Slashdot Mirror
Watchdog Report Finds Alarming 20 Percent of Baby Food Tested Contains Lead (arstechnica.com)
According to an analysis released Thursday by the nonprofit advocacy group, the Environmental Defense Fund, twenty percent of 2,164 baby foods sampled between 2003 and 2013 by the Food and Drug Administration tested positive for lead. Ars Technica reports: Lead is a neurotoxin. Exposure at a young age can permanently affect a developing brain, causing lifelong behavioral problems and lower IQ. Though the levels in the baby food were generally below what the FDA considers unsafe, the agency's standards are decades old. The latest research suggests that there is no safe level of lead for children. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency this year has estimated that more than five percent of U.S. children (more than a million) get more than the FDA's recommended limit of lead from their diet. The products most often found to contain lead were fruit juices, root vegetable-based foods, and certain cookies, such as teething biscuits, the EDF reports. Oddly, the presence of lead was more common in baby foods than in the same foods marketed for adults. For instance, only 25 percent of regular apple juice tested positive for lead, while 55 percent of apple juices marketed for babies contained lead. Overall, only 14 percent of adult foods tested contained lead. The findings come from data collected in the FDA's annual survey of foods, called the Total Diet Survey, which the agency has run since the 1970s. Each year, the agency samples 280 types of foods from three different cities across the country, tracking nutrients, metals, pesticides, and other contaminants.
Remember the melamine in the pet food ?
I remember reading about melamine in milk formula. I also remember reading that the people responsible were shot. You were saying?
There was lead in the food on December 31, 2010, also. That was the last time you had a fully Democratic controlled government. You'll have to come up with another lame excuse now.
Um, it would help if you RTFA:
That said, the FDA's food standards were set in 1993. Those standards suggest that children get no more than six micrograms of lead per day, based on children having no more than 10 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. However, a 2012 NIH study found evidence that levels less than 5 micrograms per dL "decreased academic achievement, IQ, and specific cognitive measures; increased incidence of attention-related behaviors and problem behaviors." The EDF reported that the CDC is expected to lower its recommended blood levels to no more than 3.5 micrograms per DL in 2017.
The toxicity of lead was not fully understood even just several years ago. It was only recognized after Republicans took control of Congress. However Obama did sign a food-safety bill on January 4, 2011, just five days after the fully Deomocratic controlled government ended. Luckily, it had overcome a Republican filibuster in the Senate just in time, on December 21, 2010.
But since Obama signed it, it's bad and so Trump needs to undo it. This is a statement his campaign released on September 15, 2016:
Specific regulations to be eliminated include:
[...paragraphs ranting about EPA controls on CO2, water, and ozone pollution deleted...]
The FDA Food Police, which dictate how the federal government expects to produce fruits and vegetables and even dictates the nutritional content of dog food. The rules govern the soil farmers use, food and food production hygiene, food packaging, food temperatures, and even what animals may roam which fields and when. It also greatly increased inspections of food "facilities", and levies new taxes to pay for this inspection overkill.
It seems poisoned dog food isn't even popular among Trump supporters, so the "FDA Food Police" paragraph silently disappeared from Trump's campaign website. However there are still calls from some within the GOP (e.g. Newt Gingrich) to abolish the FDA altogether.
I'm not sure what will become of the CDC plans to lower the acceptable level in 2017. Trump's hiring freeze has left 700 vacancies at the CDC and his proposed budget cuts their funding by 17%.
Where does the lead comes from?
Probably in equipment used for processing. Baby food is more highly processed than most other kinds of food, and wet food is most likely to interact with the machinery. Lead is commonly added to alloys to make them easier to machine. That's why cut glass is typically leaded, as well; it's easier to cut without breaking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
RTFA. Levels are within current limits. The question is whether the limits are low enough.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Yeah the referenced article at a glance gave a detection rate, not a level for most of the claims. As someone that deals with minimal detectable concentrations for a living, it looks like they were dancing right at their detection limit. Which is fine, as long as you don't misconstrue what those numbers mean.
It does read very much like an advocacy piece though, particularly where it goes on to criticize the government for regulating concentrations based on what is achievable versus what is the minimum absolute safe quantity. Basically up in arms that there isn't a total ban on lead in food. Which shows a pretty startling lack of understanding of the biosphere and why regulations are structured that way.
First, I'll preface with this: my lab mostly monitors for radioisotopes like cesium, but the game is pretty much the same. Certain plants preferentially scavenge heavy metals; its a sort of natural confusion in their biochemistry. They're looking for things they need to grow, like iron. They really aren't that selective, because most of the heavy stuff in the soil will be things they need to grow, so there isn't really active filtration of "bad stuff" from a human perspective. The plant doesn't care. As a rule of thumb, anything that sets down large deep roots is a good candidate for this (root vegetables, trees, etc.). Grasses tend not to, although it varies a lot based on the type of grass. Water based plants are another exception (like rice), as heavy metals tend to wash into water basins and settle into silt.
Where I see this manifest most is oak trees in my line of work. There are large oak forests on the eastern seaboard of the US that had decent quantities of radio cesium dropped on them from weapons testing. The oak trees suck that metal into their leaves like a sponge, then at the end of the year the leaves fall off and rot into the topsoil, and the metal is captured again the next year. It never settles out and gets buried due to this re-suspension, and so oak leaves are some of the most radioactive things you'll find in the USA (depending on where you live).
In this food study, you're seeing a lot of that. Root vegetables aren't going to be just high in lead, they'll be full of all kinds of stuff. The fruit is going to vary by type, but they'll all have some as well. Purely non-rice grains should have comparatively little, due to shallow root structures among other things (the metal naturally will work its way down out of the topsoil in many cases, so the shallower you set your root the less of it you'll see from a plant perspective). It will also vary based on the year: plants set deeper more extensive root systems based on temperature and rainfall, so the same species in a cool drought year might have a radically different concentration of metals from the same species in the same location in a wet warm year.
Anyway, the reality is we pumped large quantities of this shit into our environment for decades. Lead mostly from gas, other metals from chemical refining, etc. Lead is the big one, as it was so ubiquitous. There really is no escaping it, and that's why the regulatory limits are set as they are. You can't expect there to be non of it, and it's extraordinarily difficult and fickle to try and control given how incredibly variable the factors can be. Take wheat. You can't test every truckload of wheat for metal content, it isn't feasible given the analyses and timescales involved. When you test off a wheat barge going to a cereal plant, you're looking at an aggregate sample from an entire region. Some fields in that region may have little to no metals, some may have a ton, and in reality most probably have trace amounts. You can't filter the metals out, the product you would have left wouldn't be food in the classical sense. So... you live with it. You set a limit you think can be achieved on average, and test out the back end (the food product itself). The food producer can test the raw ingredients themselves for protection, can try to structur