Is Baby Food More Toxic than Homemade?
A recent report from the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy of U.S. House of Representatives was titled “Baby Foods Are Tainted with Dangerous Levels of Arsenic, Lead, Cadmium, and Mercury.”
You might be over this already. It was 2 months ago, which in COVID is a lifetime. But interestingly, this story didn’t just disappear.
Yesterday, the FDA announced the Closer to Zero: Action Plan for Baby Foods.
The FDA suggests that “reductions in the levels of toxic elements in foods will be made by:
advancing the FDA’s research on ...dietary exposures to toxic elements,
setting action levels, with input from stakeholders,
encouraging adoption of best practices by industry
increasing targeted compliance and enforcement activities, and
monitoring progress of levels over time.”
Importantly, the FDA acknowledges that “reducing levels of toxic elements in foods is complicated and multifaceted. It is crucial to ensure that measures taken to limit toxic elements in foods do not have unintended consequences—like eliminating from the marketplace foods that have significant nutritional benefits or reducing the presence of one toxic element while increasing another.”
I have no complaints with trying to make baby food better. And setting reference levels for metals in products is important because manufacturers will only do what is required, having this information ahead of time gives people the comfort they need to shop, and it’s better for kids.
My concern with this entire discussion is that there is no focus on the toxic metal levels in “real food”. The FDA states that the primary sources of metals are “the air, water, and soil used to grow the crops...the type of food crop... and agricultural processes.”
None of the risk has anything to do with the process by which baby food is made, rather the source ingredients. Manufacturers are sourcing from the same farms that sell to grocery stores.
The only reason we don’t have the same “bombshell” report on homemade food is that we can’t measure it well. There is no consistency between meals, homes, recipes, etc. This same principle applies to food safety standards. No one is measuring the levels of listeria the house cat is tracking onto kitchen counters. It gives the false sense that homemade is inherently safer than packaged. It may be! But we don’t know.
There is significant convenience to be gained by using store-bought, and parents shouldn’t be discouraged from it if it’s equally safe to homemade. Similarly, parents shouldn’t be led to believe that any food they feed their baby is safe, as long as it’s homemade. If rice has high arsenic in baby food, babies shouldn’t be fed rice period.
Selective measurement leads to half-knowledge and wholly incorrect decisions.
