Researchers have known for some time that the food and drink we all consume contains arsenic.
Should we be concerned? Aren’t we protected by federal regulations? Actually, no – we are not. In the US, as in many countries, the government regulates the concentration of arsenic in drinking water, but does not regulate the concentration of arsenic in any other drink or food. We have a mercury-in-food regulation; why don’t we have an arsenic-in-food regulation?
One important difference is that all of the compounds of mercury we find in food are equally toxic. This is not the case for arsenic. Although we normally think of arsenic compounds as potentially harmful, most of the arsenic we eat is harmless. Seafood, which contains by far the highest concentrations of arsenic, delivers it as arsenobetaine, an organic chemical containing arsenic that is innocuous to us humans.
How then should arsenic in food be regulated? To do that well, we need to develop better ways to determine the amounts of arsenic and other chemicals in our foods.
Focus on Rice
Scientists are still in the early days of collecting data on the arsenic content of food. So far, we think the only widely consumed foodstuffs with the potential for long-term health problems due to the arsenic content are rice and all rice-derived products, such as flour, cakes, crackers and infant formulas.
Chemical analyses show that regardless of the origin of the rice, four arsenic-containing compounds account for about 95% of the arsenic that is released from rice on cooking. Two of the compounds, together known as inorganic arsenic, are known human carcinogens, and two (monomethyl and dimethylated arsenic) are possibly carcinogenic to humans, according the International Agency for Research on Cancer.
