"When parents first serve solid foods to their babies, they often turn to infant rice cereal. The iron-fortified mix is nutritious and relatively easy to feed babies unaccustomed to spoons or strong flavors.
But the Food and Drug Administration allows 10 times as much arsenic in this favored first food as it does in other products, like bottled water and apple juice — despite the fact that, as a neurotoxin, arsenic can have an outsize impact on babies, whose brains are still developing.
Environmental health experts have long criticized FDA's approach to heavy metals in food, arguing the agency doesn't do enough to track or regulate the problem even when there's evidence that kids are being exposed to neurotoxins.
Though FDA today released a plan to address baby food contamination following a recent congressional report on the issue, experts say its foods program has been reliant on industry for too long."
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