Ways To Prevent Heavy Metals In Your Baby’s Food

Store-bought baby food, including the organic ones, have unsafe levels of toxic heavy metals like arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury. It is almost impossible to avoid these metals in your baby’s diet as they are everywhere in our environment ; in the water, soil, and air that we breathe. However, by limiting rice cereals and processed snacks, the chances of these metals can be reduced.

Let’s look at why heavy metals are present in the food and how they can be reduced in the baby’s food.

Why Are Toxic Metals Present In Baby Food?

Some heavy metals are present in all food which also includes baby food. Metals enter the food we consume through pesticides and pollution because of their natural presence in water, soil, and air. 

How to Reduce Heavy Metals in Food

Feed a Variety of Foods

Feed your child a well-balanced diet that contains a variety of fruits, vegetables, grains, and lean protein. Make sure you wash them in cool water before preparing and serving the baby. Keep the baby’s diet in check with a variety of healthy foods that consist of the necessary nutrients. This can help reduce the exposure to toxic metals and other chemicals found in some foods.

Read the Label

It is always a good idea to pick multi-ingredient baby food, However, some of these blends may have the same first or second ingredient. For instance, different flavor blends like apple/cherry and spinach/lettuce, can both consist of carrots as their first ingredient. Hence it is important that you read the ingredients on the label to ensure your baby is offered a true variety of foods.

Substitute Your Grains

A good source of nutrition for babies is fortified infant cereals. However, do not just consider rice as the first or the only option. Rice tends to absorb 10 times more arsenic from groundwater than other crops. 

What you can do is opt for a variety of grains in the baby’s diet. Whole grains such as couscous, oat, barley, and quinoa are a good source of fibre and protein for the baby’s growth. Avoid using rice milk and brown rice syrup as sweeteners in your baby’s food.

Breastfeed Instead of Formula Milk If Possible

It is well known that mother’s milk has no best substitute. Unless there is an issue, feed your baby with breast milk. Only once your child reaches the second year, water and whole milk can be the alternate choices. 

Try Feeding Homemade Meals

Even though heavy metals are present in the products that you buy for making food, homemade baby food can be of some help. The manufacturing and packaging chemicals are at least prevented from getting into your baby’s diet. 

Test the Water at Home

Tap water coming from lead pipes tend to have lead in it. Additionally, well water also might have heavy metals and lead.

Avoid Juice

Apple, grape and other juices have the highest source of heavy metals almost as equal to rice products. Many families serve juices to their children daily but a safer idea is to replace these juices with water. But if you want to feed them fruits, opt for whole fruits as they are better compared to fruit juices. 

Careful Preparation

As per reports carrots and sweet potatoes are the top foods that are most contaminated. When picking baby food that is safe to eat, you might want to avoid these.  If you want to feed carrots and sweet potatoes, peel them well. Even if you peel an extra layer of the skin, the heavy metal consumption can be reduced. 

Try replacing these with a variety of vegetables to reduce the risk. Another useful tip is to add extra water to rice to boil it and then strain it before serving. 

So consider the baby food safe to eat to take care of your growing child. Even when the baby is growing inside you, take care of reducing heavy metals in your diet.