Healthify your supermarket choices.
What’s that Poison in Your Juice? [Antimony]
European researchers are worried about antimony, a toxic chemical element, appearing at possibly unsafe levels in various juice brands:
Writing in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring, scientists at the University of Copenhagen studied antimony levels in 42 juice drinks and found antimony concentrations above EU limits for drinking water in eight of them.
This discovery is of concern to the soft drinks industry because antimony is a suspected carcinogen that resembles arsenic on a chemical level. read more…
What you need to know:
Antimony is a toxic chemical element. In small doses, it can cause headaches, dizziness, and depression. Larger doses can lead to violent and frequent vomiting, and death in a few days.
So how does antimony get into juice drinks? The answer may lie in the containers, not the liquid itself. Antimony leaches from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles into liquids stored within.
And why, dear lord, one asks, is a toxin used in food bottles?
Turns out that antimony is used as a catalyst in the production of plastic bottles. Despite it’s role solely as a facilitator of a chemical reaction, there’s always a minuscule bit of antimony that is left over in the resulting bottle.
There are strict standards as to how much antimony is allowed in water to be considered safe. In the US it’s 6 part per billion (ppb). In the EU – 5 ppb. But this is a definition for water in general. There are no standards specifically for bottled juices.
The British Soft Drinks Association (BSDA) responded to the study claiming that the 44 ppb found in several bottles does not mean they’re unsafe, as
“there is no read across between the levels of antimony permitted in drinking water and those that might be acceptable in a fruit juice or a juice drink. It is not uncommon that different product types should have different regulatory requirements.”
What to do at the supermarket:
Another reason to fret about buying and consuming plastic bottled drinks? Not really.
We wouldn’t put antimony at the top of our list of worries. There are plenty of other good reasons to switch to tap water, including weight lost, money saved, and planet greened.
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Here’s two simple rules for choosing food and food products.
1. If its bad for your teeth its probably not so good for you.
Juice is bad news for teeth, it makes dentists rich! Eat the fruit instead.
2. If its harmful to planetary health, its probably harmful to human health.
All those juice boxes and PET containers are not good for the planet, it makes sense that they would be harmful to us also. Same thing for all the plastic bottles. Bottled water is not really as “healthy” as you might think.
Bottom line:
Eat fruit in season
Drink tap water that has been filtered.
You body and planet will thank you!
Good points, Susan. I can’t even say that either of those are more important than the other, too. Food which we know to cause cavities will also cause disease elsewhere in the body. Food which (through plastic) pollutes eventually finds its way back into our bodies, too, through the food chain.
So what’s the alternative to eating processed food? Just stop doing it, and tell them you’re not going to do it anymore.
Actually there is a limit for antimony migrating from plastic packaging to foods like juice in Europe. It’s 40 µg per kg. But the authors of that paper in the Journal of Environmental Monitoring either did not know this or deliberately did not mention it. Either way, that does not inspire confidence in the accuracy of their report.