The FDA has a huge opportunity right now to limit heavy metals in baby food. We know that exposure to lead early in life can result in lifelong impacts on cognitive development, learning ability, and even lifetime earnings.
And yet, lead is in the food babies are eating at too-high levels. As a parent with a one-year-old at home, I am beyond alarmed.
Now is the time for FDA to set meaningful standards to protect babies’ brains from dangerous, health-harming lead in food.
Tell FDA: Baby Food Is Not a Place for Lead
In 2020, FDA acknowledged that “no safe level of lead exposure has been identified for children’s health.” Five years later, it is still in our baby food. FDA has failed to change or limit allowable levels. This is completely unacceptable.
No caregiver should have to worry that the food they’re spooning into their babies’ mouths, day after day, could potentially be poisoning their developing brains and nervous systems.
Lead ends up in baby food because it’s found in the soil and water used to grow food, sometimes introduced by industrial pollution. It can also drift from the spraying of pesticides or other sources, and get introduced during manufacturing and packaging.
Whatever routes heavy metals like lead take into babies’ food, we need strong protections to limit it. These limits should not just be for one type of food like dry infant cereal and single-ingredient root vegetables. They need to be in place for snack foods, toddler beverages, infant formula, and anything a parent or caregiver shops for outside a store’s baby food aisle too! Babies eat more than just items marketed as baby food.
Join Moms in telling FDA: To truly protect babies, we must act on all sources of contamination and set meaningful limits now to reduce dietary exposure to lead. Anything less fails to protect our most vulnerable.