Coughlin:  "U.S.-grown rice is safe and nutritious."

BELTSVILLE, MD -- In a presentation at the annual spring symposium of the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (JIFSAN) here, a leading food toxicologist, Dr. James R. Coughlin, said there is a better way to approach food chemical safety issues.

"We need to take a holistic approach," he said.  "There may be a health risk associated with some foods which contain trace levels of a toxic chemical, but there may be an even greater public health risk to eliminating that food from your diet.  It is much more important to examine the safety and benefits of the whole food than to merely focus, as we have done for decades, on the presence of a very low level of a toxic chemical in that food."

Coughlin said the traditional approach to food chemical safety, where a single chemical is studied in the food essentially in a vacuum, does not lead to sound public health results, can create false alarm for the public, and often doesn't take into account the mitigating health benefits of a particular food.

Coughlin pointed to the issue of arsenic in rice that has gained some sensationalist media attention despite assurances from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that arsenic levels "found in its testing are too low to cause immediate or short-term adverse health effects."

"After looking at the risks and benefits data I am not prepared to say anything that would lead rice eaters to change their diet," said Dr. Terry Troxell, a scientist and former Director of the FDA's Office of Plant and Dairy Foods, who also presented at the conference.

Coughlin described the conclusions of a major 2013 review of inorganic arsenic's potential cancer risks by Dr. Samuel Cohen of the University of Nebraska Medical Center.  Dr. Cohen and his collaborators found there is little, if any, cause for concern when it comes to human exposure to low levels of inorganic arsenic in foods and in the environment.

Coughlin said that "Cohen showed that even though inorganic arsenic is a known human carcinogen for some people exposed to very large amounts, there is no direct link between human cancer and inorganic arsenic when the levels are below a threshold dose.  Coughlin believes that "levels of inorganic arsenic in rice are just too low to reach any of the thresholds. Add to that there are important health benefits associated with eating rice."

"There have been no documented incidents in which arsenic in U.S. rice has led to human health problems," said Coughlin during his presentation.  "In fact, many populations that consume up to five times more rice than Americans have lower overall disease rates - and the rice they are eating likely has higher arsenic levels, since U.S. rice is consistently shown to have among the lowest levels anywhere in the world."  Coughlin concluded that "in spite of the very low arsenic levels in rice, rice is still a safe and nutritious food."

Contact:  Michael Klein, (703) 236-1458

BATON ROUGE, LA -- The Louisiana Senate Committee on Agriculture, Forestry, Aquaculture, and Rural Development voted today to approve rice check-off legislation that was approved by the House on April 10.  The legislation makes changes to the Louisiana Rice Check-Off statutes introduced in response to the state Supreme Court's ruling late last year that elements of the statutes, created forty years ago, were unconstitutional.

The two bills, HB 886 and HB 1045, fund vital research and promotion efforts and were unanimously approved by the Committee.  Both bills now move to the full Senate for consideration in the coming days.

The bills set the assessments at current levels, provide for a refund provision for any growers who do not wish to support research or promotion activities funded by check-off dollars, and expand the size of the rice research and promotion boards by two seats each.

Contact:  Randy Jemison, (337) 738-7009

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