Arsenic in Your Juice and Rice

Our daughter sent me this link and I'd highly recommend you tke a look. http://health.yahoo.net/articles/nutrition/arsenic-in-juice?page=3
I've copied a few statements from the article to wet your appetite and give you some idea what it says.

I caution you that the government does not control the arsenic levels in our food and a long time ago arsenic was a part of the pesticides used by farmers. It never left the soil except to piggy back in some of the foods we eat. For brands they test that were high in inorganic arsenic, read the article. Yes, there is inorganic and organic. The inorganic being the nastier one.

So read away. You'll be shocked. I was.
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10 of three dozen apple-juice samples with total arsenic levels exceeding 10 parts per billion (ppb).


“People sometimes say, ‘If arsenic exposure is so bad, why don’t you see more people sick or dying from it?’ But the many diseases likely to be increased by exposure even at relatively low levels are so common already that its effects are overlooked simply because no one has looked carefully for the connection,” says Joshua Hamilton, Ph.D., a toxicologist specializing in arsenic research and the chief academic and scientific officer at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass.


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.
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.S. is grown in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, and Texas, on land formerly used to grow cotton, where arsenical pesticides were used for decades.


U.S. rice has among the highest average inorganic arsenic levels in the world—almost three times higher than levels in Basmati rice imported from low-arsenic areas of Nepal, India, and Pakistan. Rice from Egypt has the lowest levels of all.


Infant rice cereal for the U.S. market is generally made from U.S. rice, Meharg says, but labeling usually doesn’t specify country of origin.

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Just one more reason to try and produce all we can of our own food.