US lawmakers plan to introduce a bill Thursday that aims to limit the amount of heavy metals found in baby food through stronger regulation and enforcement by the US Food and Drug Administration.
I think ‘limit’ is fine as long as that limit is under levels safe for infant consumption. It’s probably not possible to make baby food entirely free of heavy metals because they’re basically everywhere. But it is possible to make them with heavy metals under a specific safety threshold.
In bones, lead can take 25-30 years to leave the body. Actually, this is true of many types of heavy metal poisoning (and radiation, eg radium), and bone loss as we get older tends to release these compounds. This is part of why they believe there’s a delay with ALS and Alzheimers between when you ingest heavy metal and when you actually develop symptoms.
In older adults, the primary source of lead exposure can be endogenous. Excretion of lead is relatively slow, and accumulation is common [31]. During early and middle life, lead is sequestered in the bones, where it replaces calcium in the hydroxyapatite structure [32]. The skeleton contains 70–95% of the body burden of lead where lead can remain for decades [32], which can be exploited for exposure assessment research. Adults experiencing loss of bone mass via osteoporosis release lead into the bloodstream. In older adults, 40–70% of blood lead can be attributed to previous body stores [32]. Lead that entered the body during previous periods of high exposure can become biologically active decades later.
If we limited use of fossil fuel vehicles on farmland, that would help a lot. The exhaust from tractors along with the bits of tires left in fields etc all put heavy metals in our food supply. As it is, almost all farmland in the US needs bioremediation to reduce heavy metals in their soils.
I think ‘limit’ is fine as long as that limit is under levels safe for infant consumption. It’s probably not possible to make baby food entirely free of heavy metals because they’re basically everywhere. But it is possible to make them with heavy metals under a specific safety threshold.
Getting to 100% in anything is really fucking hard - some shits occasionally going to go wrong and that’s unavoidable.
Fun fact there is no safe limit of lead to eat. It’s a forever metal so once it is in you it never leaves and will only continue to hurt you.
Citation desired. All references I’m seeing explicitly state that lead is eventually excreted in urine and feces.
In bones, lead can take 25-30 years to leave the body. Actually, this is true of many types of heavy metal poisoning (and radiation, eg radium), and bone loss as we get older tends to release these compounds. This is part of why they believe there’s a delay with ALS and Alzheimers between when you ingest heavy metal and when you actually develop symptoms.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7454042/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161813X20301352
Well then it’s too bad we can’t possibly entirely remove lead from the food chain.
If we limited use of fossil fuel vehicles on farmland, that would help a lot. The exhaust from tractors along with the bits of tires left in fields etc all put heavy metals in our food supply. As it is, almost all farmland in the US needs bioremediation to reduce heavy metals in their soils.