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Food items served to school kids in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., contained heavy metals, including lead, and roughly 50 pesticides, according to new testing commissioned by Spotlight on America.
The Health Research Institute (HRI), an accredited independent lab in Iowa, conducted the testing. HRI’s Chief Scientist and CEO John Fagan told The Defender, “We tested every part of the lunch … it was pretty shocking.”
Nearly 30 million U.S. kids eat school lunch every day, according to the School Nutrition Association.
Fagan’s lab identified 49 pesticides — listed at the end of this article — with 38 different pesticides detected in just one elementary school lunch. Among them was carbendazim, a fungicide banned in most European countries that can cause infertility and endocrine disruption.
Many wheat-based items contained the weedkiller glyphosate, commonly marketed as Roundup, which causes cancer and disrupts immune function.
A single strawberry cup contained 23 pesticides, Spotlight on America reported.
Fagan’s lab also found numerous heavy metals in the samples. According to the Cleveland Clinic, exposure to heavy metals can cause irreversible damage to the human body, and may even be life-threatening.
Lead — which “at any level is harmful to children’s IQ,” Fagan said — was found in 100% of the samples.
Some samples contained cadmium, a heavy metal known to increase the risk of lung cancer, at a level 12 times higher than the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) limit for bottled water, according to Spotlight on America.
The lab also found arsenic in rice at levels 6 times higher than what’s allowed in apple juice, Spotlight on America said.
Fagan said, “The children need our help and protection.”
Zen Honeycutt — founder and executive director of Moms Across America, a nonprofit representing hundreds of thousands of mothers who want safer food served to their kids — agreed.
Honeycutt told The Defender that if foreign countries were serving these types and amounts of toxins to our children, “we would call it poison and be at war with them.”
“It is time,” she added, “for parents and concerned citizens to demand that our regulatory agencies require the food suppliers and farmers to do better. This is not an impossible task … it is, in fact, what regenerative, organic and biodynamic farmers do every day.”
School meals should not be ‘another source of toxic exposure’
Spotlight on America released its school lunch testing results nine days after Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) introduced the Safe School Meals Act.
If passed, the bill would direct the FDA to place limits on heavy metals, ban certain pesticide residues and do a safety reassessment of food additives, including artificial food dyes linked to health harms, according to a press release.
The bill also would ban PFAS, also known as “forever chemicals,” phthalates and bisphenols from school meal food packaging.
Booker said in a Sept. 18 press release that U.S. children consume far too many harmful substances in the food.
“School meals should be a child’s safest source of nourishment,” he said, “not another source of toxic exposure.”
The bill would create “a significant new market opportunity for organic and regenerative farmers” by increasing the funding available for schools to buy safe school meals, Booker added.
Honeycutt urged people to tell their federal representatives to support the bill. “We must make access to safe, nontoxic, nutrient-dense food a priority for the safety of our children and the future of our country.”
Epidemiologist: ‘Our regulatory system is not succeeding’
Epidemiologist Melissa Perry, dean of the George Mason University College of Public Health, who reviewed the school lunch testing results told Spotlight on America, “50 pesticides in school lunches, it’s not okay.”
Perry has researched pesticides for over 25 years. She said the test results demonstrate “that our regulatory system is not succeeding in ensuring that the food that children eat are free from chemical burden.”
According to a statement to Spotlight on America from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), the FDA and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “establish limits … and work together with USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) to test and monitor contaminants in the food supply and environment, including heavy metals.”
The amount of pesticides detected in the testing mostly fell below the EPA’s limits, Spotlight on America said. However, that doesn’t mean those quantities are safe — especially for children’s developing brains and bodies, Perry said, adding:
“The variety and the volume of chemicals that are being introduced in the market every year makes it practically impossible to evaluate the health effects of each and every chemical. …
“We don’t know what it means to be exposed over time at low levels continuously, especially for developing children.”
Rather than doing individual risk assessments for each chemical, some researchers suggested regulatory agencies should use the Key Characteristics (KC) framework for making science-based decisions on how best to protect consumers from harm.
Under the KC framework, chemicals can be grouped and assessed based on their properties — or key characteristics — making it easier to quickly identify which chemicals might be harmful.
Still, we don’t know what happens when children are exposed to multiple pesticides simultaneously, Perry said. More research needs to be done.
The Defender reached out to both the FDA and EPA for comment but did not receive a response by the deadline.
‘This is something that will affect their whole life’
In 2022, Moms Across America commissioned the HRI to analyze the contents of 43 school lunches gathered from public schools in 15 U.S. states.
Fagan said Spotlight on America’s recent testing produced comparable results to the 2022 testing.
However, he said, the 2022 testing also looked at nutritional value — an area that needs more attention.
Many U.S. school kids come from low-income families, Fagan said. “They’re food-insecure. School lunch is probably the best meal many of those kids have during the day. And yet it doesn’t give them the essential nutrients they need for their brain to grow and be healthy and strong.”
According to Fagan, fast food companies — including Subway, Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, Taco Bell, and Chick-fil-A — commonly supply school lunches. Other suppliers include large food-service companies including Aramark, Chartwells, Sodexo, Opaa!, Revolution Foods and Whitsons Culinary Group.
Prior testing of popular foods sold by fast food chains showed that many items contained high levels of toxic metals, pesticides and “abysmally low” nutritional levels.
Parents need to understand that what their kids are eating at school doesn’t just impact their kids the day they eat that meal, Fagan said. “This is something that will affect their whole life because it’s that nutrition that supports the development of their brain and their muscles and every part of their body.”
The Defender asked the USDA — which sets the nutritional standards for school meals — what the agency does to ensure that the meals are free of pesticides, heavy metals and other toxins but did not receive a response by the deadline.
Spotlight on America included the full list of the 49 pesticides identified in its report:
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