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A frosty mug of beer or ruby-red glass of wine just wouldn't be the same if the liquid was murky or gritty. That's why producers of alcoholic beverages usually filter them. But in a study appearing in ACS' Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, researchers report that a material often used as a filter could be transferring heavy metals such as arsenic to beer and wine. They also found ways to possibly limit this contamination.
Chronic dietary exposure to high levels of arsenic, lead and cadmium can endanger health. Therefore, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has set limits on these heavy metals in foods and beverages. Although some studies have reported elevated levels of the contaminants in wine and beer, researchers aren't sure how the metals are ending up in these beverages. Benjamin Redan, Lauren Jackson and colleagues wondered if the diatomaceous earth (DE) used to filter beer and wine could be introducing heavy metals, and if so, whether altering the filtering conditions could reduce the transfer.
Journal Reference:
Benjamin W. Redan, Joseph E. Jablonski, Catherine Halverson, James Jaganathan, Md. Abdul Mabud, Lauren S. Jackson. Factors Affecting Transfer of the Heavy Metals Arsenic, Lead, and Cadmium from Diatomaceous-Earth Filter Aids to Alcoholic Beverages during Laboratory-Scale Filtration. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2019; DOI: 10.1021/acs.jafc.8b06062
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Saturday February 23 2019, @02:13PM
Some might remember that a few years back there were panicked articles about trace amounts of psychoactive medicines like zanax in our water supply. Everybody was in a tizzy for a few days about it. My wife, an intelligent, educated person with a Master's degree, ran up to me and said "We have to buy a water filter NOW!" I pointed out that at the concentrations they were reporting you'd have to drink gallons of water a day, every day, for many lifetimes before you got so much as the same dose as one tiny pill.
Some years after that, some friends sent around a crisis message that was making the rounds on email. It was a picture of the beautiful Pacific Ocean filling up with deadly red, orange, and fluorescent yellow, flowing out from the epicenter of a place called Fukushima. OMG we all had to switch off all our appliances and sit in the dark ruing Man's insatiable greed for electrons that led him to risk nuclear power. The HORROR! The HORROR! I talked about half-lives, measurement, and how incredibly mind-bogglingly huge the Pacific Ocean was.
Now this. It makes me wonder if there was some quantum leap in the orders of magnitude of the sensitivity of our measurement equipment that has produced all these stories. Does anybody know? Has there been some advance that has enabled us to detect these slight levels? My cynical side says that somewhere in the darkness the marketing department for the Detectron 9000 is feeding these sensationalist stories to gullible and severely math- and science-challenged journalists.
Washington DC delenda est.