Baby food allegedly riddled with poisonous metals--and the Trump administration did nothing about it

[riversedge]

Source: salon




A congressional report alleges that baby food contained heavy metals like mercury, arsenic and lead


By Matthew Rozsa February 10, 2021 11:59PM (UTC)


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The House Oversight Committee released a report on Thursday based on a congressional investigation into the potential presence of toxic heavy metals — including lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury — in baby foods. Four baby food manufacturers provided Congress with information about the amount of toxic heavy metals in their foods based on their own internal testing, including Beech-Nut Nutrition Company, Gerber, Hain Celestial Group, Inc. and Nurture Inc. Between those four companies, Congress found that the companies allow dangerously high levels of toxic heavy metals in their foods and that the foods sold by the companies frequently exceed even those standards.

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Three other major baby food manufacturers — Campbell, Walmart and Sprout Organic Foods — did not cooperate with the congressional investigators, leaving them "greatly concerned" about the possible toxic heavy metal contamination in their foods. Then again, as the chair of the subcommittee which conducted the investigation told Salon, the government has previously not forced these companies to be accountable for what they put in their baby food.

"They are not regulated for the most part," Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., chair of the House Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy, told Salon. "Unfortunately, despite knowing the hazards of toxic metals — like arsenic, mercury, lead and cadmium — being present in baby foods, the FDA essentially was AWOL on these issues for years. And in fact, the Trump administration was given a secret presentation by one of the baby food makers, showing that the finished baby foods actually contain a greater metallic content than even the ingredients. And yet the Trump administration completely failed to act. Now that has to change immediately."


He later added, "Before the Trump administration came into office the scientific community and advocacy community was discovering these baby foods had toxic heavy metals. And in the later part of the Obama administration, they started to begin promulgating standards. But even then those standards were not comprehensive enough. And then they basically came to a halt during the Trump administration."

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Read more: https://www.salon.com/2021/02/10/baby-food-may-be-riddled-with-poisonous-metals--and-the-trump-administration-did-nothing-about-it/

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OMG. We get overwhelmed with who said what nasty thing to who and do not focus on dangerous health issues that affect babies-/


See Report here:

https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/2021-02-04%20ECP%20Baby%20Food%20Staff%20Report.pdf

[PSPS]

1. Actually, the FDA has been impotent for decades. It was "captured" back in saint ronnie's reign

[applegrove]

2. Canadian babyfood is okay apparently. I guess we regulate properly.n/t

[NurseJackie]

7. It always infuriates me when the GOP argues that the "market forces will cause manufacturers...

It always infuriates me when the GOP argues that the "market forces will cause manufacturers to self-regulate". (ie: once people find out your baby food is toxic, they'll stop buying it, and Acme Baby Food will either improve, or shut down.)

Meanwhile, millions of babies have been poisoned.

[mjvpi]

12. Bingo

Free Market corrections only occur after a problem becomes known and intolerable. I share your frustration. The speed at which that "natural" correction occurs is inverse to the size of the company. And God forgive if it affects shareholders.

One of the greatest thing about science is that it is predictive. The EPA was great when it was a subsidized clean up for big business but then it started to regulate to prevent. Oh the Free Market Horror! And to think that there are those who believe that the destructive lag of Free Market correction can deal with global climate change. Insanity.

[applegrove]

16. I know. They like too sell shit to the regular family and good stuff to those that can afford

gourmet. Just like with the healthcare plans.

[judesedit]

3. No wonder we have brain-dead politicians with brain-dead supporters

and insurrectionists. They really are a bunch of lemmings due to all the metals, chemicals and toxins in the food, water, and air we breathe. This is serious and must be addressed asap. What is going into our food? What effects has it had on us and has it been intentional as a means to end? There are many different birth defects being seen in animals and humans. The brain must be affected, too. And when you think of all the pharmaceuticals entering the water systems through waste it is nothing short of scary.

[NNadir]

4. Basically, this results from lower limits of detection achieved by ICP/MS, and not necessarily...

...toxicology.

These instruments are largely supplanting, and have largely supplanted, the far less sensitive OES instruments for detecting metals.

Food is riddled with metals. Almost all of the worlds's mined phosphorous, for example, without which it would be impossible to feed humanity, is associated with uranium.

About 15 or 20 years ago, modern ICP/MS instruments achieved detection limits in the parts per trillion range, enabling scientists to detect levels of elements that have always been there but were undetectable until the advance of instrumentation.

Of course, mining has made the situation worse in many places, as had the combustion of coal, and for many years, the combustion of gasoline containing tetraethyl lead. Every time the chaparral in California burns, historic lead from the glory days of the muscle cars is volatilized.

The most famous heavy metal, which I often I assume is responsible for "mad hatter's disease" - aka the Republican base - is mercury. Despite the bull handed out by anti-vaxxers like Jenny McCarthy, who became famous for being photographed in the nude and certainly not because of her intelligence, any mercury historically associated with vaccines is trivial. Most of the mercury contamination on the planet results from coal combustion, overwhelmingly so, with the balance being associated with medical waste, in particular blood pressure devices.

Cadmium and mercury derive their toxicology because they each substitute for zinc, their congener, in zinc centered metalloproteins, some of which serve important roles in energy metabolism.

Southern China is notable for having rather high levels of cadmium in rice, in part because of cadmium naturally found in soil, but also for the mining of cadmium to manufacture, among other things, "green" solar cells.

The world's largest mass poisoning is associated with Bangladesh, because of the loss of water and degradation of the water from the Ganges delta reflecting practices in the Indian portion of the river. As a result, Bengali rice is often irrigated using ground water, which in that region, because of deposition of Himalaya minerals, percolates through natural arsenic minerals.

Many metals are of course essential, some of them reflecting the "dose makes the poison" rhetoric one hears. Selenium is, for example, considered a toxic element, but small amounts are essential to living things for those rare enzymes that require selenomethionine. Copper is toxic in large doses, but is deliberately placed in vitamins to assure physiologically important levels.

All the food on Earth, particularly in the Anthropocene, has metals in it. Starvation is not good for babies either.

We've had some hoopla about this issue before at DU; again, in most cases, its about detection levels and not about toxicology.

As in the last one, this "finding" prompts my regular joke that one cannot be awarded a degree in journalism if you have passed a college level science course with a grade of C or better.

[ProfessorGAC]

5. Backing NNadir Here

This finding (from last week, BTW) is in the category of "look close enough, you'll find something bad".
There is little in this study that links these picoscopic levels of metal to any actual health effects.
There's also no data to support that these levels weren't always there, pre-Motus, pre-Reagan.
Likely was in the baby food I ate in the 1950s.
When we start discussing single digit parts per trillion, concern over it ignores 3 things: 1). The human body is resilient enough to tolerate small amounts of anything. 2). Getting it lower than what's being detected is not likely achievable in a nondestructive manner, 3) the rare metals described do NOT come from the manufacturing process, but rather the food itself.
So, this " report" is rather alarmist & not terribly useful.

[pazzyanne]

8. My first thought was,"Is this linked to the rise in autism?"

https://naturallyrecoveringautism.com/2020/10/23/toxic-heavy-metals-linked-to-severe-autistic-behaviors/

[ProfessorGAC]

10. I Doubt It

First, I have a hard time believing was not there the whole time.
But, 20 years ago we didn't have instrumentation that couple quantify it, if it detected levels that that low at all.
Second, the article to which you linked is close to an add for zeolites that may not actually be as effective as claimed, depending on mass transfer capacity of the various media.
Reducing the metals in baby food is problematic because the fluid dynamics of those pastes, purees, & gels limit the motility.
Third, the rise in autism has, at least in statistically significant measure, from better diagnostics & a greater willingness to conclude that condition in the diagnosis. (A modest reduction in the stigma of autism, perhaps?)
The metals under investigation here are NOT introduced during processing. Nobody uses equipment that has mercury, lead, cadmium, etc. Yes, there is chromium in industrial equipment (stainless steel) but it takes SEVERE condition to disrupt the crystal structure at the surface. If they have those conditions, they line the pipe with polymer.
So, they're naturally occurring, have more than likely always been there, and I admit I am dubious about the information in your link.
So, I'm going with no.

[pazzyanne]

11. The following links are to Mount Sinai, a leading reseach institution:

https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2018/what-can-baby-teeth-tell-us-about-autism-and-heavy-metals

https://www.mountsinai.org/about/newsroom/2018/zinc-and-copper-metabolic-cycles-in-baby-teeth-linked-to-autism

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-09/tmsh-rim091919.php

https://www.healio.com/news/psychiatry/20190927/unique-metabolic-signature-in-baby-teeth-linked-to-adhd-autism

... and also a link to ALS:

https://neurosciencenews.com/als-teeth-16437/

[ProfessorGAC]

14. OK, I Read Them

There's nothing to contradict what I said.

[mjvpi]

13. Thanks for your post. Are you saying that the EPA limits on acceptable amounts...

... don’t take this into consideration? The article says that the companies were exceeding EPA limits, which one would assume are based on peer reviewed science. Are you saying that you disagree with the science that set those acceptable limits? I don’t ask this question in a snarky way.

[NNadir]

15. This is a big issue in the pharmaceutical industry, where the switch to USP 232, 233 was delayed...

...for many years because manufacturers realized that ICP/MS would immediately find levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, etc that were always there, but were now detectable, leading to panic and fear resulting from general scientific ignorance on the part of the general public. If one knows science, this becomes immediately obvious.

EPA and FDA regulations are connected to maximum daily doses (MDD) and permissible daily exposure (PDE).

The levels are generally defined in terms of weight. If one has 1 ppb/kg of lead or mercury, or whatever, in a baby food jar that contains maybe 60 grams of food, one is still well below MDD and PDE.

As a practical matter, food grown in Bangladesh clearly and unambiguously exceeds arsenic levels set by the USEPA, which are conservative, as does cadmium in rice grown in Southern China.

When choosing in Bangladesh, or in Southern China, between starvation and exceeding USEPA limits, I'm sure that the latter approach is taken.

It will simply not prove to be possible to remove trace quantities of these elements from food, and effort and attention is better spent elsewhere.

I am not going to read the full report from the Congressional Committee, which almost certainly does not consist of scientifically literate staff educated in these areas of toxicology and/or analytical chemistry (which is not a criticism of the staff, since this is an esoteric subject, but not one on which their efforts should focus.)

Recently it was reported in a newspaper - which is unusual since newspaper articles are generally very poor when discussing science - that 1 in 5 deaths, worldwide, are associated with air pollution. This actually jives quite well with the scientific literature, but not with the notion that Fukushima is the only environmental risk that should ever be discussed in the news, although far more news articles are written about Fukushima than about air pollution deaths.

The fact is that in certain areas of this country, and many other countries around the world, the air is "unsafe" to breathe, but people do not avoid this unsafe air by suffocating.

There is such a thing as selective attention, and in general, the consequences of embracing it are dolorous.

I hope this helps explain the situation better.

[twodogsbarking]

9. When these poisoned children grow up

they will be Republicans.