Study: Everything I Like to Ingest Has Arsenic

<p><a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-161839757/stock-photo-dangerous-food.html?src=vzHfzmLLyw9kI3L4M9Y3oA-1-0" target="_blank">Fabio Freitas e Silva</a>/Shutterstock</p>

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I have a friend who claims to have stopped reading me because I ruin all of her favorite foods for her: rice, quinoa, chicken… After writing this post, I may boycott me as well. In a study (hat tip: LiveScience) apparently designed by my friend for revenge on me, Dartmouth researchers found an association between bodily arsenic loads and consumption of the following substances I have swooned over in print (and enjoy in really life pretty much every chance I get): white wine, beer, Brussels sprouts, and “dark meat fish,” a category that includes my beloved sardines.

For people who drink 2.5 beers or glasses of white wine per day, they found, arsenic levels were 20 percent to 30 percent higher than for nondrinkers. Gulp. Or, perhaps better: Stop gulping.

LiveScience‘s Bahar Gholipour raises an important caveat: The researchers acknowledge that it’s unclear whether the arsenic levels the researchers found in their subjects are high enough to trigger the compound’s negative effects, which include, according to the study, “skin lesions; skin, lung, and bladder cancer; vascular diseases; low birth weight; and potentially diabetes mellitus and increased susceptibility to infection.” More research, they say, is needed, and I’ll be following closely.

As for rice, which has been shown in recent studies to have high arsenic loads, the researchers found “no clear relationship” between consumption and arsenic loads. So my friend can go back to eating her favorite staple—seasoned with a lashing of schadenfreude. Excuse me while I whip up my dinner: air-poached air, accompanied by well-filtered water.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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