Feds Put Orange Juice Through the Wringer

Like lots of things that are supposed to be good for you, orange juice may turn out to be not so good for you.  Maybe even bad for you. It depends who you ask.

U.S. regulators are concerned that there may be a prohibited fungicide, carbendazim, in some shipments of imported orange juice.

Carbendazim has been linked to increased risk of liver tumors in animals and was reportedly found in low levels last month in orange juice products from Brazil, which produces about 41 percent of U.S. imports, according to press reports.

"Carbendazim is approved for use in a variety of crops, including citrus, in many countries," Nega Beru, Ph.D., of the Food and Drug Administration's Office of Food Safety, said in an undated letter to the Juice Products Association.  

"In the United States, however, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has not approved carbendazim for use as a fungicide on oranges, nor has it established a tolerance or an exemption from the need for a tolerance for carbendazim in orange juice in the United States.  Thus, carbendazim in orange juice is an unlawful pesticide chemical residue under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act," Beru said.

Immediate concern?

Beru went on to say, however, that there may not be an immediate safety concern.

"The Environmental Protection Agency has conducted a preliminary risk assessment based on the recent reports of carbendazim in orange juice.  Based on that risk assessment, EPA has concluded that consumption of orange juice with carbendazim at the low levels that have been reported does not raise safety concerns," Beru said.  "FDA does not intend to take action to remove from domestic commerce orange juice containing the reported low levels of carbendazim. FDA is, however, conducting its own testing of orange juice for carbendazim, and, if the agency identifies orange juice with carbendazim at levels that present a public health risk, it will alert the public and take the necessary action to ensure that the product is removed from the market."

Beru said FDA is also sampling import shipments of orange juice and will deny entry to shipments that test positive for carbendazim. 

Minute Maid Responds

One of the country's biggest juice producers says OJ is still safe.

“Brazilian orange juice is safe and always has been,” said Dan Schafer, a spokesman for Coca Cola Co., which owns the Minute Maid brand. “Second, this is an issue that impacts every company that produces products in the U.S. containing orange juice from Brazil.”

Coca-Cola, by the way, says it was the company that originally alerted U.S. regulators to the issues surrounding Brazilian orange juice after it found a fungicide in some of its products.

The company said it the FDA on Dec. 28 after detecting low levels of carbendazim in its own and in competitors' finished orange juice and in juice concentrates that were not yet on the market.