The Corn Refiners Association has been aggressively targeting worried parents with a series of ads in parenting and health markets disputing the public health campaigns against high-fructose corn syrup.  

I can't wait to see their spin on this one.  I wonder how long before they start sowing doubt about the risk of mercury in your kid's popsicle. "Wow, you get your hair done by an environmental toxicologist?"  

I chuckled when I read the author's (deserved) disparagement of HFCS, followed by his admission that he drinks coffee, which is no less nutritionally void or toxic.  

Since the most common source of mercury in the environment is coal-burning, and such powerplants are common throughout the US, it would interesting to find just how much mercury contamination there is in organically grown produce, free of HFCS.
Has anyone commissioned a study to see how safe this preferred foodsource really is?

    The coal Ash wet impoundment that broke in Tennessee made the news cycle recently. The heavy metals component of that toxic spill was elaborated on. However it is surprising to me to know how little the public at large knows about the wet impoundments of coal wash water that is contaminated not only with the same heavy metals but the chemicals used in the coal washing and preparation process. We have hundreds of them in Southern Appalachia and have had some monster breaks but they hardly make the news. It would be surprising for the general public to know how many leak and the coal companies are not fined for. It would be surprising also to know how many are turned loose on the third or maintenance shifts to lower the levels to allow for more coal waste water without having to build a new impoundment. If you notice the tributaries of Southern Appalachia you will see all the run off eventually hit's the Mississippi River. The contamination runs all the way to the Gulf.
    When they decided to get lead and some of the toxic chemicals out of the environment all of the old service station gas pump tanks had to be dug up and the soil removed and cleaned/replaced. It took millions of tax payer dollars to start this process and we are still working on it. The large coal wash water impoundments pose an Environmental Hazard and if we ever get around to cleaning them up the taxpayers will get stuck with a humongous bill again. Each Heavy Metal in and of itself is named on the EPA Hazard Materials list but when you combine all of them into a toxic soup and call it a coal slurry or waste water impoundment it is not. Curios to observe this little practice.
    When you do Mountain Top Removal the rock overburden is blasted into smaller pieces and the mineral disturbed in the soil. When you stack all this aggregate rock and subsoil in a valley and when the rains that fed the covered up stream is now allowed to leech throw this overburden sieve the heavy metals are leeched out into what's left of the stream below the fill. Remember this was solid rock and subsoil packed form eons of time and the runoff before was on top of  this and did not contain the heavy metals. All of this goes into the same tributaries mentioned above.
    Co2 and Global warming dominates the discussion sometimes when we talk about the burning of coal. The myriads of problems associated with the mining of coal are hardly ever mentioned or studied much less addressed.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

edarnold said it already. how "mercury free" is the rest of our food? and seriously, "traces" of mercury being found in food? why don't you actually give the numbers? are they more than we'd get in a glass of water? a purposely incomplete article is called propaganda.

It is absurd to that we allow coal-burning powerplants to dominate our atmosphere! Momentarily setting aside the issue of contaminants introduced during food processing, there is a nice parallel here to the time when strontium showed up in our milk supply. It was not so much a reason to abandon the idea of purity in our food system as it was a reason to question the wisdom of detonating nuclear weapons under our beautiful spacious skies.

The potential for contamination of our food system does beg a couple of questions, like, "What is the rate of mercury deposition from atmospheric fallout?" Is it high enough to contaminate the surface of our leafy greens, our monster zucchini, our succulent red bell peppers? Or does it accumulate in our topsoil, reaching concentrations where plants are forced to take it up at higher rates than they would under ideal conditions? Several studies have shown that when mercury levels were artificially increased, the efficiency of photosynthesis went down--photosynthesis currently being the largest source of energy on the planet.

If plants are taking up mercury, is it getting concentrated in roots, stems, leaves, or reproductive tissue? Maybe organic lettuce has more mercury in it than an organic tomato. Maybe both have lower chemical residue than their artificially-fertilized and artificially-bug-free counterpart (not to say that organic produce is plagued by bugs; there are just more creative ways to control pests than introducing toxins into your backyard).

Wild fish in our lakes, streams, ponds, and sloughs have become a concern because they are near the top of the aquatic food chain and suffer from the effects of mercury accumulating in algae and bugs. Perhaps we should be more concerned about organic eggs or organic cheese than organic veggies? If we had the ability to do a very careful accounting of the the inputs and outputs of different food systems, my money is still on organic contributing more to the health of people and the land. Once upon a time, conservationists were concerned mostly with eroding soils and loss of wildlife habitat when it came to less-than-ideal farming and food producting. Today, we have all that and an obesity epidemic and a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Corn industry and others claim that they are using new technology for NaOH and HCl production.  The fact is that there are still plenty of Mercury Cell Chlor-Alkali plants in and outside of the US.  Today materials are sourced worldwide at the cheapest prices available. Recent Wall Street revelations prove that where there is money to be made and little oversight, unscrupulous people do whatever they can to maximize profits. How many times do we have to get burned before we study reported problems in detail?  If it looks like a duck and acts like a duck ....

For those of us that question industry claims of no mercury in HFCS or other products, they state that any Hg concentrations are so low that you would have to drink a 55 gal drum of soda for any ill effects.  Due diligence is what is needed and that will not come from the very politically astute Corn Lobby. The American Food Industry does not have a "Farm to Fork" food certification requirement as other countries have.  Industry ability to resist such controls has placed us at risk to multiple tainted food products on an all too regular basis.