Vary what you eat, particularly if you are exposed to arsenic through private well water, other foods or other sources. Not usually. Making fruits and vegetables a regular part of your daily diet is important for good health at all ages. Since some fruits and vegetables have more arsenic than others, vary what you eat and avoid eating one kind of food all the time if it has higher levels of arsenic.
If you could be exposed to arsenic from well water , other foods or other sources , make sure to reduce your total arsenic exposure. Plants absorb arsenic from the soil in varying amounts and move it to different parts depending on the type of plant. Arsenic occurs naturally in soil, but arsenic containing chemicals were historically used on orchard fruit trees in the U. Although these chemicals are no longer used in this country, arsenic can stay in the soil for long periods of time.
Other human activities can also deposit arsenic in soil and certain high risk locations are more likely to have arsenic. In July , the U. Apple juice has received a lot of attention as a potential source of higher arsenic exposure, particularly for children. Some fruit juices, imported from other countries which still use arsenic-based pesticides, have also shown higher arsenic levels.
Consumer Reports said their findings are a "spot check" and "should not be used to draw definitive conclusions about specific brands. CBS News reached out to all of the juice companies. Ten responded saying their products are safe and follow all food safety guidelines.
Have a consumer problem? Email tips to CBS News at consumer cbsnews. Heavy metals found in 45 fruit juices: report. Please enter email address to continue. Please enter valid email address to continue. Chrome Safari Continue. Officials and researchers often use the data to determine risk factors for major diseases and develop public health policy.
In fact, data on lead in the blood of NHANES participants were instrumental in developing policies that have successfully resulted in lead being removed from gasoline. Our analysis was led by Richard Stahlhut, M. Ana Navas-Acien, M. She was the lead author of a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association PDF that first linked low-level arsenic exposure with the prevalence of type 2 diabetes in the United States.
Because most ingested arsenic is excreted in urine, the best measure of recent exposure is a urine test. That made the results we analyzed more likely to represent inorganic arsenic, of greatest concern in terms of potential health risks. The resulting analysis of almost 3, study participants found that those reporting apple-juice consumption had on average 19 percent greater levels of total urinary arsenic than those subjects who did not, and those who reported drinking grape juice had 20 percent higher levels.
The results might understate the correlation between juice consumption and urinary arsenic levels because NHANES urinary data exclude children younger than 6, who tend to be big juice drinkers. Robert Wright, M. Those brands with elevated arsenic should investigate the source and eliminate it. Arsenic has been notoriously used as a poison since ancient times. A fatal poisoning would require a single dose of inorganic arsenic about the weight of a postage stamp.
But chronic toxicity can result from long-term exposure to much lower levels in food, and even to water that meets the ppb drinking-water limit. A study of children in Bangladesh PDF suggested diminished intelligence based on test scores in children exposed to arsenic in drinking water at levels above 5 ppb, says study author Joseph Graziano, Ph.
In Maine, where almost half the population relies on private wells, the USGS found arsenic levels in well water as high as 3, ppb. And a study published in PDF in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health examined the long-term effects of low-level exposure on more than rural Texans whose groundwater was estimated to have arsenic at median levels below the federal drinking-water standard.
It found that exposure was related to poor scores in language, memory, and other brain functions. Chronic arsenic exposure can initially cause gastrointestinal problems and skin discoloration or lesions.
Exposure over time, which the World Health Organization says could be five to 20 years, could increase the risk of various cancers and high blood pressure, diabetes, and reproductive problems.
Signs of chronic low-level arsenic exposure can be mistaken for other ailments such as chronic fatigue syndrome. Usually the connection to arsenic exposure is not made immediately, as Sharyn Duffy of Geneseo, N.
She visited a doctor in about pain and skin changes on the sole of her left foot. She was referred to a podiatrist and eventually received a diagnosis of hyperkeratosis, in which lesions develop or thick skin forms on the palms or soles of the feet.
It can be among the earliest symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning. But she says it was roughly two years before she was finally referred to a neurologist, who suggested testing for arsenic. She had double the typical levels. Michael Harbut, M. Case in point: From through , residents of Antofagasta, Chile, were exposed to naturally occurring arsenic in drinking water PDF that peaked at almost 1, ppb before an arsenic removal plant was installed.
Studies led by researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found that people born during that period who had probable exposure in the womb and during early childhood had a lung-cancer death rate six times higher than those in their age group elsewhere in Chile. Their rate of death in their 30s and 40s from another form of lung disease was almost 50 times higher than for people without that arsenic exposure.
In addition to juice, foods including chicken, rice, and even baby food have been found to contain arsenic—sometimes at higher levels than the amounts found in juice. Brian Jackson, Ph. He reported finding up to 23 ppb of arsenic in lab tests of name-brand jars of baby food, with inorganic arsenic representing 70 to 90 percent of those total amounts.
Similar results turned up in a study conducted by FDA scientists in Cincinnati, who found arsenic levels of up to 24 ppb in baby food, with sweet potatoes, carrots, green beans, and peaches containing only the inorganic form. A United Kingdom study published in PDF found that the levels of inorganic arsenic in ounce packets of dried infant rice cereals ranged from 60 to ppb.
Rice-based infant cereals are often the first solid food that babies eat. Rice frequently contains high levels of inorganic arsenic because it is among plants that are unusually efficient at taking up arsenic from the soil and incorporating it in the grains people eat. Moreover, much of the rice produced in the U.
Meharg studies human exposures to arsenic in the environment. His research over the past six years has shown that U. Rice from Egypt has the lowest levels of all. Infant rice cereal for the U.
His study PDF found that median arsenic levels in California rice were 41 percent lower than levels in rice from the south-central U.
Evidence of arsenic's ability to cause cancer and other life-threatening illnesses has surged because some of the diseases linked to it have latency periods of several decades. Only recently have scientists been able to more fully measure the effects in populations that were exposed to elevated levels of arsenic in drinking water many years ago. The Environmental Protection Agency periodically revises its assessment of the toxicity of various chemicals to offer guidance on drinking-water standards.
Based on such a review, the agency changed the water standard for arsenic to 10 ppb, effective in , from the ppb limit it set in The EPA had proposed a 5-ppb limit in , so the current limit is a compromise that came only after years of haggling over the costs of removing arsenic.
Since , New Jersey has had a 5-ppb threshold, advising residents that water with arsenic levels above that shouldn't be used for drinking or cooking. For known human carcinogens such as inorganic arsenic, the EPA assumes there's actually no "safe" level of exposure, so it normally sets exposure limits that include a margin of safety to ideally allow for only one additional case of cancer in a million people, or at worst, no more than one in 10, For water with 10 ppb of arsenic, the excess cancer risk is one in Debate over that standard is likely to begin anew.
The agency's latest draft report, from February , proposes that the number used to calculate the cancer risk posed by ingesting inorganic arsenic be increased fold to reflect arsenic's role in causing bladder and lung cancer.
The proposal "suggests that arsenic's carcinogenic properties have been underestimated for a long time and that the federal drinking-water standard is underprotective based on current science," says Keeve Nachman, the Johns Hopkins scientist.
Each year the FDA tests a variety of foods and beverages for arsenic and other contaminants. It also started a program in to test for specific toxins such as arsenic and lead in domestic and imported products.
As of late November, that program had published results for samples of apple juice and concentrate. And the agency can alert inspectors at U. Currently there's an alert for increased surveillance of apple concentrate from China and six other countries "where we have a suspicion there may be high levels of arsenic in their products," says FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Yao.
But in fiscal , the agency conducted physical inspections of only 2 percent of imported food shipments.
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