 Ocrotoxin has been described as toxic to the immune system, developing fetus, kidneys, and nervous system as well as being carcinogenic. But that's in animal studies. Ocrotoxin causes kidney toxicity in certain animal species, but there's little documented evidence of adverse effects in humans. That's why it's only considered a possible human carcinogen. Big ag assures that current Ocrotoxin levels are safe, even among those who eat a lot of contaminated foods. The worst-case scenario may be young children eating a lot of oat-based cereals, but even then, their lifetime cancer risk is considered negligible, with those arguing against regulatory standards suggesting you can eat more than 42 cups of oatmeal a day and not worry about it. Where did they get these kinds of estimates? They determined the so-called benchmark dose in animals, the dose of the toxin that gives a 10% increase in pathology, and then because you want to err on the side of caution, you divide that dose by 500 as a kind of safety fudge factor to develop the tallable daily intake. For cancer risk, you can find that tumor dose, the dose that increases tumor incidence in lab animals by 5%, and extrapolate down to the negligible cancer risk intake, effectively incorporating a 5,000-fold safety factor. Seems kind of arbitrary, right? But what else are you going to do? I mean, you can't just intentionally feed people the stuff and see what happens, though, hey, look, people eat it all the time. Can we just follow people and their diets out over time and see if people who eat more whole grains like oats, for example, are more likely to have cancer or live shorter lives? What is the association between whole grain intake and all-cause, cardiovascular, and cancer mortality? Every additional ounce of whole grain a day is associated not only with a lower risk for cancer, but also a lower risk of dying from all causes put together. Here are all the big cancer studies, every single one. If anything, trended towards lower cancer risk, bottom line is that you don't find adverse effects confirmed in these population studies. This is not to say okrotoxins is necessarily harmless, but any such risk it does pose doesn't outweigh the known benefits of whole grain consumption. And in fact, healthy constituents of the whole grains themselves, like the antioxidants, may directly reduce the impacts of mycotoxins by protecting cells from damage, to eating lots of fruits and vegetables may also help. Either way, a healthy diet can play a significant role in mitigating the risk. In summary, healthy foods like whole grains are good, but not as good as they could be because of okrotoxin, whereas less-healthful foods like wine and pork are worse because of the mycotoxin. Okrotoxin was detected, for example, in 44% of tested pork.