A jar of apple juice is posed with apples in Moreland Hills, Ohio on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2011. The federal Food and Drug Administration and a leading doctor are disputing suggestions by television show host Dr. Mehmet Oz that trace amounts of arsenic in many apple juice products pose a health concern. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)
The Food and Drug Administration is criticizing Dr. Oz for his statement that apple apple juice contains arsenic that is harmful to its drinkers.
The popular medical expert said on his Fox show Wednesday that a New Jersey lab found troubling levels of arsenic in several brands of apple juice.
“There is no evidence of any public health risk from drinking these juices. And FDA has been testing them for years,” the agency said in a statement, adding that they even tested one of the same juice batches Oz cited. The FDA said that the level of arsenic was 2 to 6 parts per billion, which is far less that the 36 the show had stated.
The agency said that arsenic is naturally present in water, air, food and soil. Organic arsenic, the kind the FDA said is in apple juices, passes through the body quickly and isn’t harmful. It’s inorganic arsenic that can be toxic and cause cancer.
The FDA said that the results from “The Dr. Oz Show” are misleading because it didn’t break down the two types when it was tested.
A spokesman for the show said that Oz does not agree that organic arsenic is as safe as authorities believe.
“The position of the show is that total arsenic needs to be lower,” he said. “We did the tests. We stand by the results and we think the standards should be different.
However, even Oz said that people shouldn’t shun apple juice, and that he would give continue giving it to his own children. He said that his main concern was the effects from drinking the juice over an extended period of time.
“There’s no question in my mind folks can continue drinking apple juice,” he told the Associated Press in an interview. “There have been no cases at all of kids being harmed by elevated levels of arsenic, and the kinds of numbers we are talking about are not high enough to cause acute injury.”
With Associated Press
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