In February 2021, a congressional report exposing four popular baby food companies for manufacturing products for children under 36 months with alarming concentrations of toxic metals was made public. Since then, parents nationwide have understandably been outraged, yet the FDA failed to take any concrete measure to address the issue. Instead, the agency came up with the Closer to Zero plan, which is meant to “reduce exposure to toxic elements from foods eaten by babies and young children to as low as possible.”
However, the FDA’s strategy is quite problematic because the Closer to Zero plan would come to fruition only in 2024 or later.
To comprehend how serious the problem is, a comparison between the safe limit for arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury and what the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy found in the companies’ products is necessary. Accordingly, while the safe limit for arsenic is 10 ppb, Beech-Nut used ingredients with more than 880 ppb arsenic. At the same time, Hain Celestial allowed baby food containing 309 ppb arsenic to go on the market. Lead was found in the baby food of Hain Celestial in a concentration of over 300 ppb, when the maximum limit is 5 ppb, whereas over 340 ppb cadmium was present in the products of Beech-Nut when the safe limit for this metal is also 5 ppb.
The Closer to Zero plan would take so long to complete because it entails four steps, out of which the first two are unnecessary and redundant. These steps — “evaluating the scientific basis for action levels” and “proposing action levels” — can easily be skipped by the FDA, as we already know the safe limits for toxic metals from the Subcommittee on Economic and Consumer Policy. More specifically, the safe limits for arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury have been proposed in the Baby Food Safety Act of 2021, a bill initiated by Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois. He was also the one who led the investigation of baby food companies.
Nevertheless, the third step of the Closer to Zero plan involves practical action, namely evaluating the achievability and feasibility of the safe limits. Indeed, the FDA should make sure that all baby food companies in the country have access to the means necessary to keep the content of toxic metals in their products under the maximum allowable limit. Some of the practices the agencies should encourage manufacturers to implement are sourcing rice from crops grown on soil with a lower arsenic concentration, growing crops with natural soil additives to lower toxic metal uptake and using food strains that are less likely to absorb toxic metals.
Furthermore, the Closer to Zero plan has additional shortcomings, such as failing to consider explicitly the mounting effect of toxic metals on children’s neurodevelopment, not taking more aggressive measures to minimize children’s intake of toxic metals, and failing to define clearly what “as low as possible” and “children’s food” mean. Nonetheless, a sliver of hope for parents would be the Baby Food Safety Act of 2021.
In March 2021, the Baby Food Safety Act, whose purpose is to immediately set maximum permissible limits for toxic metals in infant and toddler food, was introduced by Krishnamoorthi. Unlike the FDA’s Closer to Zero plan, the bill would make it mandatory for baby food companies to keep the content of toxic metals below the safe limits as soon as it entered law. It would also invest the FDA with more authority in this respect. Therefore, the agency could monitor baby food manufacturers more closely and be able to lower the safe limits of toxic metals even more, if necessary.
If the Baby Food Safety Act became law, parents of infants and toddlers would no longer have to worry about toxic metals endangering their children’s health, and baby food companies would be forced to manufacture these products ethically without cutting corners.
