This means that for millions of infants across the country who rely on WIC to meet basic nutritional needs, arsenic-laden rice cereal may still be on the menu. And WIC programs in most states continue to offer rice cereals, according to the nonprofit National WIC Association, a coalition of state and local WIC officials and families.
While several manufacturers have now pushed pause on that production, at least two-Gerber and Earth’s Best, owned by Hain Celestial-have not. Last October, in fact, CR called on five leading baby food manufacturers to suspend making infant rice cereal until they can guarantee that their products have much lower arsenic levels. Some food safety advocates and state attorneys general say the government should go even further, by setting stricter standards for how much arsenic is allowed in rice cereal and other baby foods. The agency should “redirect its buying power to safer foods that offer infants the nutrition they need without leading them to consume dangerous levels of arsenic,” he says. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic Congressman from Illinois who has spearheaded federal investigations into arsenic and other heavy metals in baby foods, agrees. “It’s an obvious step to make foods safer for the millions of infants on WIC.” “There’s nothing stopping them,’’ she says. She believes the Department of Agriculture, which oversees WIC, should remove rice cereal from the program on a national level. That has left a confusing patchwork of policies that vary from state to state, which continues to expose millions of infants to potentially dangerous heavy metals, says Jane Houlihan, research director at Healthy Babies Bright Futures, a nonprofit organization supporting initiatives to reduce babies’ exposures to toxic chemicals. Responding to that concern, a few states have removed infant rice cereal from the list of products that parents can purchase with their WIC benefits. While the products are typically enriched with iron, calcium, B vitamins, and other nutrients, they often also have dangerously high levels of arsenic, a toxic heavy metal that gets into rice from contaminated water and soil. Yet growing research, including tests from Consumer Reports, shows that rice cereals aren’t good choices for infants.
And many parents get that cereal through the Women, Infants, and Children’s program, a federal initiative that provides nutritional support to 53 percent of all children born in the U.S. The first bite of solid food for many babies in this country comes in the form of infant rice cereal.
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