Diet rumors in 2012 (I): Prawns + vitamin C= eating poison? (2)

The truth is:

According to the rumors, the reason that people should not eat prawns and vitamin C together is that prawns contain a high concentration of arsenic compound, which is non-toxic to the human body but the vitamin C can transform it into highly toxic "trivalent arsenic," that is arsenic trioxide, causing acute poisoning even death.

Westerners like putting in lemon juice when cooking prawns and Chinese people also like such dishes as stir-fried prawns with Longjing Tea and prawns in tomato sauce. If the explain is true and the vitamin C in lemon, tea and tomatoes reacts with prawns, why no one is poisoned after eating them?

In fact, the vast majority of arsenic contained in prawns is stable organic arsenic and the content of inorganic arsenic is less than 4 percent.

According to China’s national standards, the content of inorganic arsenic per kilogram of prawns shall not exceed 0.5 milligram. Even if all of the inorganic arsenic can be transformed into arsenic trioxide, one must eat approximately 105 kilograms of prawns to reach the oral dose of arsenic trioxide causing death.

Experts said that the following three toxic substances are more worthy of attention:

First, some toxic substances are naturally existed in the food such as puffer fish meat. Second, the toxic substances naturally exist in some food but people have found a way to detoxify them, such as the raw soya-bean milk and hyacinth beans, which can be detoxified through thorough heating. Third, it mainly includes the pollutants especially the biological contaminants.

Read the Chinese version: 2012“饮食谣言”大盘点（上）; Source: Beijing Morning Post