Hot Topic: Is toxic baby food poisoning our children?
The alarm certainly sounded long and loud in 2022 when Abbott recalled Similac, Alimentum, and EleCare powdered infant formulas after an FDA investigation found Cronobacter sakazakii in the powdered infant formulas.
Do not use recalled product produced at Abbott Nutrition’s Sturgis, MI, facility the FDA urged.
The largest supplier of infant formula in America withdrew its products from supermarket shelves nationwide. A suddenly very limited supply coupled with concern about the safety of what few products could still be found on supermarket shelves created consumer panic.
Consumer concern was compounded late last year when dozens of products were recalled after hundreds of confirmed cases of lead poisoning by children who ate certain brands of apple purée containing contaminated cinnamon, according to the FDA. The lead detected in those products was more than 2,000 times higher than the FDA’s maximum allowed limit.
In 2018, Consumer Reports tested 50 packaged baby and toddler foods for cadmium, mercury, arsenic, and lead and found all the products contained measurable amounts of at least one heavy metal, about two-thirds had “worrisome” levels and 15 posed a potential health risk if eaten only once a day. The magazine conducted follow-up tests five years later and found the overall risk hadn’t changed much. In 2024 their research team still found shocking levels of arsenic, cadmium, and lead in baby food made with rice, sweet potatoes, and carrots.
Healthy Babies Bright Futures, a non-profit “alliance of scientists, nonprofit organizations and donors working to create and support initiatives that measurably reduce exposures to neurotoxic chemicals” checked 168 baby foods in 2019 and found toxic metals in 95 percent of them. In 2022, the group tested homemade baby food. Sadly, the group discovered that 94 percent was contaminated with one or more of the four toxic heavy metals. Levels of heavy metals varied significantly by the type of food, not by how it was made.
Cronobacter? Arsenic? Lead? Cadmium? What’s Going On?
As far back as February 2021, the U.S. House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy released a 59-page report stating that some packaged baby foods contained “dangerous levels” of heavy metals. Yet, it took the Food and Drug Administration nearly four years to set maximum levels for lead in baby foods.
No level of lead is safe for infants and toddlers, according to the Centers for Disease and Prevention, the World Health Organization and the American Academy of Pediatrics.
Under the new FDA guidelines, baby food manufacturers should have no more than 10 parts per billion of lead in yogurts, custards, puddings, single-ingredient meats, processed fruits and vegetables, and mixtures of fruits, vegetables, grains and meat sold in jars, pouches, tubs or boxes.
“The guidance does not cover infant formula, beverages, or snack foods like puffs and teething biscuits,” the federal agency said.
Root vegetables such as carrots and sweet potatoes, which typically contain the highest levels of lead, and dry infant cereals are permitted to contain twice the level of those foods.
Are the FDA’s actions too little, too late?
The FDA’s final guidance estimated their suggested steps could reduce lead exposure from processed baby foods by about 20 percent to 30 percent.
Agreeing with the findings of Healthy Babies Bright Futures, Mindy Brashears, Director for the International Center for Food Industry Excellence at Texas Tech University, put her finger on an often overlooked “solution” that some parents think they’ve developed – “They think that If they make their own baby food, it will be safer,” she said. “The lead generally comes from the source product itself. Consumers blame the processing so assume if they make their own it will be better, but that simply isn’t true.”
We wanted to know what other experts say about the FDA’s long overdue attempt at making baby foods safer. Here is what they said:
Thomas Galligan, Center for Science in the Public Interest Principal Scientist for Additives and Supplements: The FDA’s final guidance is very timid. Hopefully it will influence a few firms to take more precautions and invest in better controls to prevent harmful levels of contamination, but it’s a very baby step on baby food, whose meagerness is exacerbated by its lack of enforceability, and extensive loopholes exempting products like infant formula. FDA can do better, and we will continue to advocate with our coalition partners for standards that better reflect the science.
Darin Detwiler, food safety academic, advisor, advocate, author, and Professor of Food Policy and Corporate Social Responsibility at Northeastern University: The toxic baby food crisis is not just a failure in public health; it is a defining moral challenge for an industry entrusted with the most sacred responsibility: nourishing our children. For years, warnings about heavy metals like lead, arsenic, and cadmium, coupled with pathogens such as Cronobacter sakazakii, have sounded loudly, only to be met with insufficient action. The public’s trust has been steadily undermined by corporate inertia and regulatory gaps that prioritize short-term profits over long-term safety.
Keith Warriner, Professor of Food Science, University of Guelph: The presence of lead, cadmium and lead in foods are primarily environmental pollutants or from old infrastructure in processing plants. There is the rare occurrence of deliberate contamination for financial gain which is easier to control by having an effective supplier verification program and taking lessons from the melamine incident in petfood treats.
However, environmental pollution is more challenging given the scale of industrialization occurring across the globe. All logic would say there are no safe levels of these toxic compounds in foods, especially in those commodities destined for infants. One assumes the FDA guidelines were delayed and limits provided due to the difficulty in imposing zero tolerance.
As with many food safety regulations, it is easy to propose zero tolerance but it’s another on how this could be achieved. It may be possible to source ingredients from regions with low or no levels of pollutants but if those sources could provide sufficient product to support the food sector is questionable. What is needed is the classic One Health approach where methods to prevent or reduce the impact of pollutants within the environment are used. In this regard, there is active research in bioremediation to sequester heavy metals, but other approaches can also be taken. Embracing new technologies would be the most effective approach than relying on testing.”
Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, New York University: It looks to me as though we need a thorough investigation of the amounts of heavy metals in foods in general and baby foods in particular. No safe level of lead and other heavy metals has ever been established, meaning that the safest level is zero. But if baby food makers are sourcing foods that contain them, the metals will get concentrated in their products, are intrinsic, and cannot be removed.
Testing is essential to make sure the levels are as low as possible. Regulations should be rigorous to encourage baby food companies to source carefully and test at every step. Protecting babies from lead exposure should be high on the priority list.”
Jane Houlihan, National Director of Science and Health for Healthy Babies Bright Futures: We called out the FDA for its misleading claim that the new lead guidance would meaningfully reduce babies’ exposure to lead. The reductions they cite apply to only a narrow subset of foods and a limited portion of U.S. babies. Specifically, the agency’s calculations focus on the 90th percentile of exposure — only for the foods they’ve chosen to regulate.
The biggest flaw in the new guidance is that it ignores the foods responsible for most of the lead in babies’ diets: infant formula, homemade foods, and items purchased outside the baby food aisle. These sources account for more than three-fourths of babies’ lead exposure. By failing to address them and instead focusing solely on commercial baby food, the FDA’s action will reduce overall exposure by less than 4 percent — a woefully inadequate step.
The FDA must do better. We’ve urged the agency to lower lead levels in infant formula and tackle lead contamination in foods beyond the baby food aisle. That’s the only way to achieve real progress. There is no safe level of lead exposure — these changes can’t come soon enough.
Important links
Abbott Recall | Powder Infant Formulas & 2 fl oz Ready-to-Feed Liquid Products – (Abbott press release)
Heavy Metals in Baby Food: What You Need to Know – (Consumer Reports)
What To Know About Heavy Metals in Baby Food – (Cleveland Clinic)
FDA Issues New Compliance Measures for Infant Formula Testing-and Reporting – (Food Safety News)
4 Key Environmental Monitoring Solutions to ensure your end product isn’t ‘Poisoned’ – (Nemis Technologies)
Digging into the Dollars: The True Cost of Foodborne Outbreaks – (Nemis Technologies)
What’s in My Baby’s Food? – (Healthy Babies Bright Futures)
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