A friend sent me this article about a test done on Serenity Kids baby puffs, Happy Baby puffs, and a couple other things. There are positive results for lead, cadium, arsenic, and mercury.
The "Clean Label Project Purity Award" does not mean what you think it means.
The article is long but the tl;dr is don't buy puffs or cassava based foods.
@torn12 Good God. As someone who works in the lead testing industry please avoid LSM at all costs. While not always wrong she is a known fear monger who ultimately does more harm than good
@e31 I definitely went down that rabbit hole and was super paranoid about lead for a while. And I am cautious now to a lesser degree. As someone who is an expert on things lead-related, what should I actually worry about?
@rascoeb Lead paint!!!!! And people doing their own renovations in old houses!! Also if you do any hobby using lead. But if you do those hobbies you probably know and are hopefully using good housekeeping practices
@e31 Question, when it comes to lead based paint, is it just eating the chips that you have to worry about? Is it dangerous just existing and not being touched?
@way195 So most kids don't actually eat lead chips, thats now considered an outdated way of thinking. They ingest lead dust through normal hand to mouth behavior. If your lead paint is in good condition it is much less of a risk. If it's in poor condition, chipping, flaking, a door is rubbing on the frame, etc, then it is much more of a risk.
@jacobla Imo it's always worth having someone come out with an XRF to test the paint at your home. Knowledge us power and there is no way to know without testing.
An anecdote: my house was built in 1790. A couple months after we moved in I brought the XRF home and tested our house. There is WAYYY less lead that I expected and now I know where the lead is so I can appropriately manage it
@e31 I want to chime in as someone living in an old house! I get my daughter tested every 6 months because we do projects here and there and absolutely have chipping paint on every door jam. I recently got her tested at 2 and the finger prick test came back high! I was FREAKING OUT, making plans to leave my beloved home, etc. I did not know that if the finger prick comes back high they test again at a lab (venous test). We did this and her levels came back waaaay below the cut-off. So if you ARE worried or live in an old house PLEASE request the venous test and don’t even bother with the in office finger prick.
@e31 What about toys? My MIL is persistent in letting my kids use her vintage Fisher Price and Lego toys. I don’t allow it, but I see her sneaking some of them anyway.
@e31 What does this mean? Like, when she is not wrong, how does it do harm? When she's been wrong, is it because she's performing tests herself, incorrectly?
@discipul4yahwey Nearly everything you interact with has some degree of heavy metals. They are naturally occurring and then through human actions we've made their prevalence in the food pyramid worse. THAT SAID most people and children are poisoned either through lead paint in their homes or through their hobbies. Is it really responsible to put fear into people about every little thing they eat when we should really be worried about the old paint in their homes or shitty landlords who don't take care of their apartments? There is a certain amount of exposure that you cannot escape because you are existing in this world. It just is what it is. If you can find a way to exist without eating please let me know. We should focus on the actual way kids every day are getting lead poisoned (which is how her kid was lead poisoned btw, not by puffs)
So much of so called “advocacy” is really insular and not focused on protecting other children who are most at risk, it’s about protecting yours and your own in a way that sucks all the attention out of this topic.
Please scream about shitty landlords, toddlers who can’t get led tests because health care is broken, and water infrastructure being managed for profit and not saftey.
Please don’t scream about organic cassava puffs at Whole Foods.
@jaenalyn Alright, well, if any of you goofballs want to get involved in organizing tenants or get connected to a lead action advocacy group you can click "Chat" instead of downvote and I'll try to help you actually do something. Until then, save the sanctimonious "screaming." It's not doing anything about the corporations selling kids snacks, the ones running healthcare, or the ones managing slum condition apartments.
@e31 Lead is not naturally occurring in our human environment. That is a frequently parroted misconception. Lead is naturally occurring in the Earth's crust and it should stay there. It is so, so much worse for humans and natural living things than 99% of the substances that people in this sub get up in arms about. People just love to hate on LSM because, it's true, avoiding lead has become impossible and it's painful for people to face the reality of that. But she's not one bit wrong that it should be avoided as much as possible, and it's not like nothing could be done about the fact that we're still actively mining lead and adding it to products and our environment as we speak when there are hundreds of alternative options (albeit slightly more expensive to producers- Stanley cups, anyone?). At least she's an activist about something real and something important.
@e31 Downvote me if you it makes you feel better, but I was simply asking for clarification on your vaguely-worded comment. Some friends work for the local lead action project and I have helped organize tenant unions, so trust me when I say I'm aware of issues with lead paint. I also own a firearm and have deleading soap, so it's not as if I'm ignoring these things when asking you to be more explicit and present some evidence regarding your comments against LSM.
I think you're presenting a false dilemma here: either we talk about higher-than-deemed-safe levels of lead in foods claiming to be healthy, or lead paint because that causes the majority of lead poisoning in children. Personally, I'd rather have all the information and then figure out where I might need to take risks.
Fwiw, there are also quite a few people in the Serenity foods Instagram comments saying their children had elevated lead levels off of primarily snacking on cassava-based puffs to avoid grain-based puffs (due to arsenic levels, et al) and that they'd been tearing their homes apart looking for the source. My wife was saying that LSM was suggesting varying your child's diet to avoid prolonged exposure to any one particular substance in one product, which hardly seems like fear-mongering or telling people not to eat.
@discipul4yahwey I agree with you, I feel like lead in food is worse than phthalates and bpas but I avoid those so I ought to avoid lead too! I would rather know than not know.
@e31 Just chiming in to amplify the caution around LSM.
I literally have met her in real life, we have friends in common, and I knew her during her early and well-meaning campaign against lead. She's gone wiiiild with the claims she makes, and im pretty sure none of my friend group associate with her anymore. She's not a reputable source of information, at the very least. Caution.
