Heavy Metals in Food: Baby Food, Spices, and What the Numbers Mean

If you were feeding a toddler in the fall of 2023, you probably remember the cinnamon applesauce recall. Pouches of apple cinnamon puree sold under the WanaBana, Schnucks, and Weis labels were pulled from shelves after children turned up with elevated blood lead levels, and FDA testing of the cinnamon found lead at 2,270 to 5,110 parts per million. For scale, the limit international food standards bodies have proposed for lead in spices is 2.5 parts per million. The contaminated cinnamon was running roughly a thousand times past it, and the CDC eventually linked hundreds of cases of elevated blood lead in young children to those pouches.

That story sits at the frightening end of a wider stream of headlines: arsenic in rice, lead and cadmium in baby food, cadmium in dark chocolate. They blur into one anxious question about whether the food supply is quietly poisoning your family. The honest answer ends with a short list of habits that genuinely help, and none of them involve panic.

How Metals Get Into Food in the First Place

Lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury are elements. They have always been in the earth’s crust, and a century of leaded gasoline, lead paint, mining, and old orchard pesticides added more to the topsoil that food grows in. Plant roots cannot fully distinguish the minerals they need from the metals they do not, so as crops pull water and nutrients from the ground, trace amounts of metals come along. Unlike the substances in our guide to food additives , nobody approves these or adds them for a function. They are contaminants, and the FDA’s stated goal is to push them as low as the food supply allows.

Some crops are simply better at collecting specific metals. Rice is the textbook case. It grows in flooded paddies, where the waterlogged soil chemistry converts arsenic into a form rice roots absorb easily, through the same uptake pathway the plant uses for silicon. Arsenic walks in through a door the plant holds open for a nutrient it actually wants. That is why rice carries more inorganic arsenic than other grains, and why our rice nutrition profile treats it as a staple worth rotating rather than an everyday default. Cacao trees do something similar with cadmium in volcanic soils, which is the origin of the heavy metal caveat in our dark chocolate breakdown . Root vegetables like carrots and sweet potatoes grow in direct contact with soil, so they pick up slightly more lead than fruit hanging from a branch.

Spices are a different and uglier story. The cinnamon in those applesauce pouches was not contaminated by soil. FDA investigators traced it to a single processor in Ecuador and found lead and chromium levels consistent with lead chromate, an industrial yellow pigment. The agency’s working theory is economically motivated adulteration, someone adding pigment on purpose to boost color or weight. It was not a first. Researchers documented the same trick in Bangladesh, where processors added lead chromate to turmeric to make dull roots look vividly yellow (Forsyth et al., 2019, Environmental Research).

Detection Is Not the Same as Danger

Modern laboratories can find almost anything in almost everything, down to parts per billion. One part per billion is about one second out of 32 years. So a report that a food “contains lead” tells you very little on its own. The question that matters is dose over time.

Think of your body as a bathtub with a slow drain. Metals trickle in from food, water, air, and household dust, and your kidneys and gut slowly drain them out. An occasional splash never fills the tub. Trouble starts when one high-level source keeps the tap running faster than the drain can empty, which is exactly what a daily pouch of adulterated applesauce did. Lead is the worst guest in this scenario because the body stockpiles it in bone, so the tub drains slowest of all.

Two facts frame every number you will read. First, the CDC and FDA state that no safe level of lead exposure in children has been identified. That sounds terrifying, but it is a policy target meaning always aim lower, not a claim that every detectable trace causes harm. Second, children are not small adults. They absorb a larger fraction of the lead they swallow, their brains are still wiring themselves, and they eat more food relative to their body weight. That is why regulators concentrate on foods for babies and young children, and why the same caution applies during pregnancy, which our pregnancy food safety guide covers in detail.

What the FDA Is Doing: Closer to Zero

In 2021 the FDA launched Closer to Zero , a program to reduce lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in foods commonly eaten by babies and young children. The name is honest. Metals in soil make zero impossible, so the goal is as low as achievable while keeping nutritious food on shelves.

The program’s main tool is the action level. In January 2025 the FDA finalized action levels for lead in processed foods for children under two: 10 parts per billion for most categories, including fruits, vegetables, yogurts, and meat and grain mixtures, and 20 parts per billion for single-ingredient root vegetables and dry infant cereals. An earlier guidance set 100 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic as the action level for infant rice cereal. An action level is not a line between safe and unsafe. It is an enforcement lever. Above it, the FDA can declare a food adulterated and pull it from the market. Below it, the pressure on manufacturers to source cleaner ingredients keeps working.

The cinnamon episode shows both the system’s weakness and its backstop. Routine product testing did not catch the pouches. Pediatric blood lead screening in North Carolina did, and the recall, import alerts on the cinnamon supplier, and a wave of FDA testing of ground cinnamon on American shelves all followed from there.

What Actually Lowers Your Exposure

Variety is the single most useful habit, and it is the FDA’s own headline advice. A varied diet caps the dose any one contaminated source can deliver, the same way a spread-out portfolio caps the damage any one bad stock can do. For adults that means not building every meal around the same grain or snack. For babies it means rotating infant cereals among rice, oat, barley, and multigrain instead of serving rice cereal at every feeding.

Rice deserves one specific technique. Cooking it like pasta, in six to ten parts water, then draining the excess, removes 40 to 60 percent of the inorganic arsenic depending on the rice type, a figure the FDA cites from published research. The tradeoff is that the extra water also carries off some of the iron, folate, and thiamin added to enriched white rice. Brown rice tends to carry more arsenic than white because the metal concentrates in the bran layers. That is not a reason to drop brown rice, just another reason to rotate grains rather than eating any single one daily.

For spices, buy from established brands with real supply chains and testing programs. The adulteration cases share a pattern: cheap, unusually vivid product moving through markets with little oversight. A famous brand is not a guarantee, but it raises the odds that someone tested the lot.

If a recall touches your pantry, stop using the product. For a child, ask your pediatrician about a blood lead test, because low-level exposure rarely shows visible symptoms. Skip anything marketed as a heavy metal detox or cleanse. No over-the-counter product is approved to remove metals from the body, and that marketing feeds on exactly the fear these headlines create.

Keeping It in Perspective

The metals are real, the doses in most foods are tiny, and the people most worth protecting are the smallest eaters at the table. You cannot drive exposure to zero, because the metals are in the planet’s soil, but you can keep the bathtub from ever filling: rotate foods, vary the grains, prepare rice with extra water when it is a staple, and lean on the basic food safety habits that quietly do most of the protective work. The cinnamon story was genuinely bad, and it also ended the way the system is supposed to end, with screening, recalls, import alerts, and new enforceable limits. Feed the toddler. Just rotate the menu.