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bloomberglaw OP t1_j3s2zde wrote

Reply to comment by bloomberglaw in We’re the investigative team at Bloomberg Law and wrote a story on toxics metals in baby food. AMA! by bloomberglaw

Good question! Any amount can cause health problems but whether it’s possible to fully eliminate these metals is debatable. Many of the people talked to for this story say that's not realistic. You want as little as you can.

The proposed Baby Food Safety Act set limits at between 5 ppb and 15 ppb, depending on the metal and whether or not it is cereal. The reason for the variation is that it depends on how much of a food kids are expected to eat and what that food’s metal content is projected to be as to what’s considered tolerable. The more you eat of a given food, the more metals from that food build up in your system.

For instance, the guidances the FDA has outlined for lead in juice products are 10 ppb for apple juice and 20 ppb for other juices. The thinking is that kids consume more apple juice than others.

The doctors I talked for this story believe 5 ppb is a reasonable upper limit.

- Gary

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velifer t1_j3s6ux6 wrote

>Any amount can cause health problems

Simply not the case.

Even in your OP, the post says "significant" instead of "detectable." You're abusing language to sensationalize the issues, and losing credibility with anyone who has any background in environmental toxicology, which would include the people at the agencies you're expecting to do something.

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>The more you eat of a given food, the more metals from that food build up in your system.

This is a high-school level of understanding of biomagnification. It doesn't work like that.

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There is a story here, as there are some baby foods tested that had heavy metal limits above what the EPA has set for drinking water. That's not a health crisis, as no baby is sucking down liters of the same baby food every day, but it is something that should get more attention.

But stop.

This is why scientists hate journalists.

Stop sensationalizing it. Stop overselling your findings.

You sent some samples to a lab. You got results.

You can pander to your readers and maybe even some legislators, but you'll get ridiculed and ignored by the regulators and industry.

But you're more about page clicks than public health anyway...

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DerHeinzW t1_j3sdzxr wrote

> > The more you eat of a given food, the more metals from that food build up in your system.

> This is a high-school level of understanding of biomagnification. It doesn't work like that.

Well, how does it work then? The statement does not say there is a linear relationship or anything else like that, just that “the more you eat, the more metals will accumulate”. Unless the function is not monotonic, which seems unlikely (at some point the amount of metals accumulated will be less?), this seems like a true statement. Maybe too trivially so to be relevant, but true nonetheless.

I wish your comment was more constructive. It contains a lot of criticisms, without any of the actual substance of how things purportedly are. As a parent, I am willing to consider what you say, but with just “no wrong” there’s not much to go on by here?

> as no baby is sucking down liters of the same baby food every day, but it is something that should get more attention.

My baby is too young to be interested in drinking any amount of water. We try, but he does not accept it. This is normal for that age. So he ends up eating amounts of similar baby foods every day. Not liters, but still a lot compared to his body weight.

Once again, I’m not sure what to make of this. If my baby does “suck down” large amounts of the same baby food every day, should we be worried or not?

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velifer t1_j3so3zu wrote

>If my baby does “suck down” large amounts of the same baby food every day, should we be worried or not?

This is medical advice from reddit, so... um... ...yeah:

Variety is important, from a nutritional standpoint and from a risk standpoint. Going with one brand and one ingredient and one lot number every day means that you're multiplying all the deficiencies and excesses.

Tuna can have fairly high levels of mercury, but even at 1ppm (the concentrations in the OP's report are a thousand times lower) we excrete the metals in a full serving of mercury-tainted fish in under a week. Most adult humans can metabolize/excrete more than 0.021 milligrams of mercury a day.

Maybe don't feed your child on a steady diet of only Gerber Pureed Tuna.

As for biomagnification, we're extremely complicated machines. Even with similar doses and routes of exposure, metabolism, excretion, and any negative effects are dependent on levels of things like glutathione or peroxidase, some of which are triggered by the presence and action of heavy metals themselves. It's not chemical in, chemical stays, like the diagrams in textbooks.

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TossNWashMeClean t1_j3sayku wrote

I've learned not to expect much scientific literacy from people who haven't ever taken a chemistry or physics course and have been in the advertisement matrix for their entire careers.

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ShwAlex t1_j3ue1ho wrote

The dose makes the poison, as they say.

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Yea if they just made a news article stating the truth without sensationalizing, and cheered the manufacturers on for keeping their foods relatively clean, I think that would be just as great a story as doom and gloom. Why can't we celebrate positive results?

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Jfish033 t1_j3sj7ee wrote

Couldnt agree more with this person. These fools look like fools and act like fools. There fools call em out.

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