--- On Thu, 1/28/10, Larry Krengel <[log in to unmask]> asked about honey that had been stored for 20 years in an aluminum container.  

While there are several things that might give me pause about 20 year old honey, the aluminum container is not one of them.  Despite a great deal of media hype and paranoia on the internet, there have been no studies connecting aluminum with any disease.  (You will find one reference to a discovery in the 1970s "that the brains of
Alzheimers disease victims contained abnormally high levels of
aluminum".  The authors of that study have since been quite clear that they could not determine whether aluminum was cause, effect or related to some third factor.)  The US EPA and FDA have both investigated this issue quite thoroughly and found no connection between aluminum and any disease.

I do have to correct one point in the original post.  Aluminum is
actually highly reactive with other chemicals.  That's actually what
makes it so safe.  8% of the earth's surface is made up of aluminum. 
It's so reactive, though, that it's tightly bound into safe compounds.  Even pure aluminum cookware quickly achieves a dull sheen as the outermost surface oxidizes.  That oxide layer acts to seal in the rest of the metal and prevent it from also reacting.  (Unlike rust molecules which are slightly smaller and allow gaps for more oxygen to penetrate, aluminum oxide molecules are slightly larger and prevent further penetration.)


If despite all that you are still worried, you should consider the theoretical dosage that you could get off your container.  From the FDA's report:

"Many over-the-counter medicines also contain aluminum. According to
the Aluminum Association, one antacid tablet can contain 50
milligrams of aluminum or more, and it is not unusual for a person
with an upset stomach to consume more than 1,000 milligrams, or 1
gram, of aluminum per day. A buffered aspirin tablet may contain
about 10 to 20 milligrams of aluminum. In contrast, in a worst-case
scenario, a person using uncoated aluminum pans for all cooking and
food storage every day would take in an estimated 3.5 milligrams of
aluminum daily."

They go on to note that highly acidic foods may result is slightly higher levels of leaching but 1) it's still an infinitesimal level compared to all the other sources of environmental exposure and 2) it will result in visible pitting of the surface of the metal.  Honey is slightly acidic and the length of exposure was long.  However, it is far less acidic than, say tomato sauce and far less convective since I assume it was static storage (again, compared to boiling action of the tomato sauce).  A gram of aluminum (the daily antacid dosage mentioned above) is about 1/3 of a cubic centimeter - about three eraser-heads worth of volume.  So to get the same dosage as you would after a single bad day's heartburn, your container would have to almost be eroded all the way through.  If despite the long exposure the interior of the container shows little sign of pitting, there is not even a theoretical reason to worry.

Mike Rossander
www.medinabeekeepers.com



      

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