Another Dirty Little Secret: Arsenic in Rice-Containing Foods from Organic Baby Formula to Energy Shots
Friday, March 2, 2012 at 9:35AM 
Organic infant formula using organic brown rice syrup as a sweetener contained arsenic concentrations up to six times the EPA safe drinking water limitWe know that sometimes it feels like there's so much contamination in the food supply you can't eat anything. So please don't "shoot the messenger" of this alarming story. A new study (published last month in Environmental Health Perspectives, the peer-reviewed journal of the National Institute of Health's environmental arm) found high levels of the known carcinogen, arsenic, in foods that contain rice-based ingredients--especially organic brown rice syrup, used as a "healthier" alternative sweetener to high-fructose corn syrup. Rice ingredients are increasingly present in foods in part because people are looking for wheat alternatives (for example, 15% of autistic children in the U.S. are on gluten-free diets) and partly because the industry has worked hard to develop uses for its crops.
Arsenic-based pesticides (which persist in soil indefinitely after application has ceased) were used extensively on cotton crops to control boll weevils, and today rice paddies routinely cover fields where cotton once grew.
The researchers at Dartmouth University in Hanover, New Hampshire analyzed foods containing rice ingredients (including rice flour, rice grains and rice syrup) from their local supermarkets, and identified arsenic levels above what's considered safe in drinking water. There are several areas of particular concern including rice syrups, baby formula, cereal and energy bars and energy shots. The study sites energy gels for endurance athletes listing organic brown rice syrup as a main ingredient (when consumed per manufacturer's instructions over a two hour workout) delivered more than the EPA limit for daily arsenic intake in water.
arsenic, energy shots, infant formula, rice 