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Consumer Reports says there’s too much arsenic in the rice you, me and most Americans eat. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration agrees and says it’s launching a program to test more than 1,200 rice products ~ from bulk rice to foods we feed our babies to snack crackers and cereals ~ for carcinogenic “inorganic” arsenic. Reuters reported Wednesday that the Consumer Reports study said that some varieties of brown rice — including brands sold by Whole Foods Markets Inc and Wal-Mart Stores Inc — contained particularly significant levels of inorganic arsenic. Products that raise particular concern for children – who are still developing and have significantly lower body weights than adults – include infant rice cereal, ready-to-eat cold breakfast cereals and rice milk, CR said. Today’s Consumer Reports-FDA double whammy sent the USA Rice Federation into damage control mode. The industry group said it is unaware of any arsenic-related illnesses that have been linked to eating U.S. rice. It also says that rice is a wholesome grain with nutritional benefits that far outweigh any perceived risk from arsenic. The Washington Post reported today that Consumer Reports found that the highest levels of inorganic arsenic were in white rice grown in Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas — which collectively produce about three-quarters of the nation’s white-rice supply. CR added its study showed inorganic arsenic found in brown rice was consistently higher than in white rice. That’s because arsenic collects in the nutrient-rich brown outer layer of rice grains, which removed during milling when the grains are polished to produce white rice. The inorganic form of arsenic is known to cause bladder, lung and skin cancers, the CR report noted. Nature reported back in a 2005 article, U.S. Rice May Carry an Arsenic Burden, that U.S.-grown rice carries “1.4 to 5 times more arsenic” than rice from Europe, India and Bangladesh. Mother Jones’s food, agriculture and health writer Tom Philpott breaks down the reason American-grown rice is more carcinogenic than imported strains ~ CHICKENS. In an article titled published Sept. 19 in the online version of Mother Jones titled, Waiter, There’s Arsenic in My Rice, Philpott writes: The US poultry industry has a disturbing habit of feeding arsenic to chickens. Arsenic, it turns out, helps control a common bug that infects chicken meat, and also gives chicken flesh a pink hue, which the industry thinks consumers want. Then… the U.S. poultry industry found it could sell chicken manure to cotton farmers as manure and did so for the better part of the 20th century. Later, as the American cotton industry waned, farmers began growing ~ you guessed it ~ rice in or near the former cotton belts of Arkansas, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas. An estimated 1.6 million tons of chicken manure was plowed into American farmlands since the 1960s, Philpott reports. WaPo: Reducing your arsenic risk from rice products [Sources ~ WaPo / Mother Jones / Nature / Reuters ] [Snicker] GR News is always ahead of the curve: http://www.giantrobot.com/food-2/arsenic-in-rice/
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UPDATE: A Bay Area journalist’s accusation that a Japanese American Black Panther Party co-founder was a paid FBI informant sent shock waves through the Asian/Pacific Island American communities last month and triggered angry denials from former activists, academics and those who knew the accused personally. But author-journalist Seth Rosenfeld, who originally accused Richard Aoki of being a government snitch in his book, Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power, says newly released documents “confirm” that Aoki, who committed suicide in March 2009, was an informant from 1961 to 1977. Following Rosenfeld’s accusations, Aoki’s biographer, Diane Fujino, chairwoman of UC Santa Barbara’s Asian American Studies Department and the author of Samurai Among Panthers: Richard Aoki on Race, Resistance and a Paradoxical Life, shadowed Rosenfeld on the promotional media blitz for his book, challenging the lack of hard evidence provided by the award-winning former San Francisco newspaper reporter and Center for Investigative Reporting contributor. Democracy Now! ~ ‘Was Bay Area Radical, Black Panther Arms Supplier Richard Aoki An FBI Informant?’ Part 1 of 2 [youtube]NE9HRp0RIV8[/youtube] Part 2 ~ ‘Was Bay Area Radical Richard Aoki an FBI Informant?’ According to Rosenfeld’s Sept. 7 California Watch article: Aoki’s friends, as well as his biographer and the producers of the film about him, expressed shock at the disclosure that he had been an informant, and some of them angrily disputed it. Some suggested the story was an attempt to place a “snitch jacket” on Aoki – an FBI tactic of falsely claiming radicals were informants, causing suspicion and mistrust among fellow activists Rosenfeld’s apparent response to the criticism of his “outing” of Aoki as an informant came in Friday’s California Watch, CIR’s monthly online news magazine, in the form of a self-bylined, 2200-word summary of the FBI’s heavily redacted 221-page file on Aoki, in which agents describe information supplied on Bay Area activist groups by Aoki “voluminous information” in “current, concise and complete reports, usually typewritten by him.” An FBI memo from 1971 when Aoki was an Asian Studies instructor at UC Berkeley and a counselor at Peralta Junior College reads: “Coverage furnished by this informant is unique and not available from any other source,” it says. “Many activist individuals seek informant’s advice and counseling since informant is considered as a militant who has succeeded within the establishment without surrending (sic) to it.” According to the California Watch article: FBI officials even reminded Aoki to report his pay as an informant on his tax return, according to a handwritten notation on a Dec. 29, 1972, report. The records do not say how much he was paid, but according to a congressional study, security informants in the 1960s typically received about $100 per month, with more valuable informants receiving up to $400 per month, the equivalent of about $2,900 today. Read “FBI files reveal new details about informant who armed Black Panthers” by Seth Rosenfeld in California Watch. Download a copy of what is apparently a raw, footnoted version of Rosenfeld’s article...
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