| ‘White Wine and Beer Important Sources of Arsenic’ screams the title of the article in livescience.com which reports the study. But as you go through the results you feel assured that the most significant source of arsenic in most people's diets is drinking water. The new study is the first to take into account this constituent when looking at the amount of arsenic from foods.
Researchers analyzed the diets of 852 people in New Hampshire and the levels of arsenic in their toenails. Four out of the 120 foods studied turned out to significantly raise people's arsenic levels: beer, white wine (red wine to a lesser extent), Brussels sprouts and dark-meat fish such as salmon, tuna and sardines. Interestingly, the researchers didn't find a link between arsenic levels and intake of rice, which is thought to be relatively high in arsenic.
In the study, the arsenic levels in the participants' household tap water were well below the 10 micrograms per liter set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limit, at 0.30 micrograms per liter, on average. However, 52 participants had tap water arsenic levels higher than the EPA's limits.
The results suggest that diet can be an important source of people's arsenic exposure over the long term, regardless of arsenic concentrations in their drinking water, the researchers said.
The element arsenic occurs naturally in the environment. Long-term exposure, even at low levels, has been linked to increased risks of bladder, lung and skin cancer, as well as type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
The study was published on November 16 in the Nutrition Journal and is reported in delWine mainly so our white wine drinkers don’t start panicking. The diet we maintain and the quality of foodstuff is considered to contain far more levels of arsenic and carcinogenic elements, particularly in India, according to experts.
According to the researchers diet can be an important source of people's arsenic exposure over the long term, regardless of arsenic concentrations in their drinking water. The arsenic levels in participants' toenails were 0.12 micrograms per gram, on average. However, it is unclear what level of concentration found in toenail samples might signal an unsafe level of arsenic exposure, according to the study author Kathryn Cottingham. The toenail measurements in the study served only as a way to compare levels among people
People who reported drinking on average two and half beers or a glass of white wine every day had arsenic levels 20 to 30 percent higher than those of people who didn't drink.
One possible explanation is that the ingredients in beer and wine are relatively high in arsenic, according to the researchers. It is also possible that arsenic is added during the filtration process that gives beer and wine their sparkly, clear looks, as one recent study suggested, Cottingham said.
Although some foods are high in arsenic, people don't need to avoid them entirely, she says, advising that perhaps the best way to avoid exposure from diet is to mix it up in the foods, and not eat the same thing every day." |