I’ve already criticized the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for its handling of radiation contamination, now there’s evidence they’re ignoring arsenic poisoning of apples, rice, and other food due to farm chemicals.

In one study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, U.S. women who ate half a cup of cooked rice, ingested an amount of poisonous arsenic equivalent to drinking four and a quarter cups of water with the maximum allowable level of arsenic.

“The large and statistically significant association we observed between rice consumption and urinary arsenic, in addition to earlier reports of elevated arsenic concentrations in rice, highlights the need to regulate arsenic in food.”

But that’s not all.  Consumer Reports, and the TV show Dr. Oz, discovers that apple juice is also contaminated with arsenic.  Several brands of apple and grape juice were found to have arsenic levels exceeding Federal safe limits (max 10 parts per billion).

“Roughly 10% 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.”– Consumer Reports

Notice “inorganic arsenic”, that means it’s not naturally occurring arsenic in the soil, it’s coming from the chemicals used on farms!

Consumer Reports also added that other foods are contaminated with chemical arsenic, and that lead has been found in juices as well.

Dr. Oz questioned the FDA and they gave him the amazing response that most food born arsenic is “essentially harmless”!  He was also amazed to find out that the FDA has no criteria regarding lead in apple juice!

Inorganic (chemical) arsenic is absorbed by plant roots.  Inorganic arsenic gets into the soil because it’s part of the ingredients in the chemicals farmers use.  Over the decades those chemicals, including arsenic, has been building up in the farm soil, now it’s finally showing up in high levels in our food!

Researchers in Scotland found that most arsenic contamination can be found in U.S. states that used to grow cotton. Chemicals used on cotton plants had high levels of arsenic.  They also found that rice grown in those states had much higher levels of arsenic, than rice grown in California.

Andrew Meharg, of the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, has been warning since before 2007 about arsenic contamination in rice!  He says it’s not just the U.S. and European rice crops, but rice grown in Asia (now you can add the radiation from Japan).

In fact, Meharg said the U.S. Environment Protection Agency (EPA) conducted a study and were concerned with the results: “…the risk assessment has been done for the U.S.A. by the U.S. EPA and they’ve actually found that there is a risk for the U.S. based population and that’s why the U.S. levels in water were reduced, because the risk from arsenic to the U.S. population was more perceptible, and above background, particularly for lung and bladder cancers and what we’re finding is that the levels of arsenic in rice for certain subpopulations exceed those current levels for safety and water. And eating high levels of rice, they’re actually well over what they should be consuming.”-from March, 2007 interview

Meharg said rice with the lowest levels of arsenic, according to his research, comes from India.

Don’t everybody rush for the ‘organically’ grown food, there just isn’t enough for all of us, just more reason there’s a coming global food crisis.  Grow your own!