"In the first study, researchers found detectable levels of mercury in nine of 20 samples of commercial HFCS."
Debatable and harmful can be widely separated. Without any real numbers I am going to assume that this is a tiny amount of contamination and hardly meaningful.
PS: I might be an environmentalist, but I hate bad science reporting.
"Because corn syrup is in almost everything it's hard to know just how much mercury you're ingesting."
I think that's Retric's point, and if it's not his, I'll certainly claim it. There's a little bit of everything in everything (thanks, entropy!). This article does nothing absolutely nothing to inform us as to whether this is actually worth thinking about.
The information content of this article is zero. Without more information it's not even worth your time to think about. (Trying to find more information might be worthwhile, and based on the other HN-posters who actually did that, I find myself fairly unconcerned about this putative threat.)
Japanese studies have shown that chlorella is helpful for removing heavy metals, including mercury. I know people who don't eat sushi without a handful of it as well.
This chart lists several brand-name foods that had "detectable" levels of mercury, the worst of which is about 350 parts per trillion. According to Wikipedia, the "action level" of mercury in fish (the point at which government takes action) is one part per million. So it sounds like you'd have to eat/drink thousands of servings of this food to equal one particularly bad helping of fish.
On the other hand, Wikipedia lists the legal limit for water as two parts per billion ("inorganic mercury" instead of "methylmercury"), which would be easier to hit. I'm not sure which limit applies in this case.
Edit: It might be worse than this for some portion of the population. From the "Not so sweet" paper:
Using the USDA’s estimate of 50 grams of average consumption HFCS per day, one might roughly estimate potential total mercury ingestion via HFCS of up to 28.5ug total mercury/day (50 grams HFCS X 0.570 ug/g). Using these same assumptions, high-end HFCS consumers potentially could
have much higher total mercury ingestion.
It is difficult to know to what to compare this figure. The EPA has established a "reference dose," or maximum recommended dietary intake of methylmercury. Methylmercury is the form typically found in fish and seafood. The reference dose of 0.1 ug/kg/day applies to women of childbearing age and young children, who are thought to be the most at risk from methylmercury exposure. For the "average" 55 kg American woman, this would translate into no more than 5.5ug/day of methylmercury.
There is no reference dose for total mercury. The mercury found in HFCS may be a different form of
mercury than the methylmercury typically found in fish (we just don’t know), but it poses a risk just
the same. Mercury in any form can be toxic to the developing brain.
Debatable and harmful can be widely separated. Without any real numbers I am going to assume that this is a tiny amount of contamination and hardly meaningful.
PS: I might be an environmentalist, but I hate bad science reporting.