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.

Comments

Well crap

[rsilvergun]

Makes sense. It's in our water supply after all. That said, I'm not expecting the Trump administration to take action on this. And I sure as hell don't expect Congress too. Man, a functioning government sure would be nice right about now...

Re:Well crap

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not expecting the Trump administration to take action on this

Why not? Dems had years to do stuff and they didn't.

Re:Well crap

[ShanghaiBill]

I mean, you really shouldn't be feeding your baby processed food to begin with.

"Baby food" started out as an American thing, promoted by corporate marketing and TV advertising. It has been pushed into some other countries, but in most of the world, once kids are weaned they just eat mashed up adult food. "Baby food" is overpriced and over processed crap, that is best avoided.

Re:Well crap

[djinn6]

Let's say both you and I run rating agencies. Yours does everything properly, testing often and rating them honestly, and mine barely tests anything at all and just hands out 4 or 5 stars to whoever paid me. Guess what? My agency will make all the money because the businesses love me. I mean, who doesn't like a 5 star rating?

Oh and consumers? A few well-produced ads takes care of them. Do you really think any of them will ever figure out how much testing I do? The ad says I test more than you and that's all they'll ever know. In a few years, yours will be insolvent and be sold at a massive discount and I'll be the only game in town.

Here's the undeniable truth: if rating agencies actually worked, food safety laws would've never have existed in the first place.

Re:Well crap

[Anonymous Coward]

As to the rating agencies, under the existing system and with all of the laws, the rating agencies that exist all except one (Egan Jones) recommended mortgage backed securities (derivatives) as triple A rated debt until the very moment the market crashed.

So explain how removing the system and laws will encourage these companies to produce better results?

We already know why that happened: the companies were being paid to rate these securities with high scores and your own guys at Egan Jones testified that companies were "shopping around" to give their business to whoever would rate their securities the highest.

laws sanding low borrowing standards

Just a reminder: the definition of "Sub-Prime" is "not backed by fannie mae". Anyone creating sub-prime loans did so of their own free will and would have been at their own expense if they had not been able to unload them on other suckers by paying rating agencies to fluff up their value.

Egan Jones didn't

What's Egan Jones's stock ticker so I can see how much investors punished them for turning away good money? Oh, they're privately held, aren't they. That's certainly one way to protect yourself from the whims of an ever shifting set of owners demanding quarterly results without a long term goal.

But how MUCH lead?

[Ungrounded Lightning]

We've seen this sort of article before:
  - Say a bunch of stuff "tested positive" for BAD THING.
  - Talk about how bad BAD THING is.
  - Talk about where the government sets the (generally very bureaucrat-CYA-low) cutoff of what they consider dangerous (or actionable).
  - But never mention the level of BAD THING detected, or where it lies on the government's scale of "Oh HORRORS!" vs. "Meh. There's a trace of BAD THING everywhere." scale.
  - Foam up a nice head of panic.
  - Sell a lot of papers/eyeball views/whatever if you're a media outlet. Get a bunch more donations for your "good work" to fight poisoning people with BAD THING if you're an advocacy group (as in this case).
  - PROFIT!

"Tested Positive" says there's enough to detect. As the tests get better the level of detectability gets vanishingly small. This not only gives more opportunities to pull this stunt as time goes on, but it also enables the use of an apples-orange comparison with the less sensitive tests of the past to make up a fake-news item about how "this many decades ago only THIS LOWER PERCENTAGE of things tested for BAD THING tested positive."

I looked through the whole article for any statement of what level of lead was detected, but didn't find it. Did I miss something? Or was this yet another bogus scare story by an organization with an axe to grind (and/or being removed from the government funding teat and trying to fill in with extra donations).

Re:But how MUCH lead?

[Namarrgon]

Maybe you missed the part of the article citing research that showed ANY level of lead was unsafe.

The whole point being, why does baby food contain *more* lead than adult food?Particularly considering how babies are the most vulnerable to its neurotoxic effects.

Re:But how MUCH lead?

[Anonymous Coward]

> That's said because nobody is going to do experiments to find out what the real threshold is.

Counterpoints:

1) We _know_ what maximum safe radiation exposure levels are. We've been able to determine this through both laboratory experiments and field studies.

2) We used to absolutely _flood_ the environment with lead. Then we switched to burning unleaded gasoline in nearly every ICE. So, we have _huge_ blobs of data about lead exposure in humans... back when we used to regularly and willingly expose humans to it.

3) The limits of animal testing are well understood. Because of this we can expose lab animals to varying amounts of lead and get a _really_ good idea of how the human body will handle a similar dosage of lead.

In short, we've already done the studies. If there _was_ a minimum safe dosage of lead, we'd loudly trumpet the information. It is usually cheaper to run looser quality controls than tighter ones, after all. (And Americans _love_ saving money!)

Yes, Well crap

[Okian Warrior]

How does this crap get modded up in a tech forum?

There's no insight, no tech content, no explanation - just a childish swipe at the elected president.

And to top it off, anyone with half a brain or more would immediately recognize that the times cited in the OP were years before Trump, and mostly during Obama... so that the post casts aspersions on Obama more than Trump.

We're supposed to be the smart people in the room. One side just got done ginning up a sniper to take out the other side - do we really have to stand for this nonsense?

This forum depends on our participation. Can't we just take back control and refuse to mod up this sort of crap?

Re:Yes, Well crap

[ShanghaiBill]

How does this crap get modded up in a tech forum?

The article itself is garbage. It contains no useful information whatsoever, other that that lead is "detectable". Well, no shit. Lead is detectable in seawater, and even in the atmosphere. The only curious fact is that there were actual a few samples that did NOT detect lead. The only plausible explanation for that is that they were using crappy instruments.

If TFA had been written by a non-idiot, it would have listed the actual levels and compared them to safety standards, or at least normal background levels. But then it would have been obvious that there was actually no "news" worth reporting.

Re:Yes, Well crap

[Namarrgon]

Non-idiots would have simply checked the cited source, where all the numbers you're looking for are clearly displayed, before declaring it not worth reporting.

If you had, you'd see the 1993 FDA lead limit was no more than 6 micrograms/day for young children - and that e.g. baby rice cereal was found to contain up to 82 parts per billion. Which means that feeding your baby 100g of that cereal would already exceed the daily limit by 37%, without including other sources.

And again, you missed the whole point of the article, which was asking why baby food has more detectable lead in it than similar adult foods, especially as babies are so much more sensitive to its toxic effects.