Four of the leading baby food makers have “knowingly” been selling products which have poisonously “high levels of toxic heavy metals.” They admit it in “internal company documents” turned over to a congressional committee on Thursday.
Baby food full of poison
While the four big industry leaders at least admit to what they are doing, the rest of the industry went to great lengths to avoid cooperating with the investigation. Their results could test worse if any samples ever get sent to the lab.
The report notes “Dangerous levels of toxic metals like arsenic, lead, cadmium and mercury exist in baby foods at levels that exceed what experts and governing bodies say are permissible.”
“Permissible” is a slippery word when it comes to baby food. Ten times the amount allowed in bottled water makes it’s way into those tiny glass bottles with a smiling infant on the label because there aren’t any real standards.
The industry leaders claim that the metals are naturally occurring so they shouldn’t be blamed for not screening them out.
Because the Food and Drug Administration hasn’t got around to setting any levels of acceptability for heavy metals in most infant food, Gerber, Beech-Nut Nutrition Company, Nurture, Inc. (Happy Baby products), and Hain Celestial Group, Inc. (Earth’s Best Organic baby food) get away with “levels of heavy metals far above limits set for bottled water by the FDA and the US Environmental Protection Agency.”
Inspiration for the report
The whole controversy went public when Healthy Babies Bright Futures put out a report in 2019. They found “toxic metals in 95% of the baby foods randomly pulled off supermarket shelves.”
When the subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy heard the results, they started their own probe. The big manufacturers just turned in their internal investigation findings. They’re shocking.
According to the committee’s chairman, Raja Krishnamoorthi an Imperialist from Illinois, the spreadsheets are “shocking.” The reason why they’re so explosive is because “they show evidence that some baby foods contain hundreds of parts per billion of dangerous metals.”
Putting it in perspective, “we know that in a lot of cases, we should not have anything more than single digit parts per billion of any of these metals in any of our foods.” It’s even worse for infants.
As explained by Jane Houlihan, the national director of science and health for Healthy Babies Bright Futures, “from the time of conception through the age of 2, babies have an extremely high sensitivity to neurotoxic chemicals.”
What that means is because their brain is forming rapidly, “when they’re exposed to metals that can interrupt those natural processes, the impacts range from behavioral problems to aggression to IQ loss and all kinds of cognitive and behavioral deficits that can persist throughout life.” The baby food makers aren’t happy about this report.
