This content was created by Matt Kelly. This content was uploaded by Matt Kelly. This is a YouTube video titled "Heavy Metals in Baby Food? (WHAT TO DO & Companies Involved)" (posted 2021-08-25T19:52:18Z) featuring a single presenter who identifies as a physician and educator with three decades in medicine. The speaker reviews reports (citing Harvard Health/Claire McCarthy) finding arsenic, lead, cadmium (and in one test mercury) in commercial baby foods, explains sources and pathways for heavy metal contamination (rice, water, bioconcentration), and gives practical advice: minimize rice-based baby foods, delay solids until about 6 months if possible, prepare home-cooked/steamed baby foods (freeze in portions), rotate to non-rice grains (barley, oats), filter cooking water, and limit high-mercury fish. The presenter also points viewers to the Environmental Working Group and the cited Harvard Health article for more details.
Chapters
But a whole lot of news outlets had this thing about, holy smokes, there's a lot of heavy metals in baby food. And it's sort of like, oh, you know, the FDA is like, whoops, we never looked, we never asked. So everyone's embarrassed. Heavy metals in baby food. Really seems like the last place we would want toxic heavy metals would be in the food we feed our babies. I'm Dr. A. I've been in medicine the last 3 decades as a physician, an educator, a writer. There was a big splash when this came out a couple of weeks ago. This is being done live in July 2021. So if you're in the future, it was a long time ago. Uh, but a whole lot of news outlets had this thing about, holy smokes, there's a lot of heavy metals in baby food. And it's sort of like, oh, you know, the FDA is like, oops, we never looked. We never asked. So everyone's embarrassed. Yeah. Claire McCarthy, MD, wrote a really nice little summary in the— she's a senior faculty editor of Harvard Health Publishing. March 5th, 2021 is the date. They checked for arsenic, lead, and cadmium, and they were found to be very high in baby foods. And one company, Chess, also tested mercury, and that was high there. So the companies that did it, and this is from the Harvard Health News, were Nurture, Beech-Nut, Hain, and Gerber, and they all answered, and they all said yes, we found heavy metals of significant amount in the baby food. The FDA asked Walmart, Campbell's, and Sprouts, and as of this moment, they have not provided the information. But knowing what we know about food and metals and other things, I can almost guarantee you if it's in Most of the baby foods we tested here, it's going to be in the other baby foods too. Metals come into vegetables, animal product, everything else through a number of ways. One is bioconcentration, comes from the sky, falls on the ground, goes into the food, or goes into the food the animal eats. The other huge one is the water that's drunk or irrigated onto the food. And, uh, there's, there's other things as well. There's some foods that just love to suck heavy metals up out of the ground. So it's not unusual that we would find metals in things. It's just, they're very concentrated in baby foods. It's pretty well accepted that heavy metals like arsenic, lead, and cadmium, and mercury are not good for us, especially when you have a growing brain, cardiovascular system, body like a baby. The last thing you want is more metals in the food. Just have to give a shout out to Russell Brand. He has a YouTube channel. Obviously he's much more famous than I am. If you want to really entertaining take on this, uh, but also, you know, a little bit longer, uh, go look up Russell Brand's video. It's on YouTube about heavy metals or toxins in baby food. And, uh, he has kind of a different take. Now, the first thing that, uh, Dr. McCarthy talks about, which everyone pretty much agrees on, is there's a lot of baby food, uh, that has a lot of rice in it. Rice is a high arsenic food unless it is washed very, very well. So rice, you want to minimize going in as a high-volume food for the baby unless you're really washing it and doing a lot of other things. The other thing to keep in mind is that babies don't really need solid food until they're 6 months or older. And so if they're nursing, that sort of takes care of the problem of needing the baby food. But the other thing is that babies— here, just think about it this way. Baby food has not existed for all of the time humans have. Okay. Babies can eat any soft food. They don't have a lot of teeth or any teeth. Maybe when you're giving it to them, usually babies start to eat some food when they start to get some teeth. You can give them soft table food that you have, which probably is less toxic. You can see my other videos about how to lower the toxin level in your food and Other stuff coming in. Look at the Environmental Working Group, ewg.org. They're really great for looking at what foods are more or less toxic, which ones you should buy organic. But let's say you have a cooked yam on your plate. You can take your fork, smash that up, and feed the baby a little baby size, and they're going to be fine with it. You do want to start with things that are as soft as possible, because if there's a lot of fiber or a lot of stringy things or other stuff, it's going to be very hard for them to get down. The other thing that you can do is you can make your own baby food and you can steam it, steam the vegetables. If you want to use meat, like some lamb or something, cook it really, really well. And then you blend it and you can actually freeze it. You can get ice cube trays and freeze that in there. We've done this for the grandkids. It's, it's really not that hard. By doing that, you would at least know what the food is that you were getting. you are processing and you are putting into your child. The other thing is with respect to rice and the high amount of arsenic in it, you, and if you're looking for grains in the baby's diet, you can rotate and do some non-rice grains like barley, oat. The other thing that you wanna be real careful with though, and we talked about this in other videos, is the water supply. Water coming in through your municipal sources, your pipes can have lead and other things We've talked about getting at least, you know, a carafe-type filter or, you know, a jug-type filter or other filters to filter out heavy metals. You can look into those, and the, the people who sell them will give you the reports on what they filter out. You just want to make sure you're not cooking or steaming the baby's food or your food in water that's full of heavy metals, and that's one of the big ways in. So let's say you look at the Environmental Working Group, the The dirty dozen, the worst, you know, foods for toxicity. You get those organic, clean as you can possibly get them, and then you cook them or steam them in water that's been filtered. You have the least amount potentially of heavy metals going in. The other thing they talk about, of course, is most of us know that bigger fish have bioconcentrated a lot of mercury. So like tuna, you want to minimize tuna and other things like that. So you can look at You know, line-caught salmon, cod, some other things that, that could be used also as a protein source. Sadly, this is true. Uh, and every time they looked for a metal, they found it in amounts that were not good for babies, certainly not good for adults, but especially not babies. Do take a look, take a look at that article from Dr. McCarthy, Harvard Health Publishing, about heavy metals in baby food. And, uh, you can download that and get a lot of tips, uh, there on how to minimize the exposure of your children. All right. Dr. Andersen, I want to thank you guys for subscribing. If you haven't, please like, share, subscribe, do the notifications. It really helps. And I really appreciate the questions we get. I do try and get to the comments if possible, and I do try and save them for future episodes. But I will see you all in the next video. Have a great day. See you again. Bye.
