Rice versus Drinking Water: Estimating the Primary Source of Arsenic in the U.S. Diet

This study will facilitate assessing arsenic exposures and more accurately estimating inorganic exposures.” Limitations to the study were primarily associated with the source data. For example, the dietary data, although extensive, captured only what people ate on two days about a week apart, which prevented accurate assessment of exposures at the extreme ends of consumption. “As you go out on the tails of the statistical distribution of rice consumption rates, this two-day survey starts to become unreliable,” says study coauthor Jack Creed, a research chemist at the EPA’s National Exposure Research Laboratory. For example, if a person ate a lot of rice on one of their survey days, their rice consumption would appear to be high, even if they usually did not eat much rice. This is especially worth noting, given that adverse health effects of arsenic result from long-term exposure. Creed notes that more information is needed on what people are actually eating, especially long-term rice consumption in subpopulations such as very young children and specific ethnic groups. “That’s what it is going to take to get to estimate the exposures that you’d like to better evaluate,” he says. NHANES recently started collecting more detailed information about Asian subpopulations with very different diets (including Chinese Americans, Indian Americans, and a composite group made up of Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese Americans) so that they can be more accurately as...
Source: EHP Research - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Science Selections Source Type: research