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Comment by sithadmin | Hacker News Reader

I am suspicious that the repeated comparison to standards for water here aren't really fair. Heavy metals are a natural occurrence in pretty much all foods that we eat, regardless of environmental pollution (though pollution does have a notable impact).

For instance, it's incredibly common for even the highest-quality 'organic' produce to contain levels of heavy metals such as lead in amounts that drastically exceed California's prop 65 standards. Things like avocados and watermelons often have close to 10x more lead than what prop 65 considers acceptable. Spinach, wines, cruciferous vegetables and nuts tend to be even worse. Even when grown in relatively unpolluted soils with 'natural' lead levels (50-400 ppm range), many such produce items STILL drastically exceed prop 65 standards.

That said, I'm not a food safety expert or toxicologist, so I might have an incredibly bad take on this.

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Honestly, the whole thing reads like a hit piece. There are published standards for exposure levels in foods but the committee intentionally used inapplicable standards such as the much more stringent standard for purified water. Their reasoning is, "It is not sound logic to say that water is unsafe to drink if it contains over 5 ppb lead, but candy and fruit juice can be ten and twenty times higher than that limit."

The report is also full of frankly offensive conjecture. You'll find statements like, "Whether due to evasion or negligence, Sprout’s failure to respond raises serious concerns about the presence of toxic heavy metals in its baby foods," about any company that didn't respond to the committee in the way they felt appropriate.

They also repeatedly state that the levels of heavy metals in baby foods are unsafe but they never actually make a case for it. They just take it as truth and titled the report as such.

Finally, I would keep in mind that this is a congressional oversight committee staff report. This wasn't made by scientists. Nobody involved in the creation of the report has working knowledge of food safety or testing procedures. All testing in the report was provided by the companies in question. This report was made by a team of people working for the House as the foundation for proposing new laws and regulations and as such it's an inherently political report.

Frankly, after the publishing of this report it's doubtful that any company will be willing to work with this subcommittee ever again and they would be right to refuse.

I guess you can have left-wing anti-science too.

> Honestly, the whole thing reads like a hit piece.

To me it reads like cognitive dissonance. They write multiple damning statements (yes based in science) but conclude with 'voluntary changes' and 'more research'.

I'll mention that the piece speaks about FDA not needing baby food manufacturers to test the final product of the food, only the ingredients. Multiple independent studies confirm that the manufacturing of baby food products is outrageous, in terms of what is allowed. Compared to adult food, it's a double standard.

Instead, baby foods should be held to a higher standard. But this Democrat Committee is okay with 3 companies (of 7) not responding to their inquiry, only 'suggesting' private changes, and kicks the can down the road with a cop-out like 'more research needs to be done by the FDA'.

It's a long document but corruption and negligence is bipartisan [1].

[1] - This is b/c the report condemns Trump for hiding hazardous facts about baby food products but then with those facts they/Dem-led only commit to lip service.

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