Hi, this is Monica Reinagel, the nutrition diva, here with your quick and dirty tips for eating well and feeling fabulous.

As I'm sure you've heard by now, there's a lot of concern these days about high arsenic levels in certain foods.

Ironically, the foods at the center of the scare, apple juice and brown rice,

are generally thought of as healthy foods.

Several of you have written to ask how much of these foods

it's safe for us or our kids to consume

or whether we should avoid them altogether.

So how much arsenic is too much? Well in larger amounts of course arsenic is a rather notorious poison.

In fact, slipping a dose of arsenic into someone's cup of mead or grog was a popular

way of offing political rivals back in the days of mead and grog. These days, we're not so worried about an accidental or intentional

overdose of arsenic. Rather we worry about chronic exposure to levels that

aren't enough to make you feel sick right away, but over time

could cause serious health problems. Up until lately, contaminated well water

was the primary concern, and so efforts have focused on rigorous testing of water supplies to ensure that arsenic levels didn't exceed safe thresholds.

Now that some foods have been found to contain high levels of arsenic, one of our challenges

is that we simply don't know that much about how arsenic in foods might affect people and

what safe thresholds might be. Simply evaluating foods by the standards that we set for drinking

water could either over or underestimate the dangers, and here's why. The safe threshold for arsenic in drinking water is 10

parts per billion, but that's calculated based on how much water you're likely to

drink day in and day out. It wouldn't make sense to apply that same threshold to a food

that you only eat once or twice a week. On the other hand, the safe threshold

for water assumes that drinking water is the only significant source of arsenic

...