The US allowable limit for mercury in bottled water (and tap water) is 2000 parts per trillion. The report documents a maximum of 350 parts per trillion in Quaker Oatmeal to Go.
Omitting that data which provides context probably tells you a lot about the people who wrote the report.
You mean, the people who wrote the Washington Post article. The report clearly included the data.
The report also mentions that the EPA has a "reference dose" of mercury of 0.1 ug/kg/day for women of childbearing age and young children, which they work out to 5.5 ug/day for the average woman -- versus an estimated 28.5ug total mercury/day consumed by the average American via contaminated HFCS.
However, it's not clear how this EPA standard compares to the "US allowable limit for mercury in bottled water", which is presumably an FDA standard, or what assumptions went into these standards.
Punchline: last footnote of this post... if you lived on nothing but HFCS Coke-a-cola and all of that mercury were somehow transformed into its dangerous organic form, you would still only get 5% of your reference dose.
The mercury report does not include the 2000ppt FDA limit on mercury. It contains a different limit on methymercury which is not measured in any test of this report.
Middle of page 12...
The 0.1ug/kg/day is for methylmercury. The numbers measured in the report are for mercury. They researchers admit in the next paragraph that they have no idea if the mercury in HFCS is methymercury. (Presumably there are tests which they chose not to perform.)
But look what they do with the numbers:
- 20 samples of HFCS tested.
- 11 have no detectable mercury (<5ppb) [1]
- 1 sample was 570ppb
They then estimate mercury ingestion using the 570ppb outlier times the 50g USDA daily HFCS number to get 28.5ug. A scary number since it is about 5 times the limit they just showed you. Except the number these illusionists showed you in their left hand was for methylmercury limit of 3/4 scale women[2] and the number they showed you in their right was total mercury (inorganic plus organic) of full scale people, and the one in the right assumes that all the disparate sources of HFCS in a day's food happened to use the same outlier source[3].
[1] I wonder why the HFCS tests have a 5000ppT limit of detection and the foods test (page 14) have limits in the 20-100ppT range. Different tests? Something about HFCS that confounds the test? No answers.
[2] For the “average” 55 kg American woman I suppose the "average 55kg woman" weighs 55kg. The average American woman however weighs 74.5kg. 55kg gives a more dramatic number though.
[3] They don't report any sort of average or distribution of the 20 samples other than the 9 of them are above the limits of detection. I suspect the average did nothing for their argument so they went with an outlier. Let's check their data...
I just finished a 257mL american Coke (the little half can) with 2.5g of HFCS (1%, yes I mixed volume and mass, but we are estimating here) in it. Their one reported test of Coke was 60ppT mercury, which if we assume it all came from the HFCS would be 6ppB mercury in the HFCS. What if the 570ppb HFCS number were real and was used for Coke? That would be 5700ppt in the food test. There is nothing within an order of magnitude in the table, and there isn't much in the way of consumable food that is more heavily sugared than American sodas. What if you got ALL of your calories by drinking 20 tiny Cokes a day and what if ALL of the mercury in the Coke was methylmercury? 50g of HFCS at 6ppb would give you 0.3ug/day, about 5% of your EPA reference dose.
Point taken. They do seem to be using worst-case numbers.
I'm curious, though, where you got the 1% number for Coke HFCS content? Elsewhere in the comments there is a link to an About.com article that says that most soft drinks contain about 10% HFCS, and I'd be surprised to see Coke among the less-sweetened drinks. I can't find other references online beyond guesses, which seem to indicate around 40g per regular can. If your estimate is off by a factor of 10, your proposed all-Coke diet would give you 50% of your EPA reference dose, which is a little more worrying.
You are right, I misread the label of the can, when I read 26g of sugars and the 9% of RDA next to it I interpreted it as 9% of the 26g, but it is 26g, 9% of the a 290g RDA.
Your 50% of EPA dose is correct, but still shouldn't be too worrying because there is no evidence presented that the mercury is in an organic form. Just that if it were, it would still be safe.
I'll go back and annotate the previous comment.
Or maybe not, the 'edit' link is gone, perhaps since it has a reply. I'll just have to hope people read far enough to find the correction.
And, just incase I sound as if I like mercury in my Coke, I don't. It seems reasonable to use mercury free alternatives (provided they don't have some other hazard). There was proposed legislation to that effect that didn't make it to law, perhaps it can make it this year. What I oppose here is terrifying the populace with puffed up science-sounding articles to achieve an ulterior motive.
Omitting that data which provides context probably tells you a lot about the people who wrote the report.