Nearly 40% Of Baby Foods Contain Toxic Chemicals And Pesticides According To New Study

The following report is by the Environmental Working Group (EWG):

Your baby’s food may contain potentially harmful pesticides – but the Environmental Working Group’s decades of fighting to protect children’s health have helped eliminate the most toxic threats from these products.

That’s the conclusion of new EWG research, which detected nine pesticides in dozens of non-organic, or conventional, baby foods. The study comes almost 30 years after we issued a groundbreaking report, in 1995, investigating pesticides in the food that infants and very young children eat.

Babies and young children are particularly vulnerable to potential health harms from consuming food that contains residues of agricultural pesticides.

EWG’s newest research into popular baby foods found pesticides like acetamiprid, a neonicotinoid insecticide that studies increasingly suggest might harm humans as well as bees, and captan, which is linked to cancer.

The results are vital for parents and caregivers looking to limit the pesticides babies are exposed to every day. The study, along with EWG’s long-running guides to making safer choices when shopping, are designed to help consumers find baby food with few or no pesticides.

What you need to know from EWG’s latest tests:

• We sampled 73 products – 58 conventional baby foods and 15 organic.
• The products were from three popular brands – Beech-Nut, Gerber and Parent’s Choice.
• At least one pesticide residue was detected in 22 of the 58 conventional baby foods.
• No pesticides were detected in any of the 15 organic products.

Any pesticides in baby food may be too much for children’s health. But parents should be relieved that some of the chemicals we found in our 1995 study are no longer being detected. That includes chlorpyrifos, linked to brain damage in children and the developing fetus, which we detected almost three decades ago…