(Forbes) - I am what I have termed a blue collar wine snob. I’m picky about my wine and am even a member of a wine club, but I rarely pay more than $10 a bottle, mainly because I drink about two bottles a week. So when I caught a headline about popular wines supposedly containing enough arsenic to eventually cause cancer, you can bet I raised an eyebrow. CBS News reported last Thursday that “very high levels of arsenic” showed up in almost a quarter of 1,300 wines tested by independent Denver-based lab BeverageGrades. “Very high,” according to BeverageGrades founder and former wine distributor Kevin Hicks, meant four to five times more arsenic than the EPA standard for drinking water, which is 10 parts per billion (ppb), or 10 micrograms per liter (mcg/L). Among the top-selling wines with three, four and five times the 10 ppb standard were, respectively, Trader Joe’s Two-Buck Chuck White Zinfandel, Ménage à Trois Moscato and Franzia White Grenache. Hicks told CBS he noticed a trend of higher amounts of arsenic the cheaper the wine was on a per-liter basis. The CBS report reads as alarmist — though they mention at the end that their own independent testing of four wines yielded arsenic levels above 10 ppb but much lower than BeverageGrades’ results — and Hicks clearly finds these results concerning enough that he’s filing a class action suit against more than two dozen wine makers and sellers for their unsafe products. He’s also, by the way, marketing his company’s testing services to wine makers who might be concerned about… arsenic in their wine. This news report and lawsuit could easily be seen as creating one’s own demand. But if we assume the BeverageGrades’ results are correct — a big “if” since the results have not been independently confirmed, the company has not described its methods, and the company is simultaneously attempting to sell winemakers its services after creating a news story — how much should you be concerned if you’re a regular wine drinker? The shortest answer, according to Kenneth Spaeth, MD, chief of occupational and environmental medicine at the North Shore-LIJ Health System in Great Neck, NY, is we don’t know yet. “It’s a bit of dilemma for consumers right now because there’s so much information we don’t have,” he said. “I also know nothing about the methodology, about how these data were collected and how much consistency there was from sample to sample and bottle to bottle. Given all these gaps in the information, it’s hard to give advice about it, but some of the levels sound high enough to cautious about how much wine is being consumed.” However, a bit of digging and math may offer a more reassuring answer at least for the time being. We can make some basic calculations based on the little we do know, again assuming the BeverageGrades findings are accurate (despite CBS’s findings of much lower amounts for the four wines they tested). First, is drinking water the right standard to use for acceptable levels of arsenic in wine? As Spaeth said, probably not, but it’s all we have, so that’s what we’ll use. The EPA maximum contaminant level of 10 ppb of arsenic in drinking water is based on calculations that assume a person will drink approximately 2 liters of water a day, a reasonable standard, Spaeth said. But that’s water. If you’re drinking 2 L of wine a day, you’ve got bigger problems than just the arsenic levels in your wine. (For one, you liver likely won’t last long enough for you to develop cancer. And, a daily drinker of that much would certainly qualify as an alcoholic.) So let’s do the math for two standard glasses of wine a day. A 5 oz. glass is approximately 150 ml, so two glasses is 300 ml. If that wine contains arsenic at five times the EPA standard for drinking water, then 300 x 5 means you’re getting as much arsenic as the equivalent of drinking 1.5 L of drinking water at the maximum amount allowed by the EPA. That calculation, however, ignores the net effect of arsenic from different sources and assumes that the EPA standard is appropriate, which some experts question. The biggest health concerns related to arsenic are types of cancer, especially bladder, lung and skin cancer. A 1999 National Academy of Sciences report estimated the risk of dying from cancer due to arsenic in drinking water at 10 ppb at approximately 1 in 500 to 1 in 1,000, which Spaeth said many people would find too high. That report, however, is now more than 15 years old. Right now, more recent data would be needed to establish whether the EPA’s levels are appropriate. But in reality, drinking water typically has far lower levels than this maximum anyway. A recent study on well water, which is more likely to have contaminants than municipal water supplies, found median levels at one tenth the standard, and most cities have arsenic levels below 5 ppb. Los Angeles water, for example, averages 1.4 ppb and had a recorded maximum of 3.4 ppb. Chicago’s drinking water supply averages 0.17 ppb with a maximum recorded 1 ppb. So even if you’re drinking 2 L of water a day, that makes the “extra” arsenic you might be getting from wine that much less of an issue.