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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 "This study appears to be much ado about nothing," says Richard Lobb, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council. The paper makes numerous assumptions -- not based on data in the study -- about arsenic levels in chicken livers and muscle tissues as well as the relationship between organic and inorganic arsenic, he says.
Arsenic in poultry feed, which represents the less toxic organic form, "is used responsibly and safely by poultry producers," Lobb adds.
Lasky and colleagues from the Agriculture Department's Food Safety and Inspection Service used national data measuring arsenic in chicken liver samples to estimate the amount present in muscle tissue, the part of the chicken that is most frequently consumed.
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From 1994 to 2000, average arsenic concentration in young chickens ranged from 0.33 to 0.43 parts per million.
The authors multiplied their estimates of arsenic in chicken muscle tissue by different levels of chicken consumption.
A person who eats an average amount of chicken -- about 2 ounces a day -- might ingest 3.6 micrograms to 5.2 micrograms of inorganic arsenic and 5.6 micrograms to 8.1 micrograms of total arsenic a day, they found.
By contrast, the top 1 percent of the population that consumes about 12 ounces of chicken a day would get much more of the substance: some 21 micrograms to 31 micrograms of inorganic arsenic per day and 33 micrograms to 47 micrograms of total arsenic per day.
For someone weighing 154 pounds, that's 0.30 to 0.44 micrograms per kilogram per day of inorganic arsenic -- well below the tolerable daily intake of 2 micrograms per kilogram per day, but still a sizable portion of the total.
An expert committee administered jointly by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization determines the tolerable daily intake for arsenic.
"This article is really meant to raise a bunch of questions for further investigation," Lasky says. "It's reasonable for consumers to say, 'We want to know more about this.'"
More information
Learn about arsenic at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (www.epa.gov), while you can learn to eat safely at the U.S. government's
FoodSafety (www.foodsafety.gov) site. Page: << Prev | 1 | 2
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