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Sunday, September 15, 2013

ARSENIC IN FOOD - FDA COVERUP AND REFUSAL TO DISCLOSE TRUE DANGER

High levels of arsenic, cadmium and other toxic contaminants in our food that you should know about.
 
NATURAL NEWS - FDA deliberately deceiving Americans over arsenic in rice, chicken and other foods; contamination now widespread.  There is arsenic in rice, and it's generally higher in brown rice than in white rice.
 
Consumer Reports tested 223 samples of rice products in 2012 and found significant levels of arsenic in most of them, including inorganic arsenic (the really toxic kind).
 
As Consumer Reports found, it's not unusual to see arsenic at levels of 200 ppb or more in rice-based baby cereals. Click here for the complete test results.
 
The release of this information freaked out the U.S. rice industry, resulting in enormous pressure being put on the FDA to try to assuage fears that rice products were contaminated with arsenic (which they are). 
 
So the FDA, always working in the interests of food corporations rather than the public, issued a statement saying that yes, there was arsenic in rice, but no, it didn't pose any "short-term" health risks.
 
Well, we already knew that. Otherwise people would be dropping dead from eating rice. But what the FDA totally glossed over was the long-term health risks from chronic exposure to arsenic.  That's where our real concerns are found, and that's the issue that the FDA completely ignored.
 
The FDA's exact language on this is, "agency scientists determined that the amount of detectable arsenic is too low in the rice and rice product samples to cause any immediate or short-term adverse health effects."
 
The FDA's glossing over the arsenic problem was so blatant that even WIRED Magazine got in on the backlash and published a story by Deborah Blum that essentially accuses the FDA of a cover-up.
 
In fact, the real cover-up is far bigger than arsenic in rice.  Lead and cadmium are far more toxic than arsenic.
 
The toxic elements lead and cadmium are probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more toxic than arsenic, generally speaking.
 
While each metal targets different body organs and metabolic pathways, the overall toxicity of lead and cadmium is many times that of arsenic.
 
So why isn't anybody talking about cadmium in rice?  Probably because the issue becomes quickly politicized when the conversation turns to rice grown in China.
 
 
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When you buy organic food from the bulk section of your supermarket, it's advisable to demand to know where the food was actually grown - not where the supermarket purchased it. 
 
I live in Canada and the supermarket employee would reassure me that the millet I used to buy "came from the USA". 
 
What he did not tell me, and what he probably did not know, was that while the millet "was imported from the US" it was not grown there but in Asia.  There are big wholesale importers in the US that buy large amounts of food from Asia and then sell them to distributors in Canada and the USA.  
 
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Canada and the US used to grow huge amounts of grains for human consumption, but now they find it more profitable to grow corn, which can be used as an ingredient in the production of ethanol.  In the meantime supermarkets import cheaper grains and other foods from Asia.
 
 
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