Arsenic in Your Food

Do you remember the film "Arsenic and Old Lace"? This was director Frank Capra's classic 1944 film about two elderly sisters in Brooklyn and their ongoing effort to permit lonely bachelors to die with smiles on their faces - by serving said bachelors elderberry wine spiked with arsenic.

It turns out that here in 2018 you don't have to add the arsenic, you can find it already in your food.

Arsenic is used as an additive in chicken and pig feeds to promote faster growth and a Johns Hopkins study found that the arsenic-based drugs fed to poultry remains in their flesh and is transformed into cancer-causing inorganic arsenic (iAs) when cooked. Manure from arsenic treated birds is often used as a fertilizer which then gets into our ground water and crops.

Arsenic has been found in a variety of crops including apples, Brussels sprouts, beets, carrots and wheat. But rice seems particularly adept at absorbing arsenic from groundwater. Rice and many products made from rice have arsenic levels "significantly" higher than the 5ppm set by the EPA as an acceptable limit, according to Consumer Reports.

More bad news? Men who had 2.5 beers per day had arsenic levels more than 30% higher than nonconsumers, and women who drank five to six glasses of wine per week had levels 20% higher than nonconsumers. The arsenic may be coming from the water used to brew these beverages, but beer and wine producers also use a filtration material, diatomaceous earth, that's known to harbor arsenic.

While the FDA assures us that arsenic levels in our food are safe, you may want to take reasonable steps to limit your exposure.

Don't just cook your rice, rinse it well first. When cooking, double the water to rice ratio to 6::1 and discard the excess after cooking. Brown rice tends to have higher arsenic levels that white rice does. Rice grown in California, India and Pakistan normally has lower arsenic levels than rice grown elsewhere.

Consume less conventionally raised chicken.

As always, you cannot depend on the government, let alone the producers, to keep your food safe. Its on you.