Did the FDA Suppress Evidence of Mercury-Tainted High-Fructose Corn Syrup?

Now comes news that makes even an HFCS cynic like me do a spit-take over my home-brewed morn­ing cof­fee. Turns out that HFCS is com­monly tainted with mer­cury — a highly toxic sub­stance — accord­ing to a peer-reviewed report pub­lished by Environmental Health (abstract here; PDF of the must-read full text here.)

The Environmental Health study draws on sam­ples of high-fructose corn syrup taken straight from the fac­tory. But no one drinks the stuff straight. What about, say, cook­ies sweet­ened with HFCS? The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy plucked HFCS-containing prod­ucts from super­mar­ket shelves and tested them for mer­cury. The result?

Overall, we found detectable mer­cury in 17 of 55 sam­ples, or around 31 percent

Traces of mer­cury turned up in name-brand prod­ucts from mak­ers includ­ing Quaker, Hunt’s, Manwich, Hershey’s, Smucker’s, Kraft, Nutri-Grain, and Yoplait.

That a ubiq­ui­tous industrial-food ingre­di­ent such as HFCS should be tainted by mer­cury is bad enough. But it gets worse. The FDA has appar­ently known about this since 2005 — and done noth­ing to pub­li­cize it or change it.

In 2005, EH study lead author Renee Dufault was an FDA researcher. At that time, she con­ducted the tests now cited in the EH report. Her results found mer­cury in 9 of 20 HFCS sam­ples — 45 percent.

She doesn’t com­ment on why, but the FDA appar­ently did noth­ing with her results in the years since they emerged. She retired from the agency in March 2008 — and evi­dently decided to go pub­lic. She deserves praise for the deci­sion to pub­lish her work — essen­tially blow­ing the whis­tle on what looks like an egre­gious attempt to hide key infor­ma­tion from the public.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at Grist.org.