By Ben Harder
Most chicken eaten in the United States contains three to four times as much arsenic as do other kinds of meat and poultry. That finding may require researchers to revise upward their estimates of how much of this toxic metal people consume in food, but the revised amount still doesn’t exceed what’s accepted as safe.
Inorganic arsenic is a carcinogen; organic forms–compounds containing carbon and arsenic–are less toxic and combat animal diseases and accelerate growth. Therefore, organic arsenic is an approved ingredient in roxarsone, a feed additive used in poultry and swine. About 70 percent of chickens grown for meat receive roxarsone. They excrete most of the arsenic but retain some in their tissues, particularly the liver, in both organic and inorganic forms.