Arsenic And California Wine: Do You Need To Worry?

I am what I have termed a blue collar wine snob. I’m picky about my wine and am even a member of a wine club, but I rarely pay more than $10 a bottle, mainly because I drink about two bottles a week. So when I caught a headline about popular wines supposedly containing enough arsenic to eventually cause cancer, you can bet I raised an eyebrow. CBS News reported last Thursday that “very high levels of arsenic” showed up in almost a quarter of 1,300 wines tested by independent Denver-based lab BeverageGrades. “Very high,” according to BeverageGrades founder and former wine distributor Kevin Hicks, meant four to five times more arsenic than the EPA standard for drinking water, which is 10 parts per billion (ppb), or 10 micrograms per liter (mcg/L).

Among the top-selling wines with three, four and five times the 10 ppb standard were, respectively, Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck White Zinfandel, Ménage à Trois Moscato and Franzia White Grenache. Hicks told CBS he noticed a trend of higher amounts of arsenic the cheaper the wine was on a per-liter basis.

The CBS report reads as alarmist — though they mention at the end that their own independent testing of four wines yielded arsenic levels above 10 ppb but much lower than BeverageGrades’ results — and Hicks clearly finds these results concerning enough that he’s filing a class action suit against more than two dozen wine makers and sellers for their unsafe products. He’s also, by the way, marketing his company’s testing services to wine makers who might be concerned about… arsenic in their wine. This news report and lawsuit could easily be seen as creating one’s own demand. But if we assume the BeverageGrades’ results are correct — a big “if” since the results have not been independently confirmed, the company has not described its methods, and the company is simultaneously attempting to sell winemakers its services after creating a news story — how much should you be concerned if you’re a regular wine drinker?

The shortest answer, according to Kenneth Spaeth, MD, chief of occupational and environmental medicine at the North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, NY, is we don’t know yet.

“It’s a bit of dilemma for consumers right now because there’s so much information we don’t have,” he said. “I also know nothing about the methodology, about how these data were collected and how much consistency there was from sample to sample and bottle to bottle. Given all these gaps in the information, it’s hard to give advice about it, but some of the levels sound high enough to cautious about how much wine is being consumed.”

How much arsenic may be lurking in your wine? And how much does it matter? Photo by Robert Owen-Wahl, an Eastbourne Web Designer, at Eastbourne Hotels.

However, a bit of digging and math may offer a more reassuring answer at least for the time being. We can make some basic calculations based on the little we do know, again assuming the BeverageGrades findings are accurate (despite CBS’s findings of much lower amounts for the four wines they tested).

First, is drinking water the right standard to use for acceptable levels of arsenic in wine? As Spaeth said, probably not, but it’s all we have, so that’s what we’ll use. The EPA maximum contaminant level of 10 ppb of arsenic in drinking water is based on calculations that assume a person will drink approximately 2 liters of water a day, a reasonable standard, Spaeth said. But that’s water. If you’re drinking 2 L of wine a day, you’ve got bigger problems than just the arsenic levels in your wine. (For one, you liver likely won’t last long enough for you to develop cancer. And, a daily drinker of that much would certainly qualify as an alcoholic.) So let’s do the math for two standard glasses of wine a day. A 5 oz. glass is approximately 150 ml, so two glasses is 300 ml. If that wine contains arsenic at five times the EPA standard for drinking water, then 300 x 5 means you’re getting as much arsenic as the equivalent of drinking 1.5 L of drinking water at the maximum amount allowed by the EPA. That calculation, however, ignores the net effect of arsenic from different sources and assumes that the EPA standard is appropriate, which some experts question.

The biggest health concerns related to arsenic are types of cancer, especially bladder, lung and skin cancer. A 1999 National Academy of Sciences report estimated the risk of dying from cancer due to arsenic in drinking water at 10 ppb at approximately 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000, which Spaeth said many people would find too high. That report, however, is now more than 15 years old. Right now, more recent data would be needed to establish whether the EPA’s levels are appropriate. But in reality, drinking water typically has far lower levels than this maximum anyway. A recent study on well water, which is more likely to have contaminants than municipal water supplies, found median levels at one tenth the standard, and most cities have arsenic levels below 5 ppb. Los Angeles water, for example, averages 1.4 ppb and had a recorded maximum of 3.4 ppb. Chicago’s drinking water supply averages 0.17 ppb with a maximum recorded 1 ppb. So even if you’re drinking 2 L of water a day, that makes the “extra” arsenic you might be getting from wine that much less of an issue.

The EPA levels appear to be good enough for the FDA, the agency actually tasked with regulating food and drink, including wine, but again, that’s solely for drinking water. The only standard the FDA has for arsenic in food or drinks is 10 ppb in bottled water. They have a proposal for the same standard in apple juice, but beyond that, the FDA offers no guidance in arsenic levels in food. “I think that is another issue that needs to be addressed since it’s being identified as present in certain levels in our food,” Spaeth said. “If they don’t have plans to do it, this would be a very good time to start.” And interestingly, although the FDA has proposed a 10 ppb standard for apple juice, a post at Vinographypoints out the agency as previously stated that levels as high as two to five times the EPA drinking water standard have been detected in some fruit juices but do not pose a concern because individuals do not typically drink 2 L of juice a day. Just as they don’t drink that much wine daily.

If nothing else, there appears to be some confusion over what an appropriate standard would be and insufficient data to guide one. It’s true that arsenic poisoning is a serious concern with chronic exposure. Beyond than cancer risk, arsenic poisoning can damage the central and peripheral nervous systems, the liver and the kidneys. “It’s a systemic poison,” Spaeth said. “It affects virtually every organ system in the body.” These concerns have led arsenic to make headlines lately for its presence in rice products, baby formula and apple juice, but this is not the first time it has been detected in alcoholic beverages either. A study in late 2013 found those who drank more than two beers or a glass of white wine daily had 20 to 30 percent higher arsenic levels. But even in that study, the health significance of those findings was unclear, as was the source of the arsenic in the alcoholic drinks.

But before you pour your wine down the sink, consider this: even arsenic poisoning at levels below what will kill you have unmistakable symptoms: brownish green spots on the hands, feet and sometimes trunk as well as white lines in the fingernails. These can appear at low levels of arsenic intake, and the risk increases as arsenic intake increases. If all the oenophiles in Napa Valley and across the country were consuming worrisome dangerously high levels of arsenic, it would be hard to miss those spots, as well as symptoms such as headaches, confusion, drowsiness and diarrhea.

If you’re an alcoholic whose drink of choice is wine, you may (or may not) have reason to worry, but you also have far greater health concerns to address. If you have an occasional glass of wine, even one of the brands with the “very high levels,” you’re not taking in any more arsenic than you would with the occasional bowl of shellfish, dark meat fish, apple or pear juice or even brussels sprouts, for that matter. If you drink wine almost daily, as I do, you might like to see some of these companies taking steps to identify the source of the arsenic and reducing it, but unless you’re seeing brownish green spots on your hands, you are probably more likely to die from something else than arsenic poisoning or arsenic-caused cancer.