Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Omitting that data which provides context probably tells you a lot about the people who wrote the report.
The report also mentions that the EPA has a "reference dose" of mercury of 0.1 ug/kg/day for women of childbearing age and young children, which they work out to 5.5 ug/day for the average woman -- versus an estimated 28.5ug total mercury/day consumed by the average American via contaminated HFCS.
However, it's not clear how this EPA standard compares to the "US allowable limit for mercury in bottled water", which is presumably an FDA standard, or what assumptions went into these standards.
For those following along, the mercury report is at http://www.healthobservatory.org/library.cfm?refid=105026
I found the FDA/EPA limits at http://www.state.nj.us/health/eoh/hhazweb/mercury.pdf page 11 has the numbers.
The mercury report does not include the 2000ppt FDA limit on mercury. It contains a different limit on methymercury which is not measured in any test of this report.
Middle of page 12...
The 0.1ug/kg/day is for methylmercury. The numbers measured in the report are for mercury. They researchers admit in the next paragraph that they have no idea if the mercury in HFCS is methymercury. (Presumably there are tests which they chose not to perform.)
But look what they do with the numbers:
- 20 samples of HFCS tested.
- 11 have no detectable mercury (<5ppb) [1]
- 1 sample was 570ppb
They then estimate mercury ingestion using the 570ppb outlier times the 50g USDA daily HFCS number to get 28.5ug. A scary number since it is about 5 times the limit they just showed you. Except the number these illusionists showed you in their left hand was for methylmercury limit of 3/4 scale women[2] and the number they showed you in their right was total mercury (inorganic plus organic) of full scale people, and the one in the right assumes that all the disparate sources of HFCS in a day's food happened to use the same outlier source[3].
[1] I wonder why the HFCS tests have a 5000ppT limit of detection and the foods test (page 14) have limits in the 20-100ppT range. Different tests? Something about HFCS that confounds the test? No answers.
[2] For the “average” 55 kg American woman I suppose the "average 55kg woman" weighs 55kg. The average American woman however weighs 74.5kg. 55kg gives a more dramatic number though.
[3] They don't report any sort of average or distribution of the 20 samples other than the 9 of them are above the limits of detection. I suspect the average did nothing for their argument so they went with an outlier. Let's check their data...
I just finished a 257mL american Coke (the little half can) with 2.5g of HFCS (1%, yes I mixed volume and mass, but we are estimating here) in it. Their one reported test of Coke was 60ppT mercury, which if we assume it all came from the HFCS would be 6ppB mercury in the HFCS. What if the 570ppb HFCS number were real and was used for Coke? That would be 5700ppt in the food test. There is nothing within an order of magnitude in the table, and there isn't much in the way of consumable food that is more heavily sugared than American sodas. What if you got ALL of your calories by drinking 20 tiny Cokes a day and what if ALL of the mercury in the Coke was methylmercury? 50g of HFCS at 6ppb would give you 0.3ug/day, about 5% of your EPA reference dose.
I'm curious, though, where you got the 1% number for Coke HFCS content? Elsewhere in the comments there is a link to an About.com article that says that most soft drinks contain about 10% HFCS, and I'd be surprised to see Coke among the less-sweetened drinks. I can't find other references online beyond guesses, which seem to indicate around 40g per regular can. If your estimate is off by a factor of 10, your proposed all-Coke diet would give you 50% of your EPA reference dose, which is a little more worrying.
Your 50% of EPA dose is correct, but still shouldn't be too worrying because there is no evidence presented that the mercury is in an organic form. Just that if it were, it would still be safe.
I'll go back and annotate the previous comment.
Or maybe not, the 'edit' link is gone, perhaps since it has a reply. I'll just have to hope people read far enough to find the correction.
And, just incase I sound as if I like mercury in my Coke, I don't. It seems reasonable to use mercury free alternatives (provided they don't have some other hazard). There was proposed legislation to that effect that didn't make it to law, perhaps it can make it this year. What I oppose here is terrifying the populace with puffed up science-sounding articles to achieve an ulterior motive.
They found a maximum of .57 ppm mercury in corn syrup; the allowable limit of mercury in sushi is 1 ppm.
.57 is probably high, and whatever source they found that from should be checked out; but this doesn't seem to me like reason for drastic action.
But I'm no expert! Anybody want to tell me why I'm wrong?
From the worst of the tested sources, in this survey, a soda could contain .06ppm mercury, more than an order of magnitude smaller than what the government considers dangerous in seafood.
It's interesting to read about Jeremy Pivens' mercury toxicity[3]. In order to reach a point where it affected his ability to live life normally, he had to eat sushi twice a day, every day. Furthermore, his doctors said that a few months of treatment would solve his problem.
It seems likely to me that the amount of HFCS you'd need to eat in the very unlikely worst case to get actual mercury poisoning is going to give you diabetes before the mercury affects you.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't stop allowing people to sell mercury laden HFCS! If 9/20 studied samples contain no mercury, they all should, it's clearly a public health problem. What I mean to say is just that this is likely only to be a serious problem for a very few very heavy HFCS consumers, if any, and that people shouldn't take it to mean "I can't eat HFCS because I'll get mercury in me", because they probably won't get clinical amounts of mercury.
There's plenty of good reasons to avoid HFCS, I advocate that to everyone, but I don't think that the fear of the mercury found by this study is one of them.
[1] http://www.answers.com/topic/high-fructose-corn-syrup-1#cite...
[2] http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_can_of_soda_pop_we...
[3] http://www.webmd.com/news/20081218/jeremy-pivens-high-mercur...
"emissions from power plants in 10 states - Alabama, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West Virginia - represent almost 60 percent of U.S. mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants"
And what do we find in IL, IN, KY, MI, OH, and PA?
Though, to be fair, coal isn't responsible for the majority of mercury emissions, see:
Switching to a better caustic soda process should eliminate the detectable mercury, regardless of the proximity to coal plants. And some food producers are doing so; as one of the papers points out: "No mercury was detected in the majority of beverages tested."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hydroxide#Manufacture
Wikipedia claims "the membrane cell process is economically the most viable", which does not use mercury.
Also, as shown in my previous links, chloralkali plants (which make caustic soda) pollute a significant amount of mercury (needlessly, in my opinion).
Soda outside the US,for example, still uses traditional sugar.
As a result, the corn growers are a vociferous lobby in support of the sugar program.
If it was readily available I would drink it all the time (which would be quite bad for me).
We still have only ourselves to blame though. Feeding little babies french fries, coca cola, and hamburgers is a sure way to destroy their sense of taste.
Debatable and harmful can be widely separated. Without any real numbers I am going to assume that this is a tiny amount of contamination and hardly meaningful.
PS: I might be an environmentalist, but I hate bad science reporting.
This chart lists several brand-name foods that had "detectable" levels of mercury, the worst of which is about 350 parts per trillion. According to Wikipedia, the "action level" of mercury in fish (the point at which government takes action) is one part per million. So it sounds like you'd have to eat/drink thousands of servings of this food to equal one particularly bad helping of fish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_poisoning#Prevention
On the other hand, Wikipedia lists the legal limit for water as two parts per billion ("inorganic mercury" instead of "methylmercury"), which would be easier to hit. I'm not sure which limit applies in this case.
Edit: It might be worse than this for some portion of the population. From the "Not so sweet" paper:
Using the USDA’s estimate of 50 grams of average consumption HFCS per day, one might roughly estimate potential total mercury ingestion via HFCS of up to 28.5ug total mercury/day (50 grams HFCS X 0.570 ug/g). Using these same assumptions, high-end HFCS consumers potentially could have much higher total mercury ingestion.
It is difficult to know to what to compare this figure. The EPA has established a "reference dose," or maximum recommended dietary intake of methylmercury. Methylmercury is the form typically found in fish and seafood. The reference dose of 0.1 ug/kg/day applies to women of childbearing age and young children, who are thought to be the most at risk from methylmercury exposure. For the "average" 55 kg American woman, this would translate into no more than 5.5ug/day of methylmercury.
There is no reference dose for total mercury. The mercury found in HFCS may be a different form of mercury than the methylmercury typically found in fish (we just don’t know), but it poses a risk just the same. Mercury in any form can be toxic to the developing brain.
The problem is that even if one dose is below harmful level, 10 doses might not be.
Or 100, what ever the dose is.
Because corn syrup is in almost everything it's hard to know just how much mercury you're ingesting.
I think that's Retric's point, and if it's not his, I'll certainly claim it. There's a little bit of everything in everything (thanks, entropy!). This article does nothing absolutely nothing to inform us as to whether this is actually worth thinking about.
The information content of this article is zero. Without more information it's not even worth your time to think about. (Trying to find more information might be worthwhile, and based on the other HN-posters who actually did that, I find myself fairly unconcerned about this putative threat.)
I avoid high fructose corn syrup myself for two reasons. Partly, it's because I'd rather pay for the sugar tariff than send more money to the corn lobby. The other part is that after stopping my consumption of soft drinks for other reasons, I find that foods and drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup are too sweet.
no it isn't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452906
"The US allowable limit for mercury in bottled water (and tap water) is 2000 parts per trillion. The report documents a maximum of 350 parts per trillion in Quaker Oatmeal to Go.
Omitting that data which provides context probably tells you a lot about the people who wrote the report."
The good news is that arsenic-free dogshit exists. Dogs just need a good diet of arsenic-free dog food.