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Poco
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« Reply #8 on: March 02, 2008, 11:15:20 PM » |
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No tests on Draper or Ranger, but Foster Farms was not too bad.
On the other hand, your choices as a chicken shopper and
consumer will directly bear on how much arsenic you will
ingest, our results suggest. Nearly three-quarters of the
raw chicken breasts, thighs and livers from conventional
producers that we tested carried detectable levels of arsenic.
Of certified organic or other “premium” chicken parts or
whole chickens, just one-third had detectable arsenic.
Use of arsenic in chicken feed is prohibited under organic
standards.
While we tested no more than five packages of a specific
product from any one brand, results were somewhat
consistent within individual brands. None of the Rosie
Organic Chicken breast, for example, had detectable arsenic.
Arsenic also was absent or near the limit of our laboratory’s
ability to detect it from several non-organic premium
chicken brands, including Smart Chicken as well as Raised
Right Natural, Gerber’s Amish and Rocky Jr. Natural Chicken.
Premium brands did not test uniformly superior in terms of
arsenic, however. Four of five whole chickens from the single
kosher/halal brand we tested, Empire Kosher, had detectable
arsenic, with an average level of about 4 parts per billion. We
also found detectable levels of arsenic—albeit very close to
the limit of detection—in 4 of 5 samples of Smart Chicken
organic chicken breasts, purchased in Minnesota.
When we tested chicken breasts or strips (although not
necessarily chicken thighs) from Tyson and Foster Farms, the
largest and eighth largest broiler chicken producers in the
U.S. respectively, we detected no arsenic on average.
Arsenic was absent from thigh or leg meat tested under the
Rosie Organic, Rocky Jr. and Gerber’s Amish labels.
Among the three kinds of chicken liver tested, the premium
Kadejan brand was the only one found to be free of arsenic.
Five packages of Gold’n Plump livers contained an average
of nearly 222 ppb arsenic, the highest of all our chicken
samples—albeit still below the 2,000 ppb arsenic maximum
allowed in liver under law.
Arsenic also varied greatly among fast food chicken products
that we tested (Figure B). All such products carried some
detectable arsenic. But on average chicken thighs from
Church’s had 20 times the arsenic on average of thighs
purchased from KFC; on average, chicken sandwiches from Jack
In The Box registered more than five times the arsenic of those
from Subway. The source of this variation is unclear, however.
Making sense
Arsenic levels previously found in chicken generally have
been lower than federal standards, as are ours. That is, they
don’t appear to routinely violate the “tolerance levels” for
arsenic in meat set by the Food and Drug Administration—
in a process we describe in Chapter 2, and below which
consumption is deemed to be “safe.”
But that misses a more important point. This is arsenic
added intentionally to chicken. Why put more arsenic in the
food chain in the first place?
Some in the poultry industry claim arsenic in feed is needed
to raise healthy birds. Not true. Arsenic use in chicken is
unnecessary, pure and simple. Europe has banned arsenic in
animal feeds. Based on our limited sampling, many organic
and other U.S. chicken producers also appear to use no or
very little arsenic. We found little or no arsenic in chicken
products from Tyson, the world’s largest producer, for
example. (Our samples are too limited in number for us to
comfortably draw conclusions about Tyson’s arsenic use for
its entire global production.)
The poultry industry also has claimed the kinds of arsenic
fed to these birds is harmless. That’s because arsenic comes
in various forms, both inorganic and organic. The kinds of
arsenic directly added to chicken feed are “organic” arsenics,
most often one called roxarsone. (Organic in this case means
a molecule containing carbon atoms as well as arsenic). Until
recently, conventional wisdom had it that organic arsenic
wasn’t as poisonous as inorganic arsenic, the kind most
closely linked to cancer thus far.
But again, this claim misses the point. All arsenic should be
considered toxic. Organic and inorganic forms of arsenic
convert to one another, in the body and in the environment.
In fact, some organic arsenic appears to be transformed
within the chicken to inorganic arsenic; the EPA estimates
65 percent of arsenic in chicken meat is inorganic arsenic.
Further, the latest science is overturning conventional
wisdom: some organic forms of arsenic created by the
body’s metabolism now appear to be more toxic than
inorganic arsenic.
All of this suggests that the best arsenic, in chicken meat or
chicken feed, is no arsenic at all.
Finally, the poultry industry may claim the amount of arsenic
in chicken is simply too low to worry about. But even low
exposures to something known to cause cancer generally is
presumed to be risky, and therefore to be avoided. Further,
the USDA and FDA have avoided testing for arsenic in the
chicken that people mostly eat, namely muscle tissue.
People may be getting a lot more arsenic exposure through
eating chicken than previously was acknowledged. This is
especially true for “chicken lovers,” people who eat more
chicken than average.
Children who eat chicken also may face greater arsenic risks
than we previously knew. That’s because the latest science
shows that some arsenic exerts its poisonous effects in ways
that food regulators haven’t necessarily taken into account
in setting “safe” levels, such as by disrupting hormone
function. Hormones are essential for the body’s function, as
well as for normal development of a child’s brain, gonads
and other organs. Because nature intends for hormones
in the body to function at very, very low levels, even tiny
exposures to a hormone-disrupting chemical may be
sufficient to throw normal hormone function off course.
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