Recent reports in the press dealing with the amount of arsenic in apple juice has alarmed the public. In response to the publics concern over this matter the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a report, FDA: Apple Juice is Safe To Drink.
This report conveys that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has confidence in the safety of apple juice. It has been explained by Donald Zink, Ph.D, a senior science advisor at FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (CFSAN), that arsenic is present in the environment as a naturally occurring substance or as a result of contamination from human activity. Arsenic is found in water, air, food, and soil in organic and inorganic forms. This results in arsenic being found in certain food and beverage products which includes fruit juices and juice concentrates.
Zink has said that there is no evidence of any public health risk from drinking these juices. Zink has explained that organic arsenic is essentially harmless. However, the inorganic kind of arsenic can be harmful at high and long-term levels of exposure. For about six years the FDA has been tracking total arsenic contamination in apple and other juices, ever since foreign producers started gaining an increasing share of the juice market.
The FDA searches for possible contaminants in fruit juices and fruit juice concentrate in several ways. Import alerts to keep potentially dangerous products from other countries out of the U.S. marketplace are issued by the FDA. There has been a specific alert which requires importers to prove their fruit juices and concentrates are safe for consumption before they are allowed to enter the U.S.. And, as part of the FDA Total Diet Study program, the agency tests baby foods and apple juice samples for the presence of arsenic annually.
The FDA also collects and tests food and beverage samples in another program that looks for harmful substances in foods. One of the targeted products in this program is apple juice because investigators want to check for total and, if necessary, inorganic arsenic. Zink has said if the FDA finds too much inorganic arsenic in any juice, it will take steps to remove that product from the market.
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