Do You Know High Levels Of Arsenic May Be In Your Apple Juice

Who doesn’t love fruit juices? Delicious, nutritious and refreshing, what more could you want from a drink. Serve them chilled in Summer, and it would be the most pleasurable thing for you. Though most fruit juices are readily available in bottled form, the best way to consume them is to juice them yourself. That way, all you get is the juice, nothing but the juice. But did you know, that sometimes juices can be harmful as well. In fact, that is true and one of the most popular juice choices is involved? That’s right, its apple juice.

Recent studies have found a staggering amount of Arsenic to be present in Apple Juice. Now Arsenic, as you may know, is a highly toxic substance for human beings. It has also been linked to cause cancer when its consumed in small quantities. In a large amount, it has been known to be fatal. According to the recent tests done by the FDA on Apple Juice concentrates and associated products, the levels of arsenic found in the juice were 9 times higher than allowed by law; which is 10 parts per billion. Now arsenic is also found to be naturally occurring, and there are many ways that it can turn up in our food and drinks. You can consume it naturally through environmental uptake, anthropogenically through the use of pesticides, and/or through contamination during processing. There are two types of arsenic, organic and inorganic. Organic arsenic has carbon and other elements which prevent it from entering cells, thus lowering the toxicity levels. The food which have organic arsenic are relatively safe because of this reason. Inorganic arsenic is found in some geological formation and in certain pesticides, it then seeps into the water when it passes over the formations, and when the pesticide dissolves in the soil which has crops in it. This kind is highly toxic, and can prove fatal in many circumstance. Even a little bit like 100 mg is enough to kill you. However there has been a much recent study done with new and faster detection methods which have given us some better results. Researches performed this method on seven undiluted samples of apple juice, and found all samples contained both organic and inorganic arsenic at various levels. Fortunately, these levels were lesser than the maximum amount allowed. However there was one fact here that should be paid attention to, that the levels of inorganic arsenic were always greater than organic arsenic.

Although the pesticides containing arsenic have been banned since long, it leads us to believe that there might be some smaller amounts still present among the soil, where these apples grow and the juice is made. The concentrate is collected from all over the world, so this risk is a big issue. Even though the pesticides containing arsenic are banned officially, there may be some incidents in which they are still used. Which may be a possible cause of inorganic arsenic in the soil, and ultimately getting in the juice.