ECOfreak: If You Are What You Eat, I'm Arsenic and Plastic

By Desiree Parker Tuesday, January 17, 2012

A friend of mine accuses me of being a Debbie Downer in my blog all the time. Upon some brief reflection, I have to admit this is true. I will have to warn her to avert her eyes this week, because I have not one but two unfortunate bits of enviro-news to share (they’re not that new, but they were news to me) that were stuck in my head this week.

Last summer, the Food and Drug Administration found that there was arsenic in chickens. This seems to be thanks to an additive used in chicken feed that makes chickens grow faster and give the meat a nice pinkish color (though ostensibly it’s used to fight off infections). Read more about the story when it was breaking news in an L.A. Times story here).

Arsenic can cause cancer and birth defects and a bunch more nasty stuff (here’s a link to the Environmental Protection Agency page on arsenic).

To study up on the topic, I was reading a story on NutritionFacts.org, which was based on this 2006 study by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy that tested chicken for arsenic levels.

I scrolled through the study, and the good news is that it looks like organic chicken is much less likely to contain arsenic (arsenic is not allowed to be used in feed for organic products). Fast food chicken and other store-bought chicken varied pretty wildly in how much (if any) arsenic was detected.

I agree with the main point of this study: if we didn’t feed the chickens this nasty stuff, we wouldn’t have this problem!

Last summer when the FDA story broke, one company (Pfizer) agreed to halt production of the arsenic-containing feed additive. As far as I can tell, though, there is no ban on it or on other arsenic-containing feed in the U.S. so it’s a practice that’s still going on, I assume.

It doesn’t make much sense to me that we a have this stuff on a list of things that makes people sick, yet it’s okay to put it in our food. This bugs me.

What can we do about it? Eat organic chicken, I guess – and other meat, too, as I figure other animals are getting similar additives in food.

Problem number two: while we’re on the topic of how toxic things end up in our body in unexpected ways, take a look at this story I read on Discovery. Apparently, when you wash your synthetic clothes, little plastic threads float out with the water and end up in the oceans, in water creatures, and in us.

Researchers tested water in sewage treatment plants and found these tiny plastic particles. Plastics do all kinds of bad stuff when you ingest them: some can disrupt your hormones and others can cause cancer.

Nice.

Not only is nearly everything around us (and most stuff touching our food and water) made up of plastic, but now there are tiny bits of it everywhere, including in our bodies.

I guess if you are what you eat, then I'm probably arsenic and plastic.

Website for the week:

I put a bazillion links in my blog, so there’s plenty there for you to click through if you’re interested!