Not the Apple of My Eye

If an apple a day could keep the doctor away the doctor I would want to keep away form me would be Mehmet Oz.  This quack has a long history of pushing all sorts of woo and misinformation (see here, here and here ) but recently he made a claim that defies stupid, that popular brands of apple juice contain harmful levels of arsenic and may be poisoning children.  Here is a link to the story.

This claim is ridiculous of course because any element on the periodic table may appear in any food grown in our environment.  As anyone with a high school education could have told the good physician, arsenic appears in two forms, organic and inorganic and the latter is the one we need to worry about.  The FDA made that perfectly clear in their correspondence with this twat and he still refuses to admit his mistake and amend his claims.  Imagine how enraged he will become when he finds out that fish contain levels of mercury.  I think PZ Myers said it best when he suggested apple orchard owners consider a class action against him.

I found this tweet by @kreativekonnect to be demonstrative of people's lack of understanding: "the moral of the apple juice story? Why doesn't the FDA make sure food is labeled with all the ingredients?" Because then they would be labeling oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, iron, carbon etc, etc.  Toxins occur naturally in the environment and our bodies are evolved to deal with them in the small doses we would normally be exposed to them.  Some are more harmful and some are more plentiful.  It is nice to know that there are intelligent people working in agencies whose job it is to measure these toxins and determine the safe levels.  While I don't advocate blind obedience to government, there comes a time when we must place our trust in those that work for us.  In this case, Dr. Oz has undermined that trust and called their integrity in to question.  I hope they litigate him into ruin.