Hot off the press: What’s in my baby’s food?
A study just released about 2 weeks ago by the non-profit organization Healthy Babies Bright Futures warns parents about elevated levels of heavy metals found in baby food. This is certainly information no parent wants to hear. My goal is to give a summary of the report and help you to make sense of how much to worry and what you should do now.
Healthy Babies Bright Futures is a non-profit organization whose goal is take an evidence-based approach to researching and reducing the levels of toxic chemicals in the environment and decreasing the exposure risk for children’s developing brains. The organization has long been an advocate for child’s health and has been working for many years towards creating a safer and more accountable world for children.
The group evaluated 168 different containers of baby foods from 61 different brands purchased from a wide variety of stores across the United States. The report determined that 95% of the baby foods tested contained detectable levels of toxic heavy metals, with 25% of those baby foods containing all 4 of the heavy metals tested - lead, arsenic, mercury, and cadmium.
One of the major concerns cited by the report was the lack of established limits for the presence of these heavy metals in our food. While work has been done by the FDA to decrease the levels of these toxins, and some improvement has been made, there are still very few formal enforced limits.
Some food are worse than others. According to the report, there are 15 foods that had the highest levels of metals resulting in the greatest potential impact on a child’s IQ and brain development:
Rice dishes
Whole milk**
White and brown rice
Apple juice
Infant formula**
Fruit juice blend
Infant rice cereal
Grape juice
Cheerios and other oat ring cereals
Sweet potato
Soft cereal bars and oatmeal cookies
Macaroni and cheese
Puffs and teething biscuits
Bottled drinking water**
Fruit yogurt
** NOTE: the report includes whole milk, infant formula and bottled water on this list because even though the amount of heavy metals found in these food is relatively low, most children drink so much of them that the cumulative effect increases. The authors do NOT advise that parents make any changes to the consumption of these foods due to overall importance in the child’s diet, but do recommend that the FDA sets limits acceptable levels of the heavy metals in these foods as well.
WHAT IS A PARENT TO DO?
This list of foods hits hard. Basically, every food that our kids willingly eat is on the list. Fortunately, as outlined in the report, there are a few changes that can relatively easily be made to your child’s diet to reduce exposure to these four heavy metals.
TOP FOODS TO AVOID:
Puffs and other snacks made with RICE flour.
Teething biscuits and RICE rusks
Infant RICE cereal
Fruit JUICE
Carrot and Sweet Potato
SAFER ALTERNATIVES FOR CHILDREN:
Rice-free food - choose other finger foods such as apples, bananas, beans, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, avocado, peaches, or rice-free crackers
Teething alternative - frozen wash cloth, chilled cucumber or bananas
Baby cereals of any grain besides rice - oatmeal, corn, barley, quinoa
Water instead of fruit juice - Water was always the better choice anyhow!
Choose a variety of veggies - this may include carrot and sweet potato as well, but just avoid these two as a daily choice.
OVERVIEW OF HEAVY METAL TOXICITY
Let’s review the four specific heavy metals study and give a brief overview of the harm these toxins can cause to your child. I recognize that a lot of this information sounds scary, and it is. But, it is also important to be informed.
ARSENIC: This chemical is naturally found in our environment, but has widely been used as a pesticide and an additive in animal foods. Arsenic is a heavy metal that contaminates the ground water and thus makes its way into our foods, organic included. It has been shown to cause several types of cancers and to also impact our children’s developing brains, specifically decreasing IQ by several points. The scariest part is that there is not any evidence to suggest that the effects of arsenic are reversible.
LEAD: Lead is a metal that is found in all communities across the United States. Historically, due to its favorable properties such as corrosion-resistance and malleability, lead has been used an wide variety of products - most notably, paint. This lead-based paint was often used in homes and also for children’s toys. Additionally, lead found its way into pottery, pipes, gasoline, and multitude of other frequently used items. In 1978, lead was banned from use in paint. While this is helpful for new homes, older homes still pose a high risk for lead exposure for children. In these older homes the lead paint may chip off of the walls and become small lead laden dust particles. This is particularly problematic when windows are opened and closed and lead paint will chip from around the window ledges. This dust then covered the surfaces of the house which inevitably be touched by little fingers. In addition, children may have access to old wooden toys which are likely to contain lead paint. Water is another potential source of lead exposure. Hopefully all of us are aware of the Flint, Michigan lead crisis. In this community, the city’s water pipes contained lead and had not been maintained properly for many years. This resulted in a leakage of lead into the city’s drinking water. Over time, toxic levels of lead exposure in children in that community developed.
Children are at the greatest risk of lead exposure and the subsequent effects for 2 primary reasons:
1) Young children put everything in their mouths
2) Children’s brains are still developing
Lead is particularly detrimental to the neurologic development of children’s brains. Continual small exposures can be accumulative and lead to many irreversible consequences including behavioral issues, aggression, problems with attention and focus, lowered IQ, irritability, abdominal pain, and fatigue—to name a few.
CADMIUM: Cadmium is a heavy metal that has historically been used in conjunction with Zinc in the manufacture of rechargeable batteries, color pigments, and plastics. It also has properties to help protect other metals again corrosion. Cadmium has been associated with multiple health issues. These include neurotoxicity and cancers, as well as kidney, bone, and lung disease. Importantly, cadmium has been shown to cause developmental delays in children, even at low levels.
MERCURY: Mercury is a heavy metal that is widely found in nature and also as a pollutant from mining. Exposure to mercury is common from eating fish, specifically tuna and swordfish, and other seafood. Mercury has been shown to have a variety of health impacts on both adults and children, specifically cardiovascular diseases and impairment of the developing brain in children.
TAKE A DEEP BREATH
While this report appears to exude doom for our children, one important point to remember is that we are not talking about heavy metal toxicity. In other words, it is not one large dose of the metal and an immediate impact on the child. The exposures from these metals happen over months to years of trace exposure to the metal which have an accumulative effect over time. I mention this to calm parents. If you have been giving your baby rice and carrot for the past few months, all hope is not lost. Certainly, some exposure has occurred. The important thing now is to educate yourself and your family and minimize future exposures for your family. Make sure to share this post with everyone you know and together we can do our part to help our children.
RESOURCES:
1) What’s in my Baby’s Food? https://www.healthybabyfood.org/sites/healthybabyfoods.org/files/2019-10/BabyFoodReport_FULLREPORT_ENGLISH_R5b.pdf
2) Healthy Babies: Bright Futures. https://www.hbbf.org
3) Lead Toxicity: A review. Interdiscip Toxicol. 2015 Jun; 8(2): 55–64.
4) United States Department of Labor, OSHA: Cadmium. https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/cadmium/
5) https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/cadmium/healtheffects.html
6) Ciesielski T1, Weuve J, Bellinger DC, Schwartz J, Lanphear B, Wright RO. Cadmium exposure and neurodevelopmental outcomes in U.S. children. Environ Health Perspect. 2012 May;120(5):758-63. doi: 10.1289/ehp.1104152. Epub 2012 Jan 27.
7) Robin A. Bernhoft. Mercury Toxicity and Treatment: A Review of the Literature. J Environ Public Health. 2012; 2012: 460508. Published online 2011 Dec 22. doi: 10.1155/2012/460508
