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DerHeinzW t1_j3sdzxr wrote

Reply to comment by velifer in We’re the investigative team at Bloomberg Law and wrote a story on toxics metals in baby food. AMA! by bloomberglaw

> > The more you eat of a given food, the more metals from that food build up in your system.

> This is a high-school level of understanding of biomagnification. It doesn't work like that.

Well, how does it work then? The statement does not say there is a linear relationship or anything else like that, just that “the more you eat, the more metals will accumulate”. Unless the function is not monotonic, which seems unlikely (at some point the amount of metals accumulated will be less?), this seems like a true statement. Maybe too trivially so to be relevant, but true nonetheless.

I wish your comment was more constructive. It contains a lot of criticisms, without any of the actual substance of how things purportedly are. As a parent, I am willing to consider what you say, but with just “no wrong” there’s not much to go on by here?

> as no baby is sucking down liters of the same baby food every day, but it is something that should get more attention.

My baby is too young to be interested in drinking any amount of water. We try, but he does not accept it. This is normal for that age. So he ends up eating amounts of similar baby foods every day. Not liters, but still a lot compared to his body weight.

Once again, I’m not sure what to make of this. If my baby does “suck down” large amounts of the same baby food every day, should we be worried or not?

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velifer t1_j3so3zu wrote

>If my baby does “suck down” large amounts of the same baby food every day, should we be worried or not?

This is medical advice from reddit, so... um... ...yeah:

Variety is important, from a nutritional standpoint and from a risk standpoint. Going with one brand and one ingredient and one lot number every day means that you're multiplying all the deficiencies and excesses.

Tuna can have fairly high levels of mercury, but even at 1ppm (the concentrations in the OP's report are a thousand times lower) we excrete the metals in a full serving of mercury-tainted fish in under a week. Most adult humans can metabolize/excrete more than 0.021 milligrams of mercury a day.

Maybe don't feed your child on a steady diet of only Gerber Pureed Tuna.

As for biomagnification, we're extremely complicated machines. Even with similar doses and routes of exposure, metabolism, excretion, and any negative effects are dependent on levels of things like glutathione or peroxidase, some of which are triggered by the presence and action of heavy metals themselves. It's not chemical in, chemical stays, like the diagrams in textbooks.

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