Toxic Omelets: Scientists Find Arsenic in Chicken Eggs

Everyone prefers their eggs a different way—scrambled, sunny side up, over-easy, in an omelet—the list goes on and on. But no one wants their eggs sprinkled with arsenic.

But as the Utah Health Department recently found, arsenic-laden eggs are an all-too-common occurrence. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, last year, two area children displayed much higher than average levels of arsenic—75 to 100 percent higher than the limit, to be exact. The arsenic's origins stumped doctors and scientists. After Christina McNaughton, a Utah toxicologist, examined the children's home, she pinpointed the poison's unlikely source—the family's backyard chickens.

Well, not the chickens so much as the chicken feed. The food these particular chickens consumed contained roxarsone, an arsenic-based food additive. The chickens regularly ate roxarsone, then passed the toxin on to their eggs, which were consumed by the two children. According to the Utah Health Department's study, a 46-pound six-year-old who eats two eggs per day would accumulate about 506 micrograms of arsenic per week, significantly more arsenic than recommended under the U.S. minimum risk level. Not that any arsenic is really recommended, of course.

While this particular case of backyard-chickens-gone-wrong is unfortunate, it's indicative of a much larger problem. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, roxarsone and other arsenic-based substances are frequently added to poultry and swine feeds. Producers believe the additives in conjunction with antibiotics help animals combat disease and grow meatier. And while Big Poultry asserts that most of the arsenic is excreted in chickens' waste, as this Utah Health Department study and a growing body of evidence suggests, that explanation is, well, chicken crap.

McNaughton's study showed that children's arsenic levels spiked because they consumed eggs from chickens that ate roxarsone. A 2004 study from the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy showed that fast-food chicken contained elevated levels of arsenic and more than half of the store-bought chicken tested contained arsenic. The American Chemical Society notes that about 70 percent of America's broiler chickens are fed roxarsone, with agriculture using about 2.2 million pounds of the stuff every year to produce 43 billion pounds of poultry. The nation's chickens and pigs are literally marinating in the stuff before they even reach consumers' plates.

Studies may just be beginning to highlight the health risks roxarsone may have for humans, but it doesn't take a genius to know that feeding arsenic, an extremely toxic poison, to the animals people regularly eat is a recipe for disaster. Arsenic exposure is linked to cancers of the skin, bladder, kidney, liver, and lungs as well as to immune system, endocrine, and neurological problems. Yet the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the leading agency created to ensure food safety, fails to ban arsenic as a food additive. So much for protecting consumers' health.

It's time for the FDA to stop turning a blind eye to all the shenanigans food producers get away with. Sign our petition calling for the agency's reform through the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.

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