New research has found that more than half of Britain's most popular rice products - including Kellogg's Rice Krispies and Smooth Baby Rice by Heinz - exceed proposed new EU limits for arsenic.
While there are low levels of arsenic in most food and water, researchers are now concerned that arsenic can reach much higher levels in rice.
Channel 4's Dispatches, Rice: How Safe is our Food? which will be broadcast on Monday night, tested 81 different products with the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen's University Belfast.
They discovered 58 per cent exceeded proposed European Union recommended limits for children, which are expected to come into force next summer.
Although there are strict limits for the amount of arsenic level allowed in water, there are currently no maximum levels in food - and now some scientists are speaking out as they are concerned about the effects of long-term exposure.
As more evidence emerges about the harm high levels of arsenic might cause, particularly to children, new maximum levels have been proposed by the European Union with the support of the Food Standards Agency.
The proposed new EU recommendations will limit 200 parts of arsenic per billion for adults and just 100 ppb for children and babies.
During the research products including Kelloggs' Rice Krispies and Kallo organic puffed rice cereal were tested multiple times - and some showed high levels of inorganic arsenic, far above the proposed limits.
More on this story here.
2 comments:
too bad this didn't appear on Friday, for Halloween -- the story is TRULY SCARY. :-(
So much for rice as a "safe" starch :-)
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