Question

cnn why is orange juice still safe

Answer 1

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has recently tested the orange juice and orange juice concentrate for different shipments and domestic manufacturers and it has come up with a conclusion that orange juice is safe. This testing was a result of the claim made by Coca-Cola that fungicide was found in its own and in competitors' orange juice and in juice concentrates from Brazil. In order to take some precautionary actions, all the imports of orange juice and orange juice concentrate were stopped by FDA.

In order to check the validity of a claim, FDA collected samples from 31 shipments. Twenty-eight are still pending analysis, but three shipments of orange juice and orange juice concentrates were negative for carbendazim which is mainly a chemical fungicide that is legal in most parts of the world, including Canada, Japan, Europe, and Brazil. But in the USA this is considered an unlawful pesticide chemical residue. In the testing of FDA it was found that carbendazim levels under 80 parts per billion (ppb) in orange juice do not raise a safety concern.

As per USA government, almost 75% of the orange juice is produced domestically and 25% is being imported. Only 11% of all orange juice consumed in the U.S. comes from Brazil. It is quite possible that the orange juice can have carbendazim but these levels are not harmful.

Following the claims of Coca-Cola, Pepsi stated that the company uses 100% Florida orange juice for its Pure Premium juices, which do not include orange juice concentrate. On the other hand, Florida's Natural, which competes with Coca-Cola and PepsiCo's orange juice products claimed that it is only using oranges that are grown by U.S. farmers in Florida.

Thus from all these evidences, it is quite clear that the orange juice is still safe for health and there is no major threat related to these juice.