Over the past few weeks, bloggers and newspapers alike have reported on the fact that the heavy metal and neurotoxin mercury has turned up in packaged goods and sodas made with high-fructose corn syrup. The news first broke last year, when retired FDA researcher Renee Dufault reported in Environmental Health that in 2005, she'd discovered a shocking fact: nearly half of her collected high-fructose corn samples contained mercury.

Dufault's superiors at the FDA, however, failed to sound the alarm, and the world would wait until she retired to learn of her findings.

At the same time, another study conducted by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), has shown equally disturbing results: one-third of products randomly pulled off market shelves contained mercury.

In the wake of the findings, both the Corn Refiners Association (CRA) and the FDA have mounted an aggressive campaign to fight the claim. In response to the studies, CRA fired off a press release challenging the test results. The industry, they claimed, no longer uses mercury-containing caustic soda when refining its corn. Why sound the alarm on such a process no longer even in use?

The answer to that question lies in how mercury came to contaminate HFCS in the first place. In order to process corn into syrup, makers of HFCS use a combination of caustic soda and hydrochloric acid; a small number of these plants then go on to mix the solution in a vat of electrified mercury that helps break down the kernels. In their press release, however, CRA attempts to undermine Dufault's and the IATP's argument by saying the information obtained is "outdated"-- that in effect, no makers of HFCS continue to use mercury in the manufacturing process.

That wasn't the end of it, however. CRA then went on to hire Dennis Paustenbach, a lawyer who defended the utility company PG & E when it was sued for poisoning a California town's water supply with excessive levels of chromium-6. With Paustenbach's arrival, the conversation quickly shifted from whether or not HFCS actually contains mercury to whether or not mercury itself is a viable health concern. "The authors ignore important distinctions," wrote Paustenbach, "between organic and other forms of mercury and their implications for assessing human health risk."

Underscoring his point, an FDA official who spoke with Grist's Tom Philpott added that "[inorganic mercury] represents no health hazard since it is so poorly absorbed when ingested."

But health experts across the board-including the American Association of Pediatrics-agree that there are no known safe levels of mercury, inorganic or otherwise. And now, the same agency that buried Dufault's findings in the first place is telling consumers not to worry whether the soda they drink may be harmful to their health.

I don't know about you, but that's a bet I'm not willing to take.

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HFCS: Not So Natural After All
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