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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.
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...
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Your child will have an underdeveloped brain because human beings need to eat meat and animal proteins during certain phase of brain development. Why do you think so many millennials have psychological problems?
I said Congress & Trump. I don't care who's in charge. Neither party is doing much of anything. But if you're gonna bring up parties I'll remind you that the Rs pretty much own State legislatures. And while I'm on the subject Clinton the Bill was basically an R with a D next to his name. That's how he formed the coalition that got him elected. Moderately left wing on social issues and hard right on anything economic. And make no mistake, clean water is very much an economic issue. He can bet you're ass Trump's kids don't eat baby food with lead in it. Not at his income bracket.
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The new owners are desperate for traffic.
There's a lot of goofy new clickbait stuff on Slashdot these days.
In the summary, anyway, I didn't see anything about the parts-per-billion of lead being measured. There are tiny trace amounts of everything in everything. That's how how the messy business of life works.
I remember the last time a new Republican administration came to power and the trace amounts of arsenic in drinking water was hysterically discussed.
If it can be measured, and it can be made a political issue, it becomes one.
Remember the melamine in the pet food
Pet food? How about milk
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
People need to stop bickering over D and R as if either mattered. Both will sell you down the river, they just use different excuses as to why.
Citation:https://www.forbes.com/sites/nancyhuehnergarth/2016/03/07/chicken-raised-and-slaughtered-in-china-moves-one-step-closer-to-your-dinner-plate/#498614f1167a
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?
But our skin has never been as clear since.
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).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
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?
Check the ingredient label for "plumbum", usually either third or fourth listed.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Where does the lead comes from?
You misread the article. It says no level of lead in the *bloodstream* is unsafe. Just because lead is detected in something does not mean it is bio-available for absorption. Lead paint, for instance, does not absorb easily into the blood stream from the digestive tract. Kids who had high levels of lead in their blood from old houses with lead paint were getting most of it from breathing in paint dust, not eating it as many believe.
The OP is correct - the level makes a huge difference. If it's very low, like 1PPM, even assuming perfect absorption, you'd have to eat hundreds of gallons of the stuff for it to build up to harmful levels in the bloodstream.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
If the Enron mob had been under PRC jurisdiction, they'd have been shot, too. Just something to think about.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
lead is a perfectly natural substance
I stopped reading riht there. Naturalness has no bearing on heath.
Someone had to do it.
Eventually we'll manage to poison ourselves down to an intellectual level incapable of sustaining society. Think Idiocracy with no funny parts.
Someone had to do it.
Good thing they had the word "alarming" right there! I was leaning toward "fantastic", myself. Cut the bullshit, guys.
Hahahaha, I've been saying it all along. USA really is going the way of ancient Rome. Putting lead in everything until everyone goes crazy and starts killing each other. Motherfucking dumbasses on a completely epic scale. Ha!
Vegetarian I can see, but vegan is just nuts. If a baby cannot handle milk you do the best you can, but trying to raise a baby without milk otherwise, while possible, is just stupid.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
He is obviously saying he has Chinese babies as pets.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Good for your dolphins, otherwise they would be intoxicated with melamine.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
0 is always 0. No need for a % sign.
Proof:
It doesn't matter what you divide it by, 0 is always 0.
0/100 == 0/1000 == 0/10000 == 0
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Sorry, that's simply not true. The FDA even states "vegetarian and vegan diets are suitable for all stages of child development".
The FDA also said that eating fat makes you fat (it doesn't) and that you should subsist on mostly carbs (you shouldn't). If you believe anything the FDA tells you simply because the FDA told you, you are an epic dumbshit.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Which is irrelevant because lead is a naturally occurring substance present everywhere in the environment. You literally cannot go anywhere or do anything which does not expose you to lead. So it's pointless trying to avoid exposure to "ANY level of lead."
It's the higher concentrations of lead which you have to worry about. So OP is correct that without knowing how much lead was found, it's pointless.
Just as a guess, I'd say because baby food is finely minced into a gruel, any contamination is spread throughout the product instead of just sitting on the surface where it can be easily washed off (with purified water with a lower lead concentration than storage, processing, and transport environments). Similar to why ground beef is more prone to salmonella contamination than steak - grinding it spreads the bacteria from just the surface where it can be easily washed off or killed by cooking, to throughout the entire volume of meat.
I had trouble selecting the table in the pdf and copying into Excel. Do they release data files?
Nothing wrong with eating less processed foods but please stop raising a pussy.
Fewer. Or singularize "foods".
Did that make the melamine disappear?
0% lead, 0 is a percentage
We're all somebody's children.
0 is always 0. No need for a % sign.
Proof:
It doesn't matter what you divide it by, 0 is always 0.
0/100 == 0/1000 == 0/10000 == 0
Dam u dum.
If you're quantifying something in terms or percent, you're counting the number of things per 100 (possibly different) things.
You absolutely need a % sign if you're presenting other data as a percentage alongside the data which ended up at 0.
Further, dividing it by something else and getting the same result has no effect on how you should present the data. .004.
And of course, dividing it by something else can give you a different effect if you're rounding. Consider a reading of some concentration of things being
With rounding, that's 0 percent, but 4 permil.
And finally, you useless sack of shit, it does matter what you divide 0 by. It's not always 0.
0/0 is undefined.
..is lego, snot and glow in the dark sweets.
Canada, and about a dozen other nations filed a suite with the WTO claiming the country of origin labels broke WTO rules by favoring domestic products. The WTO agreed. The U.S had little choice but to drop the labels or face billions in retaliatory measures. In any case the idea that you can tell if food is safe by a country of origin label is simply laughable. There are dozens of U.S food product recalls a year, some which have spread diseases that have killed people. What we really need is to improve the FDA's inspection regime to ensure that all food in supermarket shelves is safe. https://www.wto.org/english/tr...
We find more things that contain lead.
Except it doesn't say that? https://health.gov/dietaryguid...
While I don't see that consent has anything to do with it, I see there are vegans who worry about consent. Still, what's so special about humans? Can a bonobo consent? Why or why not?
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
Wait, does that mean that cannibalism is vegan as long as the meal is provided willingly?
0 is always 0. No need for a % sign.
Proof:
It doesn't matter what you divide it by, 0 is always 0.
0/100 == 0/1000 == 0/10000 == 0
Dam u dum.
If you're quantifying something in terms or percent, you're counting the number of things per 100 (possibly different) things.
You absolutely need a % sign if you're presenting other data as a percentage alongside the data which ended up at 0.
Further, dividing it by something else and getting the same result has no effect on how you should present the data. .004.
And of course, dividing it by something else can give you a different effect if you're rounding. Consider a reading of some concentration of things being
With rounding, that's 0 percent, but 4 permil.
And finally, you useless sack of shit, it does matter what you divide 0 by. It's not always 0.
0/0 is undefined.
You must be working in a marketing department. .004 is simply 0.4%
0 is always zero. For traces you should use <:
< 0.0001 % or < 1%, etc.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Nah, you failed hard with your shit and you know it.
Nah, you failed hard with your shit and you know it.
Further, dividing it by something else and getting the same result has no effect on how you should present the data. .004.
And of course, dividing it by something else can give you a different effect if you're rounding. Consider a reading of some concentration of things being
With rounding, that's 0 percent, but 4 permil.
And finally, you useless sack of shit, it does matter what you divide 0 by. It's not always 0.
0/0 is undefined.
Go back to marketing school please. According to what you write: 0 == 0.004 "if you round" thus you can print that on your labels.
A side effect of this is that, in your book, 0/0 (0.004/0) is now infinite instead of being undefined so you have contradicted yourself.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Is there a correlation with country of origin? Is the manufacture of baby food one of the things we've outsourced to China, for instance?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The FDA also said that
Except it doesn't say that?
Congratulations, son, you just failed reading comprehension. You're going to need to learn to pay attention to tenses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but be damned sure I'm wrong, first.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Now that lead-poisoned generation can be again easily manipulated at election times again! ;-)
Sounds like a R plan to me!
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
what about 0/0 ?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
If the Enron mob had been under PRC jurisdiction, they'd have been shot, too. Just something to think about.
Doesn't matter. China may have strict enforcement (and it doesn't unless there's a lot of bad press), but that has no bearing on the fact that generally, the Chinese mentality is less focused on quality/safety and more focused on what they can get away with. Manufacturing products in China is cheaper than in the US, but from everyone I've talked to, the process is a fucking nightmare.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
people who get worked up about traces of lead are the sort who shop at Whole Foods
I despise Whole Foods and eat microwave TV dinners.
Trace lead levels are something I do care about. Everyone should care about cumulative neurotoxins, triply so for children given the eveidnce. It's only government action (like killing leaded gasoline) which has been ameliorating the problem, plus a little economic luck in that coal is now an industry in decline, so we'll see how this chart does if the unified Republican government turns its back on core FDA/EPA responsibilities. It'll also be interesting to see how the preschool lead exposure and violent crime correlation holds up over time.
Someone had to do it.