
Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury - chaostheory
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR2009012601831.html
======
jws
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.

~~~
jcl
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.

~~~
jws
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.

For those following along, the mercury report is at
<http://www.healthobservatory.org/library.cfm?refid=105026>

I found the FDA/EPA limits at
<http://www.state.nj.us/health/eoh/hhazweb/mercury.pdf> page 11 has the
numbers.

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.

~~~
jcl
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.

~~~
jws
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.

~~~
jcl
Heh, yeah, the edit link disappears after two hours, regardless of whether
anyone has replied.

------
llimllib
Here's the actual paper:
<http://www.ehjournal.net/content/pdf/1476-069x-8-2.pdf> .

They found a maximum of .57 ppm mercury in corn syrup; the allowable limit of
mercury in sushi is 1 ppm.

.57 is probably high, and whatever source they found that from should be
checked out; but this doesn't seem to me like reason for drastic action.

But I'm no expert! Anybody want to tell me why I'm wrong?

~~~
blackguardx
People generally don't eat sushi in the US as often as they consume high
fructose corn syrup containing food products.

~~~
llimllib
certainly true, though you must temper that with the fact that HFCS forms a
very small fraction of the volume of a drink/snack, serving to dilute the
potential mercury to an extraordinarily small amount per drink/snack.

~~~
blackguardx
Look at soft drinks. High fructose corn syrup is usually number 1 or number 2.

~~~
llimllib
About.com[1] says a soda contains 23 grams of HFCS, and a there are about 226
grams of soda in an 8-oz can[2], so HFCS makes up about 10% of a soda (wow!).

From the worst of the tested sources, in this survey, a soda could contain
.06ppm mercury, more than an order of magnitude smaller than what the
government considers dangerous in seafood.

It's interesting to read about Jeremy Pivens' mercury toxicity[3]. In order to
reach a point where it affected his ability to live life normally, he had to
eat sushi twice a day, every day. Furthermore, his doctors said that a few
months of treatment would solve his problem.

It seems likely to me that the amount of HFCS you'd need to eat in the very
unlikely worst case to get actual mercury poisoning is going to give you
diabetes before the mercury affects you.

Which is not to say that we shouldn't stop allowing people to sell mercury
laden HFCS! If 9/20 studied samples contain no mercury, they all should, it's
clearly a public health problem. What I mean to say is just that this is
likely only to be a serious problem for a very few very heavy HFCS consumers,
if any, and that people shouldn't take it to mean "I can't eat HFCS because
I'll get mercury in me", because they probably won't get clinical amounts of
mercury.

There's plenty of good reasons to avoid HFCS, I advocate that to everyone, but
I don't think that the fear of the mercury found by this study is one of them.

[1] [http://www.answers.com/topic/high-fructose-corn-
syrup-1#cite...](http://www.answers.com/topic/high-fructose-corn-
syrup-1#cite_note-31)

[2]
[http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_can_of_soda_pop_we...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_does_a_can_of_soda_pop_weight)

[3] [http://www.webmd.com/news/20081218/jeremy-pivens-high-
mercur...](http://www.webmd.com/news/20081218/jeremy-pivens-high-mercury-
count)

------
coryrc
<http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2005/2005-12-14-01.asp>

"emissions from power plants in 10 states - Alabama, Illinois, Indiana,
Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and West
Virginia - represent almost 60 percent of U.S. mercury emissions from coal-
fired power plants"

And what do we find in IL, IN, KY, MI, OH, and PA?

Though, to be fair, coal isn't responsible for the majority of mercury
emissions, see:

<http://www.tva.gov/environment/air/ontheair/merc_emis.htm>

<http://www.epa.gov/mercury/reportover.htm>

~~~
jcl
The papers, however, were specifically looking for mercury that was "lost"
during the creation of caustic soda, at plants that literally use tons of
mercury for this purpose. That is, the mercury is being added when the HFCS is
made, not when the corn is grown. (One paper indicates that the four plants
responsible are in GA, TN, OH, and WV.)

Switching to a better caustic soda process should eliminate the detectable
mercury, regardless of the proximity to coal plants. And some food producers
are doing so; as one of the papers points out: "No mercury was detected in the
majority of beverages tested."

~~~
coryrc
Ah, I see.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_hydroxide#Manufacture>

Wikipedia claims "the membrane cell process is economically the most viable",
which does not use mercury.

Also, as shown in my previous links, chloralkali plants (which make caustic
soda) pollute a significant amount of mercury (needlessly, in my opinion).

------
ewiethoff
Yet another reason why I'm glad I'm allergic to corn. Yet another reason to be
fed up with the Corn Cartel's push to have everything under the sun made from
corn.

~~~
ckinnan
HFCS exists ONLY because of US government policy. The US sugar program drives
up the price of sugar by limiting domestic supplies and imports. As as result
it is profitable to mill corn into sweetener, and U.S. food makers use it as a
substitute everywhere possible (mostly liquids) as it is slightly cheaper than
sugar.

Soda outside the US,for example, still uses traditional sugar.

As a result, the corn growers are a vociferous lobby in support of the sugar
program.

~~~
michaelneale
Yes when I travel to the US I notice the taste immediately in soft drinks (and
consequently stop drinking them all together, which is probably not a bad
thing for me !). HFCS seems to have all the "sweet" hit without any flavour
for it, quite horrible once you have had the alternative.

~~~
tlrobinson
I'm not much of a Coke connoisseur, but some of my friends also think that
imported Coke (from Mexico... Mexicoke!) tastes better.

~~~
michaelneale
I love it - but I try to only have 1 can every few days at most - but only
cause here in .au its sugar !

If it was readily available I would drink it all the time (which would be
quite bad for me).

------
Retric
"In the first study, researchers found detectable levels of mercury in nine of
20 samples of commercial HFCS."

Debatable and harmful can be widely separated. Without any real numbers I am
going to assume that this is a tiny amount of contamination and hardly
meaningful.

PS: I might be an environmentalist, but I hate bad science reporting.

~~~
biohacker42
Mercury accumulates in the body, and the body has ways of _slowly_ flushing it
out.

The problem is that even if one dose is below harmful level, 10 doses might
not be.

Or 100, what ever the dose is.

Because corn syrup is in almost everything it's hard to know just how much
mercury you're ingesting.

~~~
jerf
"Because corn syrup is in almost everything it's hard to know just how much
mercury you're ingesting."

I think that's Retric's point, and if it's not his, I'll certainly claim it.
There's a little bit of everything in everything (thanks, entropy!). This
article does nothing absolutely nothing to _inform_ us as to whether this is
actually worth thinking about.

The information content of this article is zero. Without more information it's
not even worth your time to think about. (Trying to find more information
might be worthwhile, and based on the other HN-posters who actually did that,
I find myself fairly unconcerned about this putative threat.)

------
blackguardx
All my food-conscious friends in northern California are going to love this
study. I live in Sonoma county and it seems like everyone I meet chooses not
to consume some food product. The most common denominator is high fructose
corn syrup.

I avoid high fructose corn syrup myself for two reasons. Partly, it's because
I'd rather pay for the sugar tariff than send more money to the corn lobby.
The other part is that after stopping my consumption of soft drinks for other
reasons, I find that foods and drinks that contain high fructose corn syrup
are too sweet.

------
ckinnan
This is huge. The autism community has long suspected that mercury is a
driver, yet eliminating it from childhood vaccines hasn't lowered the rate.
Could HFCS-borne mercury be the cause? HFCS was introduced into the food
supply in the mid to late 1980s, and autism cases have grown 15-fold since
then. (I believe HFCS is also the major driver of the parabolic growth in
diabetes during the same period.)

~~~
omouse
_"This is huge"_

no it isn't: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=452906>

_"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."_

------
time_management
_The good news is that mercury-free HFCS ingredients exist. Food companies
just need a good push to only use those ingredients_

The good news is that arsenic-free dogshit exists. Dogs just need a good diet
of arsenic-free dog food.

