How to Avoid Toxic Metals in Baby Food
Many baby products contain relatively high levels of arsenic, cadmium, mercury and lead, according to a congressional report released today. This is not a new problem; In 2019 Healthy Babies Bright Futures has released a report with similar findings, and the FDA issued a warning about arsenic in rice cereal as it is , we reported in 2016.
Fortunately, there are ways to limit your child’s exposure to these foodborne toxic metals. Healthy Babies Bright Futures offers five ways to do this, and three of them involve giving up rice.
Rice tends to harvest naturally occurring arsenic from the soil in which it is grown. Buying organic rice won’t change that ; High levels of arsenic can be found in both organic and conventionally grown rice. In some parts of the world, soil contains more arsenic than others; Basmati rice, grown in California, India and Pakistan, has the lowest levels. White rice has less arsenic than brown rice. Boiling the rice in additional water and then draining the excess removes some of the arsenic.
So if you’re not doing anything, look for rice in baby food (including organic brown rice syrup, which is used as a sweetener in many “healthy” snacks). Small amounts are not necessarily a problem, but try not to feed your baby a constant diet of rice flakes, rice cakes, and rice teething cookies.
Here are the tips from Healthy Babies Bright Futures:
- Instead of flaky rice snacks, choose packaged snacks made without rice or give your child other foods such as applesauce, bananas, and cheese. (When my kids were young, snacks didn’t matter much, so we made them practice Cheerios.)
- Choose infant cereals made with oats or other grains instead of rice porridge . It is not necessary to feed your baby with cereals, but pediatricians often recommend them because they are fortified with iron. Your child may get iron from other foods, such as meat.
- Instead of teething cookies, try giving your child a frozen banana or try other classics like teething toys or frozen loofahs.
- Give the children water to drink instead of fruit juice . Apple, pear, and grape juices tend to contain higher levels of toxic metals, and pediatricians already recommend that babies drink no more than half a glass of juice a day.
- Feed your children different vegetables instead of carrots and sweet potatoes . Baby food made from carrots and sweet potatoes showed higher levels of lead and cadmium in the Healthy Babies Bright Futures tests. Again, these vegetables are good in small amounts, but they also tend to be popular flavors and beloved by children. Strive for variety instead.
While these tips will help, ultimately more dramatic changes are needed. The Congressional report argues that companies should be required to test their finished products (and not just their individual ingredients) for these toxic metals, and that the FDA should set limits on the amount. The report indicates that there are already restrictions on some other products, such as water:
These results are several times higher than permitted by the current regulations for other products. For example, the FDA has set maximum allowable levels for bottled water at 10 ppb inorganic arsenic, 5 ppb lead, and 5 ppb cadmium, and the EPA has limited acceptable levels for mercury. in drinking water at 2 ppb. … Test results for baby food and its ingredients exceed these levels, including results that have arsenic levels 91 times higher than lead, up to 177 times higher than cadmium, and up to 5 times higher than mercury.
The congressional report also recommends that the FDA requires baby food manufacturers to label the amount of these metals present in food and phase out ingredients like rice flour, which are often high in toxic metals.