Applesauce lead poisoning cases in kids surge amid questions on FDA oversight
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The reports show that the FDA has known that we've been spooning poison directly into the mouths of our babies for years (since at least 2019) and still the FDA can't even get voluntary limits on how much poison is acceptable in a jar of "Gerber peas and carrots" put in place. Until companies are held meaningfully accountable for selling dangerous products, these kinds of problems will only continue, but the FDA seems to care more about the corporations than the public.
I'd love to see the FDA continuously going around the country, randomly pulling products off of shelves, testing them, and then handing out massive fines to companies whose products are unsafe or mislabeled. I'd like to see more ways for people to test food products themselves too.
This is the best way to circumvent the politics and corruption.
I would like to see a government grant for cheap testing methods. Either covid-like test strips which are sensitive enough and can measure 10+ contaminants for mere cents, or a government test centre which will test for free anything you mail to them using an XRF gun (expensive kit, but can test one thing every 5 seconds or so, making the amortized cost very low)
An alternative is to make it easier and cheaper to do a blood/hair test.
Early and inexpensive detection by multiple means is imperative.
This isn't something that can be solved at the consumer level. We need policy here, but in the meantime we should have options to keep our families safe.
I liken this to security: You want layered security.
Right now we have maybe one or two layers of detection at best.
The article is a typical example showing how we routinely have zero to one layer at the most.
Maybe in terms of personal responsibility, but definitely not from a societal point of view... It would distort the market by having more expensive baby food tested more often (the people buying more expensive baby food would have the money and the time to do more testing)
If anyone else is concerned, one of the quickest things you can do is throw out any of your spices from India and don’t buy anymore in the future. Unclear the origin of this cinnamon but India has been a pretty consistent problem in recent history.
I don't know if current-gen hand-held XRF detection equipment would be sensitive enough to have spotted the tainted products. But it sure sounds simple for an occasional government safety inspector to walk up & down the aisles of grocery stores, drug stores, toy stores, etc. with a detector, looking for unsuspected contamination (with lead, arsenic, cadmium, mercury, or just about any heavy metal).
https://perkinelmer.cl/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/PinAAcle-9...
>Determination of Lead and Cadmium in Foods by Graphite Furnace Atomic Absorption Spectroscopy
There are newer, more sensitive, more expensive, and more versatile spectrometers, but one of these would do nicely.
It's good to have a technique and and instrument sensitive enough to measure something like drinking water directly, using a small sample, and on our unit fairly automated with the optional accessories, once you had the samples prepared and carefully racked.
More costly is the facility capable of properly handling & disposing of the chemicals necessary to accomplish the analysis, along with instrument support equipment like calibrated glassware and balances for precision mass and volume measurement, plus appropriate sample processing (in this case a microwave sample processor).
So you can't just put the instrument in your garage and get going realistically.
Where would you start?
Somewhere other than the spectrometer, basically the instrument itself would be the final icing on the cake.
The first step has got to be preparing the samples or you can't make it to step two.
Regardless of what type of spectrometer, or even a trace level chemical test kit, what they are really built to test is plain water samples, not applesauce or even more unwaterlike foods.
So you need a sample preparation procedure that aggressively "digests" a small amount of food into a watery mixture using a bit of acid, then further dilute it with water afterward so the viscosity is closer to plain water too. And that's the liquid that you test using a spectrometer sensitive enough to do a good job, in spite of dilution (in the linked PDF 0.3 gram of food sample diluted up to 20mL of spectrometer feed).
Making that one PDF paragraph on Sample Preparation a proven starting point.
You would have to get really good at that before it would make much sense to go much further.
OTOH, there's this:
https://ideacenter.nd.edu/commercialization-engine/for-indus...
Which doesn't depend on as sensitive of a spectrometer, instead reliant on a full 2 Liter sample of the water or waterlike fluid you want to test.
IOW you might be able to digest 2 kilos of applesauce, using only a fraction of a liter of acid if you were willing to forget about having it come out in 40 minutes, then concentrate the mineral content efficiently into a small bed of activated carbon by filtration like this.
Then end up measuring the lead accurately using the less-sensitive x-ray spectrometer which is available in hand-held format.
For the most part without the need for an analytical bench, just a sample preparation bench.
That sounds shocking, but is a red herring. Unexploded munitions are a malfunction-- being warned about it means someone detonated a large amount of it in your area.
Same goes for former/adjacent shooting ranges. Assume the soil is contaminated until tested.
"Ah, these people who live life a different way, less reliant on incompetent government and malicious businesses are crazy fringe conspiracy nuts".
Millions of people grow their own food for a plethora of reasons, yeah maybe everybody should just be eating poison-laced big box food because they don't want to be labeled "nuts", only to be proven correct time and time again.
FDA and other state partners collected and analyzed additional product samples of fruit puree and applesauce pouches. FDA detected elevated levels of lead in one finished product sample of WanaBana Apple Cinnamon Puree collected from Dollar Tree. The level detected in the FDA sample of WanaBana apple cinnamon puree is 2.18 parts per million (ppm), which, for context, is more than 200 times greater than the action level the FDA has proposed in draft guidance for fruit purees and similar products intended for babies and young children.
https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
To put it in context this is 2.18 micrograms of lead per gram of apple sauce.
Currently for most foods if they are processed in the US they can say it’s a product of the US. For example meat from China processed in the US is sold as US meat. This means you can just repackage it, boom US product!
The current rules put profit over consumers being informed where their food comes from.
Sources
[1] https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/how-muc...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1892142/
[3] https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/330866/thai-rice-has-lo...
Now I typically only do this with seafood products but maybe I have been buying SA beef before.
Lead is such a ubiquitous contamination that it is worth educating yourself about and getting baseline blood tests. This site has lots of useful information: https://tamararubin.com/ The author tests products with an XRF gun and her reports have initiated recalls. It's a commentary on our lack of enforcement and oversight that one individual could be the primary source of information about lead contamination for many. Unfortunately if a company can claim their product is not for use by children than it can't really get recalled and many of us are using dishware with lead in them and have unnecessary lead exposures.
Her use of her XRG equipment has come into question by lab professionals. The most recent example being the lead scare she started around kitchenaid mixers.
I agree with the message though, everyone should become educated and be careful especially with children.
So at the end of the day who really knows. I am sure some of the things she tests is truthful but the problem is her testing does not have the greatest standards and the way she comes across seems manic. These sorts of things require rigorous testing and you can never be wrong.
Sadly no other resources that I know of. These are the sorts of things that if not the government, a third party nonprofit type rating agency does. Her mom groups are filled with panicked and freaked out individuals which is not wha tit should be.
All she's doing is testing everything under the sun for lead amounts in common household items, while being certified to do so with her own XRF, and then writing about it so that others without XRF can know. Meanwhile, everyone else is busy drinking out of lead glazed mugs, touching leaded door handles 10 times a day, toddlers sucking in leaded toys, eating high lead chocolate. Then after 30 years they got a blood panel that says their lead levels are high, and probably have been for 30 years. People are woefully unaware how much lead still permeates soo much around us still, and she's one of the few bringing awareness to it.
Does owner even understand what goes into calibrating an XRF?
Here's a training certificate. It's an 8 hour full day course: https://tamararubin.com/2017/09/tamaras-xrf-training-certifi...
Note: I think lead is a very real issue that unfortunately contaminates a lot of products.
I have not don’t a full blown investigative review of her but every time I have dug a little bit based on some recent post, this is what I come to the conclusion of.
Her website is very hard to parse through. For me, it always reads as one of those “you may have cancer” ads mixed with some antivax Facebook mom groups.
Every post about lead contamination does not go deep into the science. Did she calibrate the machine? What are the specifics about her machine? Does the material/item she is testing need modification for testing accuracy? She mentions many times she is qualified but seems like only a bare qualification from the manufacturer. That and I never see a picture of her lab.
Does she ever follow up her hand held test with a lab test to confirm? One to eliminate any inaccuracy in her device and two to have a confirmation of her results? She makes all these posts, Costco salt has unsafe lead levels, la crueset has lead, kitchenaid mixers have lead, etc. It needs to be followed up with additional, lab qualified testing.
She undoubtedly finds items with lead but I just cannot trust her methodology. My family and I get regular lead tests and we are conscious consumers but I cannot follow her style of scare mongering. And let me say it again, she definitely finds things with lead in them but without some type of scientific rigor and verification, it’s hard to trust her results.
It seems like there's a misunderstanding about the technique being used. An XRF gun is a portable device that works in the field and does not require to be operated in a lab. For most of the consumer goods she is testing she is already using a highly sensitive piece of equipment that measures ppb- it wouldn't make sense to "send it to a lab". She is certified in using the equipment and probably one of the most experienced at using it to test consumer goods. The gun she is using is self-calibrating to begin with, but still calibrated for each test.
I actually think most of the problem here is that her website has an unprofessional appearance. If it had the professional appearance you were expecting and she had a university degree in chemistry or material science but posted almost the exact same information with perhaps a few minor edits and a slightly different style I think it would have the scientific look and feel you and others are looing for. But the underlying science of using an XRF gun to test for lead seems quite sound.
But not always.
There are a lot of places where the soil and/or groundwater has a lot of lead, arsenic, mercury, what have you, because that's just the way the geology is and always has been, even before humans existed.
Always struck me as odd how few resources actually seem to get spent on the things that obviously keep us safe (clean water, clean air, safe foods etc). I do however admire the dark arts of those that manage to push back the safeguards here, that surely nobody would oppose.