from Hacker News

Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Heavy Metals [pdf]

by malloci on 2/5/21, 8:11 AM with 55 comments

• by sithadmin on 2/5/21, 2:53 PM

  I am suspicious that the repeated comparison to standards for water here aren't really fair. Heavy metals are a natural occurrence in pretty much all foods that we eat, regardless of environmental pollution (though pollution does have a notable impact).

  For instance, it's incredibly common for even the highest-quality 'organic' produce to contain levels of heavy metals such as lead in amounts that drastically exceed California's prop 65 standards. Things like avocados and watermelons often have close to 10x more lead than what prop 65 considers acceptable. Spinach, wines, cruciferous vegetables and nuts tend to be even worse. Even when grown in relatively unpolluted soils with 'natural' lead levels (50-400 ppm range), many such produce items STILL drastically exceed prop 65 standards.

  That said, I'm not a food safety expert or toxicologist, so I might have an incredibly bad take on this.

• by slowmovintarget on 2/5/21, 4:01 PM

  With our child we weren't able to breastfeed. We had to use formula. All the U.S. brands like Gerber, Enfamil, and others gave the baby terrible colic.

  We did extensive research (my wife's waking hours were consumed with this). We found Hipp Combiotic milk, and it was wonderful. It was a German brand, and adhered to EU standards for child health. Colic: gone. Within a month or two our child hit the 98% percentile for size and weight and stayed there.

  Shortly after the baby switched to solid food, the U.S. began to "crack down" on imported formula that "didn't meet FDA standards." The EU standards for food safety are generally higher than FDA standards. I'm so glad we were able to get that formula before the government interfered.

• by avesi on 2/5/21, 6:16 PM

  As a parent who has been feeding her 9 month old son various baby food products for the past few months, I'm not sure how to respond to this news. Here are my thoughts:

  1. If the baby food companies are correct and the contamination is coming from the soil, isn't it safer to buy baby food that's at least tested than feeding my son homemade food when I don't know which farms it comes from?

  2. Is this heavy metal soil contamination new? Babies have been fed manufactured purees for several generations already, so you would think we'd be able to observe results of heavy metal consumption in the older population.

  3. The report's only recommendation to parents is that they stop feeding foods with heavy metals to babies, but they don't provide a complete list of products to avoid, which any recall would. Why?

  I definitely wanted to throw away all my baby food when I read this, but now I feel like it's pointless. Unless I fed my baby a vegan diet from fruits and vegetables I grew on soil I personally tested, I don't think it's possible to avoid these heavy metals entirely. Am I wrong?

• by mox1 on 2/5/21, 2:57 PM

  So as someone who trys to follow food safety, high levels of Arsenic in rice based products is entirely not surprising to me.

  Consumer reports[1] (and others) have been discussing the high levels of Arsenic in all Rice grown in the US (even organic). Its in the soil from previous growing methods (older pesticides I believe).

  On the other hand, lead, mercury and cadmium in these foods is news to me...

  1. https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...

• by threatofrain on 2/5/21, 2:58 PM

  https://www.wsj.com/articles/toxic-heavy-metals-found-in-som...

  Companies such as Walmart refused Congressional inquiry.

• by woah on 2/5/21, 4:29 PM

  I’m very skeptical of this. Do “adult foods” have similar levels of heavy metals? I’m guessing they do. The alternative would be that all these manufacturers are conspiring to use some kind of special high-toxin supply chain just to poison babies.

• by josho on 2/5/21, 2:54 PM

  This is what’s wrong with globalization. Key parts of the supply chain have been outsourced. Landed companies have deniability when issues like this arise and face very little in consequences.

  The food we’ve been feeding our babies has 10-30x the legal limits of what is allowed in our drinking water. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m very tempted to go buy a pitch fork.

• by 1_player on 2/5/21, 3:16 PM

  Is there reason to expect heavy metals to be present only in baby foods, and not commonly available groceries?

  Are only babies at risk, or are we all?

• by dgllghr on 2/6/21, 2:48 PM

  The EU should sell a food and baby product certification to companies in other countries for products that meet their health and safety standards. I live in the US and I would pay a significant premium products with an official EU health and safety certification.

• by blakesterz on 2/5/21, 2:59 PM

  I didn't read the entire report, so I may have missed it, but where is this stuff coming from? It seems to say that the final product has higher counts than the raw ingredients, that's a result of... concentrating all the stuff I guess?

  "Voluntary phase-out of toxic ingredients—Manufacturers should voluntarily find substitutes for ingredients that are high in toxic heavy metals, or phase out products that have high amounts of ingredients that frequently test high in toxic heavy metals, such as rice;"

• by Simulacra on 2/5/21, 3:12 PM

  It seems we've heard this before but it was out of China, and dealing with infant formula. Is this a quality control problem, production, or sourcing issue?

• by bagacrap on 2/6/21, 5:51 AM

  maybe a dumb question, but how do we know this is actually a problem? How did they determine what levels were harmful? And ppb seems like an odd unit to use, given that you consume very different volumes of various things.