What is a brain-damaging chemical doing in baby food?
What does a chemical used to make rocket fuel have in common with baby food?
If the FDA did its job, that should be a big fat zero.
Unfortunately, that chemical, called perchlorate, is turning up in more and more processed foods where it’s deliberately being added as an “anti-static agent” to the packaging. But by far the most shocking place it has been found is in baby food.
Being that perchlorate is incredibly toxic, and also that it leeches right out of the packaging and into food, three years ago several environmental groups got together and filed a petition with the FDA, asking that it be banned for that use.
The agency promised to look into it and let us know what it was going to do. And this month, it finally came back with an answer.
Its plan is to do absolutely nothing.
The “FDA has all the evidence it needs that it’s a public health threat.”
That’s what Erik Olson, director of the Health Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council has to say about the recent FDA decision — or lack of — on perchlorate, an industrial chemical used in rocket fuel, explosives, fireworks and road flares.
And the agency’s “explanation” of just why it was refusing to act wasn’t much more than some bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo — something that “ignores the science and the law,” says Olson.
The danger is that it can disrupt the production of thyroid hormones by inhibiting our uptake of iodine. While that’s bad enough in adults, when infants, kids and unborn children are exposed to the chemical, it can interfere with brain development. Research done by the Environmental Defense Fund found that one in five expectant moms likely harbor levels substantial enough to put their unborn babies at risk.
When we have an iodine deficiency, explains HSI panel member Dr. Mark Stengler, it can lead to “a wide range of health problems.” These can include brain damage, autism, infections and possibly cancer. “Every single cell in your body needs iodine,” he says.
Oddly enough, it was the FDA’s own scientists who found these high levels of perchlorate in food (especially high levels were discovered in rice cereal for babies) — levels that had gone up dramatically since the last time the agency checked during the three years prior to 2006.
And while the FDA made those findings out to be some kind of big mystery, it turns out that in 2005 for the very first time, the agency gave the okay for up to12,000 parts per million of perchlorate to be added to the plastic material used to package certain dry foods — including those baby rice cereals.
Wow, it shouldn’t take Sherlock Holms to figure that one out!
But the FDA is still scratching its head. And that’s despite the fact that testing done by the company that manufactures the chemical found that it did indeed transfer to food, and at sizeable levels.
Obviously there’s a big problem here, one the FDA refuses to acknowledge.
And apart from avoiding those baby rice-cereal products — with even organic ones not guaranteed to be safe — there’s no real way to make sure we’re not serving this up to our kids or grandkids for breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s even been found in samples of bologna and salami!
This may be one of the best reasons of all to use even fewer processed foods. One thing you can do, however, is to make it a point to call the manufacturers of the foods you buy and ask if they test their products for perchlorate. Even if they don’t, they’ll get the message that people are concerned.
And you can call your legislators and ask them to support its removal from food packaging.
As the Environmental Defense Fund said, the “FDA must remedy a problem of its own making.”
“Protecting industry or people? FDA refuses to ban toxic chemical in packaging for baby cereal” Tom Neltner, May 4, 2017, Environmental Defense Fund, edf.org
