Study finds elevated levels of toxic metals in some juices and soft drinks
news.tulane.edu
news.tulane.edu
But to answer the question I believe that they are -- I still see periodic demonstrations of dissolving a full can of soda with acid leaving the soda contained (first yt hit: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xIVONw9Pr4w)
https://www.theonion.com/man-who-drinks-5-diet-cokes-per-day...
It might not be possible to kick both at once, but I feel like my life is better since switching mostly to coffee.
Good luck!
No, that's not why you so often see reference to the defined safe level of toxins in water when talking about foods. FDA does not always have standards defined for levels of those toxins in food, but there might be a level defined by EPA for water. If you want an official, scientifically plausible number to fall back on, the level defined for water is at least something.
For example, FDA didn't have a defined safe level of arsenic in rice-based foods for infants until 2020, and there's still no defined safe level of for adults AFAIK. There's nothing mysterious about this: the ag industry lobbies against these standards, and lobbies to weaken them as much as possible when they exist. But babies are cute, so eventually FDA made a standard, at least for infants - after years of pressure from groups like Consumer Reports.
The paper referenced in the article says:
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed an action level of 10 μg/L of inorganic arsenic in apple juice (USFDA, 2013).
which suggests that at the time of writing, there's isn't an official number defined by the FDA. Based on the language on the FDA's website [0] I assume "draft guidance" (which has been in existence as a "draft" for a decade) means producers won't be held accountable for exceeding the numbers there.
https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/ars...
I suppose it is a decent fallback -but it's a reminder that regulatory frameworks could use some refinement!
Well first show me a politician that wants to get rid of the lobbyist system. The last one I heard of was Ron Paul over a decade ago.
BTW, I read of a better way to cook brown rice that reduces arsenic. Instead of 1 part rice, 2 parts water, simmer for 45 minutes, one does this:
1. Cook brown 1 part brown rice in 6 parts water for 30 minutes. 2. Strain to remove the water. Put rice in a steamer basket. 3. Steam for 10 minutes.
Much of the arsenic is carried away in the water in step 2. The rice also comes out much fluffier.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16876928/
tl;dr - rinse your rice with clean water and then cook it at a ratio of 1:6 rice:water followed by draining the excess water will more than halve the amount of arsenic in the finished product
edit - tl;dr updated for accuracy
What they are selling in the supermarket can hardly be qualified as fruit juice, and are basically differently flavored soda. Some of them even manage to have more sugar than a Coke.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_juice#Not_from_concentr...
Grape juice is absolutely not normally grape juice plus possibly sugar. That would be too expensive.
How sure are we on that? It has been a while, but I recall something like Welch's tasting like grape juice.
You can use it to make wine just fine, if you're in to that sort of thing.
If i had to guess the white grape juice is whatever the green seedless variety in california was for decades from the late 70s on.
If I read "no artificial colours or flavours", I don't presume nothing has been added, because that would be really naive. So if the ethyl butyrate they re-introduce to the juice came from fruit, I see that as natural, and a pretty reasonable thing to do. Is that what you're contending?
Allegedly orange juice in the grocery store was invented in the mid 20th century as a way to sell more oranges.
1: https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...
https://gizmodo.com/dirty-little-secret-orange-juice-is-arti...
Which fruit juice are you finding not amazing? To me orange, grapefruit juices are pretty amazing and quite a different experience from eating the raw fruit (which I like too).
Oranges now are all navel oranges, which i find tougher, less sweet, and more tough fleshed.
As an aside, the oranges i am talking about are exactly tennis ball sized and can be fired out of a tennis ball cannon - to about 2 blocks away.
It is till a lot of sugar and eating the fruit is way, way better but at least there are no artificial whatever or added sugar.
You could have grape juice in (obviously) 100% grape juice, or in mixtures where the percentage of each juice (again, squeezed from fruits) is listed on the standard components label.
We di have juices from concentrate, but it is then clearly labelled as such. Or juices that are only part fruit, and it is labelled as such too.
The main thing was to make sure that when the juice says 100% it has to be only this and from squeezed fruit.
Incorrect for lots of people.
Some people like flavored/bubbly water over plain flat water. Some people do Perrier, some do LaCroix, some do Coke Zero. All of these are essentially nutritionally identical.
Really just a question of whether you think the artificial sweetener has an adverse effect on your health, which in these quantities it doesn't seem to. And if you want caffeine -- the caffeine in a liter of Coke Zero is the same as a single cup of coffee, so this is the same as a fairly normal 2 cups of coffee per day.
> "There was a 23% higher risk of developing kidney stones in the highest category of consumption of sugar-sweetened cola compared with the lowest category"
> "Artificially sweetened sodas were marginally associated with kidney stones, with an inverse relation for colas and a direct relation for noncolas."
So no worries about your Coke Zero giving you kidney stones. The culprit seems to be the fructose, rather, which Coke Zero doesn't contain:
> "Higher consumption of sugar-sweetened soda was associated with a higher incidence of kidney stones, which may be because of the fructose content. Fructose has been shown to increase the urinary excretion of calcium, oxalate, and uric acid, thus increasing the risk of stones."
Google "Mountain Dew Mouth".
Some "medium" sodas at fast food joints are over a liter, these days.
People who drink a lot of soda, in the US, really DRINK A LOT OF SODA.
Consider also that it's been the norm for years, in the US, to have free refills on soda at restaurants (with waiters eagerly topping them off constantly) and that many fast food places have self-serve soda that's either explicitly or de facto unlimited refill, if you go inside to eat rather than using the drive-through.
"Well, it's roughly the size of a two year old child, if the child were liquefied."
[1] https://www.uclahealth.org/news/observational-studies-shed-l....
And if consumption of diet soda correlates with other things, for example an unhealthier diet in general that the person "compensates" for by only drinking diet soda, then it would show up in an observational study even though there's no cause-and-effect.
But remember, diet soda is 99+% water. Really the only hypothetical problems with diet soda could be 1) artificial sweetener chemicals in the body triggering cancer or other ailments, and 2) artificial sweeteners triggering a glucose-like response triggering weight gain. But studies with rats indicate 1) shouldn't be an issue at anywhere near the concentrations in diet soda, and 2) seems rather far-fetched.
It's not what I do personally but I also don't judge, because scientifically, it's basically just water.
Do you have a problem with somebody drinking 2 cans' worth of LaCroix in the morning, 1 at lunch, 2 in the afternoon, and 1 at dinner? Why should that suddenly become "ridiculous" because an eyedropper amount of caramel color, caffeine, and artificial sweetener get added?
We're eating and drinking acidic things all day long, orange juice and grapefruits and the rest. And diet soda doesn't adhere in a layer to your teeth, the way things like orange juice and sugary Coke do.
Our enamel repairs itself through our saliva. Otherwise you'd never be able to drink a lemonade or eat a grapefruit. The acidity of Coke Zero is a nonissue in the context of a normal diet.
(Not to mention that flavored carbonated waters like La Croix and Bubly are also acidic. Bubly grapefruit flavor is pH 3.86, while Coke Zero is 3.18, from a quick Google.)
Sugar, and the addition to things that taste like it is far worse than we understand. It seems to make people do crazy things.
Or is this all a relatively new problem, whether from industrial pollution or fertilizer contamination or farm equipment or whatnot?
I assume some of the arsenic in these juice samples is from a similar pattern of usage.
It was less than 10% of samples tested. Not great, most beverages did not pose a problem. I'd like to see a list of the ones that tested postitive.
Louisiana is not quite known for its strict environmental standards (including water quality). [1] Presumably most soft drinks and juices are bottled at plants locally using local water supplies as carrying liquids long distances is not economically advantageous.
Its unclear (to me at least) if any of these findings are applicable to soft drinks/juices in other states with stricter water quality standards.
[Edit] Definitely not saying soft drinks/juices aren't toxic, I'm mostly pointing out this is a local/regional study and I feel therefore its implications are therefore local/regional.
I'd prefer:
- more local/regional studies for my location or
- a randomly sampled nation wide study or
- a control group against local/regional bottled water
before I make broad conclusions/make a change in lifestyle.
That said I mostly don't drink soft drinks/bottled water.
[1] https://www.wwno.org/coastal-desk/2022-09-29/louisiana-ranks...
Moving freight in the continental US is cheap.
In the US there are nineteen Coca-Cola bottling plants in fourteen states. None of those bottling plants are in Louisiana. Not difficult information to find.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Coca-Cola_buildings_an...
1) We have one of the best freight river systems in the world: the Mississippi/Missouri. River transport is insanely cheap.
2) Our passenger rail system may be some combo of "worse than many developing-world nations" and "nonexistent", but our freight rail network's quite good. Rail's cheap.
3) We subsidize the everloving shit out of truck transportation, making it really cheap, too.
Along similar lines, acidity (well, really not enough alkalinity) was a big factor in the municipal water problems at Flint, Michigan: the water in the pipes was allowed to become too acidic, causing it to react with the lead pipes - significantly increasing the amount of lead dissolved in the water. Whereas if the water had been more alkaline (higher pH), the lead in the pipes would not have ended up in the water to nearly the same extent.
> Most important, the treated Flint River water lacked one chemical that the treated Detroit water had: phosphate. “They essentially lost something that was protecting them against high lead concentrations,” Giammar says. Cities such as Detroit add orthophosphate to their water as part of their corrosion control plans because the compound encourages the formation of lead phosphates, which are largely insoluble and can add to the pipes’ passivation layer.
…
> The treated Flint River water had a relatively low pH that decreased over time. According to monthly operating reports from the Flint treatment plant, the city’s water had a pH of about 8 in December 2014, but then it slowly dropped to 7.3 by August 2015. Environmental engineers say that if water pH drifts too low in the absence of orthophosphate, the water can start to leach high levels of lead from pipes.
> The pH drop over time seems to indicate that plant operators in Flint didn’t even have a target pH as part of a corrosion plan, Edwards says. Water utilities usually find a pH that’s optimal for preventing corrosion in their system. For example, in Boston, another city with old lead pipes, average water pH held steady around 9.6
https://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i7/Lead-Ended-Flints-Tap-Wat...
Fruit juice and cola is of course much, much more acidic than the Flint water - orange juice for example is about pH 4 (that is, 1000 times more H+ ions than pH 7)
It's not an accident, and it's not like it never occurred to anyone that we might want to pay attention to heavy metal levels in food. Who do you think has more money to spend on lobbyists and campaign contributions, the people who want FDA to pay attention to this or the people who don't?
https://www.theonion.com/american-people-hire-high-powered-l...
AAC setups appear to range from $5,000 to $25,000 (depending on features like multi-sample processing automation etc.) at present. A lab capable of safely handling nitric acid digestion (fumes a bit) needs an effective chemical fume hood, which are at least $20,000 for a fairly basic small hood, and each metal you want to test for requires a separete protocol. See for example:
https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-12/documents/70...
You can do a bunch of different metals at once with ICP-MS but those systems cost around 10X as much as AAC.
https://www.consumerreports.org/water-quality/whats-really-i...
Anybody know of a beverages brand that prioritizes filtration / actual health of their consumers?
I would LOVE to fund a startup that focused on that from a CPG perspective or alternatively some actual scientifically relevant and ongoing standards labeling for food, beverages, etc
I get test data mailed to me quarterly about my tap water without having to ask for it or sign up. I've never seen any test data to speak of for any bottled water.
And the tap water is not stored in plastic bottles.
https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S08891575230010...
It is arrogant. You make a claim then do not show any evidence or data. You do not name those _certain places_.
Which places and what data do you have to back up the claim?
Finland
Ireland
Norway
France
Netherlands
Japan
Sweden
Canada
United Kingdom
Portugal
Switzerland
Austria
United States
...
---
On the other hand:
Why There is Nothing Wrong With American Food Standards - https://techround.co.uk/business/american-food-standards/
On the other hand, what we perceive as the low quality of food in the US might be more geared towards the "healthiness" of that food and not its safety. For instance, I will often eat fast food for a couple days while recovering from food poisoning because I feel it's generally safer than fresh food. That thing is absent of any nutrition, but it's also almost sterile.
The US scores a (perfect?) 100 in that sub-sub-category. It also scores 100 in nutrition labeling, which I found suprising, because my impression was that the nutrition and ingredient labels in the US are pretty subpar compared to the EU. But what do I know.
https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec...