug that infects chicken meat, and also gives chicken flesh a pink hue, which the industry thinks consumers want. Is all that arsenic making it into our food supply? It appears to be doing so-both in chicken meat [2] and in, of all things, rice. In a just released report [3], Consumer Reports says it found significant levels of arsenic in a variety of US rice products-including in brown rice and organic rice, and in rice-based kids’ products like cereal and even baby formula. Driving the point home, CR’s analysis of a major population study found that people who consume a serving of rice get a 44 percent spike in the arsenic level in their urine.

Rice is particularly effective at picking up arsenic from soil, CR reports, ‘in part because it is one of the only major crops grown in water-flooded conditions, which allow arsenic to be more easily taken up by its roots and stored in the grains.’

Arsenic, CR reports, is classified by the International Agency for Research on Cancer as a ‘group […]

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