US rice imports 'contain harmful levels of lead'

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22099990

by gnosis • 13 years ago

114 76 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

gnosis3• 13 years ago

"If you look through the scientific literature, especially on India and China, they irrigate their crops with raw sewage effluent and untreated industrial effluent," he explained."

...

"Dr Tongesayi also said that the increasing practice of sending electronic waste to developing countries - and the pollution it leads to - exacerbates the problem."

This is seriously scary!

I had no idea that the delicious Indian and Pakistani basmati rice that I buy from my local asian grocery store might have been grown in sewage!

They certainly don't advertise this at the grocery store. And this article mentions that high levels of arsenic in rice was a "well-known" problem, linking of FDA's advice on the matter:[1]

I had no idea about this either. Why isn't there more publicity about this?

What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer? Why aren't rice imports tested for heavy metals?

If not an outright ban on products that fail to meet basic safety standards, at the very least the FDA could require clear labeling of these products, so the consumer at least has half a chance of avoiding them if they are concerned. And who wouldn't be concerened about accidentally poisoning themselves on sewage-grown rice?

[1] http://www.fda.gov/forconsumers/consumerupdates/ucm319827.ht...

mikecane4• 13 years ago

>>>What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer?

It was basically eviscerated in the 1980s. One example is the increased amount of fat and bone allowed in meats. And did you forget about the infamous pink slime? FDA Approved!

mistercow3• 13 years ago

1. While use of ammonium hydroxide is FDA approved, approval of pink slime is really under USDA's jurisdiction.

2. Of all the failings of government regulation and the FDA in particular, pink slime is such a red herring that it's hardly even worth mentioning. If you want examples of the FDA screwing up, you can find way better examples than that.

jcr2• 13 years ago

> What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer?

The formal name is "Regulatory Capture" [1] but the common name is simply corruption.

The interesting thing the article fails to mention is most of the countries which the US imports rice from actually ban rice imports from the US. The US, specifically California central valley, had and mostly still has a huge rice industry, but since so many countries ban our imports farming rice not as profitable as it could be. The countries which ban rice imports from the US are typically trying to protect their own rice farmers.

NOTE: I'm using the term "ban" in loose manner, since in some case they just make importing rice from the US painfully difficult and expensive though endless and unfair regulation.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

hkmurakami• 13 years ago

>The countries which ban rice imports from the US are typically trying to protect their own rice farmers.

Japan's extremely inefficient agriculture sector (a model of corruption and government handouts, actually) is probably one of the most prominent offenders. (Their rice protectionism is both inefficient and corrupt)

seanmcdirmid3• 13 years ago

Think how it must feel to be Thailand, who is the largest rice exporter in the world? The US comes in at number 4 after China and Vietnam and just before India.

alex_doom• 13 years ago

"If you look through the scientific literature, especially on India and China, they irrigate their crops with raw sewage effluent and untreated industrial effluent," he explained."

I guess that gives new meaning to rice that's "organic"

aptwebapps• 13 years ago

Except for the "untreated industrial effluent" part, which is the scarier bit and presumably how the lead would get in.

MichaelSalib2• 13 years ago

What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer? Why aren't rice imports tested for heavy metals?

You know why. Because that would be onerous government regulation. Americans are obsessed with the idea that the government overregulates everything. That's why Congress is unwilling to fund enforcement actions.

anigbrowl• 13 years ago

I can't upvote this hard enough.

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

The government does overregulate damned near everything. Even worse, it fails to regulate the right things. You can't buy Kinder Eggs in the US because of FDA regulations, and yet the FDA lets in literally tons of rice that is tainted with lead or arsenic.

Does that seem like a problem to you? It seems like a problem to me.

No1• 13 years ago

No, it's because their mission above all else is now to reinforce big pharma.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/prescription/h...

aethertap3• 13 years ago

Personally, I'd prefer to assume more of the responsibility for selecting healthful food for my family, if it came with the freedom to choose it. I've run into a number of "harm in the name of help" regulations in that regard. For example, in order to sell meat in packaged cuts, it must be butchered at a USDA inspected facility. That sounds sensible at first glance, but it creates a problem for people who want humanely-raised, hormone and antibiotic free meat: running a USDA inspected processing facility is very expensive, and the only way to do it (currently) is to go for large volume. That means that the same facility that processes the conventional meat will be processing my meat, exposing it to both chemicals and pathogens that it would never otherwise have come into contact with (resistant forms of e. coli, among other things). In a large facility such as that, contamination from one animal has the potential to spread to many more. Health threats from this are uncommon, but they do happen and the size of the facilities means that their effects are widespread rather than localized.

Add to that the common practice of adding fat (from other animals) to ground meat, and you end up with a recipe for reduced-quality meat. One of the biggest reasons to eat grass-finished meat is its balance of omega fatty acids. When the leaner grass-finished meat is fatted up with fat from industrial animals, that benefit is lost. The regulation that was meant to help did help in the average, but it also made it more difficult to go beyond average.

One side-effect of regulation in agriculture in general seems to be to cut the small producers off from the bottom by centralizing and raising inspection costs. That in turn reduces diversity in the food supply and makes it more prone to large-scale outbreaks of problems (e.coli in spinach recently comes to mind).

It also has a second effect, which is that people trust food too much (rice from China seems to be a case in point). Because all food is inspected and certified transparently by someone else, consumers take little interest in the process, which makes it easier for things that aren't on the standard inspection list to escape notice.

Personally, I'd love to see a voluntary style of inspection, where a producer can opt in to one or more inspection programs in order to receive a certification. Consumers would then look for labels indicating whatever style of inspection they prefer (right now we basically have organic and not organic, but there are many others that might be relevant). There is definitely a need for inspection in the food supply, but I think that our current model of forcing all producers into a tiny number of alternatives is less than optimal.

grannyg00se• 13 years ago

That is not an India and China problem. It is an industrial farming and industrial policy problem. From which the USA also suffers.

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/help-ban-sludge/

beedogs• 13 years ago

> What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer? Why aren't rice imports tested for heavy metals?

You can thank Republicans, specifically the Bush administration, for neutering the FDA and the USDA.

Apparently profit is more important than whether or not Americans are consuming poison in their food.

DanBC• 13 years ago

> "Dr Tongesayi also said that the increasing practice of sending electronic waste to developing countries - and the pollution it leads to - exacerbates the problem."

The words "electronic waste" don't really convey the scale of the problem.

I used to imagine piles of computers, with people able to strip out the copper, tin, lead, gold, aluminum, steel, etc for sale. I knew conditions would be a bit rougher than UK factories, but I imagined some kind of shack, and some kind of tools.

Here's a snippet from a UK TV programme about the e-waste dump in Agbogbloshie, Accra, Ghana. It's pretty depressing. There's no kind of sensible plan to recovering useful stuff. Seeing a boy smashing polyester / polystyrene caps off an old PCB with a rock is just grim.

(http://videobam.com/rcEUM)

Here's a link to the original programme (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00sch78)

nmz7872• 13 years ago

"What happened to the FDA's mission to protect the consumer? Why aren't rice imports tested for heavy metals?"

'FDA spokesman Noah Bartolucci told BBC News that the "FDA plans to review the new research on lead levels in imported rice released today".'

Seems like they're just laggy... is there requirement in law to test one gram of every Xth ton of imported food?

harlox• 13 years ago

Is anything safe to eat anymore?

gph• 13 years ago

Sure, Lab-Grown Petri Dish Meat© is perfectly safe.

crag2• 13 years ago

You mean "Spam"? Already trademarked.

uvdiv4• 13 years ago

Yes, virtually everything. Out of about 10,000 samples of 731 different food products, the FDA found nothing within orders of magnitude of these lead levels.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/FoodScienceResearch/TotalD...

pp. 69-80

dhaivatpandya• 13 years ago

I don't think this a new problem, its just one that has been hidden exceptionally well in "recent" times.

The obvious example is The Jungle by Sinclair which was essentially publicity of precisely these problems, except in the beginnings of the 20th century. I highly doubt that the situation has been drastically improved, but, really hidden much more thoroughly from the public view.

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

Good thing the FDA is funded to appropriate levels to ensure that the rest of our food is safe! Oh wait...

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-204_162-57572066/sequester-may-l...

The really frightening thing to me is that even before the sequester, the FDA has largely left it up to industry-approved 3rd party food inspectors to validate food safety.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-11/food-sickens-millio...

nicksergeant3• 13 years ago

We heard about this a year ago and cut almost 95% of the rice in our diet. Now we have a rice dish about once a month or less. There were even warnings that small children should avoid rice completely.

Unfortunately you just need to be proactive about what you put in your mouth, and don't assume that since you live in a "developed" country that everything sold is safe to eat.

Don't even get me started on the FDA's stance of "all chemicals used in consumer goods are considered safe until proven otherwise" stuff.

nicksergeant3• 13 years ago

Sorry, not FDA, I meant EPA.

rdouble3• 13 years ago

Couldn't you just buy rice grown in the USA?

nicksergeant3• 13 years ago

No, even US-grown rice suffers the same problem (not as the article, though). Basically rice in the southern US is grown in fields that used to be used for cotton, and the use of arsenic as a pesticide was allowed back then.

Fast forward and they're using the same fields to grow rice, and the metals are still in the soil...

I'll try and dig up some sources when I'm not mobile.

johnward• 13 years ago

I eat a couple cups of brown rice a day. Now arsenic and lead. I need to find a new carb source. Hopefully oatmeal is still ok.

uvdiv4• 13 years ago

Here's an abstract from the researcher, Tsanangurayi Tongesayi. Not this exact presentation, but apparently the same research:

Lead was present in all the foods samples and its concentration ranged from 4.3 to 17.9 µg/g. Some baby rice food had levels of Pb as high as 12.5±0.2 µg/g.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:d4lyxhr...

(Google Cache because of the intellectual property circus).

The FDA's recommended limit, expressed in total Pb ingested per day (only figure I could find), is

The FDA’s recommended Provisional Total Tolerable Intake Level (PTTIL) for lead in children less than 6 years of age is 6 μg lead/day. For children 7 years and older, the PTTIL is 15 μg lead/day. It increases to 75 μg lead/day for adults (USFDA 1993).

http://health.mo.gov/living/environment/hazsubstancesites/pd...

This limit can be exceeded with a fraction of a gram of rice (for small children) -- literally a single grain. You could eat a small bullet's weight of lead in a few hundred kg -- several years of eating.

And here's an FDA survey of the US food supply: 731 food products, about 10,000 samples, and nothing within orders of magnitude of this.

http://www.fda.gov/downloads/Food/FoodScienceResearch/TotalD...

(pp. 69-80). Notably, their rice samples (#50) had undetectable amounts of lead, at a detection threshold of 0.007 mg/kg (= µg/g).

(I'm beginning to suspect someone confused a mg/mcg/μg somewhere; that seems like the Occam's razor explanation. Otherwise, this looks really bad).

PakG12• 13 years ago

In China, the Occam's razor explanation is that the lead is really there. China's population is freaked out by food safety because of all the food scandals that have happened over the years. Melamanine in milk, for which milk company executives were actually executed, reuse and reselling of cooking oil found in gutters, the list goes on and on and on.

I have no idea about the conditions in Taiwan, but in China, the Occam's razor explanation is unfortunately the negative option because it's proven to be so common. Recently for example, Hong Kong folks are super mad that mainland China folks are coming over and buying up all the milk powder for their babies. Why don't mainland China folks buy milk powder in mainland China? Well, there you go.

edit: for those who haven't read the article, the article states, "The researchers found the highest levels of lead in rice from China and Taiwan"

tomsaffell2• 13 years ago

Thanks for pulling those numbers. But something doesn't quite add up.. The first linked report says:

Samples of rice products from the US, South America, Asia, and Europe were purchased from local supermarkets and analyzed using XRF and GFAAS. Lead was present in all the foods samples and its concentration ranged from 4.3 to 17.9 µg/g.

So both domestic US rice and imported rice were in the 4.3-17.0 µg/g range, which if true would contradict the FDA's results, and mean that US rice was order-of-magnitude as dangerous as imported rice. What are we (or I) missing?

uvdiv4• 13 years ago

It doesn't make sense to me either. If the FDA found n.d. levels of lead in all their samples, you would expect some of the new study's samples to have low levels as well.

uvdiv4• 13 years ago

UPDATE: Here's the current abstract from the ACS.

Lead is a neurotoxin that severely impairs cognitive development and intellectual performance in children. It causes blood pressure and cardiovascular diseases in adults in addition to inducing calcium deficiency by replacing calcium in bones. Agriculture, mining and the general chemical industry are increasingly contaminating the environment, resulting in toxic heavy metal(loids) such as lead getting into agricultural food products. The level of environment contamination is not monolithic across the globe, thanks to geography and differences in environmental regulations. However, with the globalized food market, populations in both polluted and non-polluted geographical areas are equally at risk of lead exposure through food. We measured the levels of lead in rice that is imported into the U.S. using XRF and the data was validated using a NIST1568a reference sample. Lead levels ranged from 5.95±0.72 to 11.9±0.6 mg/kg and the calculated Daily Exposure amounts were significantly higher than the Provisional Total Tolerable Intakes for all age groups.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/acs-hlo031113...

ra• 13 years ago

So is there a source of rice that is reliably free from Arsenic contamination?

ars• 13 years ago

Rice from India had the least arsenic, but apparently now they have lead!

I'm not sure there is anyplace that is safe.

jcromartie• 13 years ago

Specifically, Chinese rice contains harmful levels of lead. If there is one lesson we've learned about consumer products in the last decade, it's don't eat anything from China.

seanmcdirmid3• 13 years ago

Then what am I supposed to eat?

Disclosure: I live in China. At home we eat Jasmine (Thai) rice since it is tastier anyways.

lignuist2• 13 years ago

When it comes to food from china, it always reminds me of exploding watermelons due to excessive use of fertilizer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-13421374

gmac• 13 years ago

I do vaguely try to avoid buying food from China, but some things are hard to find from anywhere else (ginger, for example).

lignuist2• 13 years ago

Put some fresh ginger in some soil and start harvesting your own after a few months.

http://herbgardens.about.com/od/indoorgardening/a/How-Can-I-...

rdl• 13 years ago

Hawaiian ginger is really good.

13b9f227ecf0• 13 years ago

There's also seems to be a case against eating any concentrated feed lot raised meat from the USA. Russia and others have banned its import.

ck2• 13 years ago

I've been trying to find drinking straws not made in China.

Makes me wonder what's in them with mouth contact.

But this endeavor seems to have no solution, cannot find any.

ern2• 13 years ago

Although I acknowledge that lead is nasty stuff, something about this issue bothers me.

According to some studies, increasing exposure to lead at low levels (1-10 micrograms/dl) shaves 4-7 points off IQ scores[1].

Yet, as population blood lead levels have plunged in recent years, there haven't been proportionately massive gains in IQ in the population. Indeed, the Flynn effect may have stalled in recent years[2].

This either means that there are confounders or some other effect is in place. But I'm no expert, and I'd value the input of someone better informed.

[1] http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa022848 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_effect#Possible_end_of_pr...

maxerickson2• 13 years ago

If the lead exposure is a threshold effect, most of the population might have already banked the benefits of going below it.

If it mostly impacts development (rather than ongoing performance), even more so.

ern2• 13 years ago

If the lead exposure is a threshold effect, most of the population might have already banked the benefits of going below it.

Experts claim there is "no threshold"[1].

[1]http://www.chem.unep.ch/pops/pdf/lead/leadexp.pdf

jjuliano• 13 years ago

Any data about rice in the Philippines?

My family owns a farm in central Luzon, and I know that the majority of farmers there doesn't use irrigation from streams but instead uses a kerosine-powered pump deep-well system.

I know this might sound anecdotal, but for more than 20 or so years I've been visiting our farms every summer, even farmers near the River streams uses deep-wells and rain water, and the irrigation that runs along the farms are from deep-wells.

Also, here's a recent article about the Philippine rice are certified arsenic-free 'http://ph.news.yahoo.com/philippine-rice-certified-arsenic-f...

GFischer• 13 years ago

I was under the impression that rice in Uruguay is similarly lead-free, using water from the "Guaraní" aquifer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guarani_Aquifer

I worry about the mushroom imports (I buy Chinese champignons and other stuff), maybe I should stop buying those.

PunkRockDoc• 13 years ago

Has anyone been able to find the actual journal article? I would like to read it and come to my own conclusions. I find it suspicious that I cant find it, but maybe I am just not looking hard enough.

US rice imports 'contain harmful levels of lead'

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