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King Arthur Flour’s response to a customer inquiring about heavy metal testing of their products (May 28, 2024):

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For those new to the Lead Safe Mama website:

Tamara Rubin is a multiple-federal-award-winning independent advocate for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety, and a documentary filmmaker. She is also a mother of Lead-poisoned children (two of her four sons were acutely Lead-poisoned in 2005).

• Tamara owns and runs Lead Safe Mama, LLC — a unique community collaborative woman-owned small business for childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety.
• Since July of 2022, the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC has been responsible for five product recalls (FDA and CPSC).
• All test results reported on this website are science-based, accurate, and replicable.
• Please check out our press page to see some of the amazing coverage of our work so far this year!

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Affiliate link to the test kit Lead Safe Mama, LLC uses for the laboratory food test results we publish: https://amzn.to/3UIPcHP

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This is an ad-free article.

Advertising and affiliate income help Lead Safe Mama, LLC cover the costs of the work we do here (independent consumer goods testing and childhood Lead poisoning prevention advocacy). We have removed ads from most of our more widely-read articles (and newly published articles, too — like this one!) to make them easier for you to read. In addition to supporting this work by starting any shopping you might be doing with a click on our affiliate links, if you would like to support the independent consumer goods testing and childhood Lead poisoning prevention advocacy work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC by making a contribution (which will also help us keep our more widely-read articles ad-free), click here. Thank you!

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Important Background: What is an Action Level?

Please note the following key points.

The original lab report for this product is below (at the bottom of this page).

The graphic above shows the levels of metals detected in this product (in red) along with the low threshold of detection (in green) for each of the metals not detected with the laboratory testing that Lead Safe Mama, LLC had completed for this product. The numbers are juxtaposed to (in blue) the “Action Level” that was proposed by the medical and scientific community in 2021 as part of the Baby Food Safety Act.

• These levels were set as “Action Levels” that are (in fact) protective of human health.
• An “Action Level” is NOT the same as a “Maximum Allowable Level.”
• Once the level of a heavy metal in food reaches the “Action Level,” that metal is officially over any safe threshold and into the realm of heavy metal levels that can cause lasting harm to children.
• The “Action Level” is the level at which the scientific and medical community believes the company (or government) needs to take ACTION to fix the problem (which also includes taking ACTION to inform the public that the product has an unsafe level of the metal detected at-or-above the “Action Level” — and which relevant batch numbers should be recalled/ not consumed).
• These Action Levels are not arbitrary, however they were not passed into law.
• These Action Levels reflect the current advice of the medical and scientific communities as levels both achievable and also protective of infant and toddler health — regardless of the fact it is not illegal to have food for children test positive at these levels (as the Baby Food Safety Act of 2021 was not passed into law).
• The legitimacy of these levels as “Action Levels”/ “Levels of Concern” (even though they were not adopted as law) is similar to the legitimacy of the America Academy of Pediatrics’ level of concern for Lead in water — which is 1 ppb — even though the FDA’s official “level of concern” for Lead in water is 15 ppb (you can read more about that here).

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For safer food choices, click here.

If you are new here, please check out our website menu (link) to see all the other items we test and report on! Welcome to the site!

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Published: July 7, 2024

Link to a safer flour choice (details below): https://amzn.to/3VU3FBt

The King Arthur Organic Bread Flour (pictured in this article) tested positive for a level of Cadmium that is unsafe for children to consume (given the standards proposed by the scientific and medical communities with the Baby Food Safety Act of 2021 — linked here).

Supporting considerations & concerns:

• Cadmium is a known carcinogen (and was identified as a carcinogen in 1993 — check out this link for more info).
• While insufficient human and animal studies have been conducted to establish or demonstrate a link between persistent low-level background Cadmium exposure and cancer, this absence of studies does not mean the link does not exist.
• In a world where we (societally) are persistently looking to “cure cancer” or for the cause of cancer, it seems prudent to eliminate food products from our diet (especially primary food staples like flour) if they test positive for a known/ established carcinogen (such as Cadmium).
• This is not the first wheat flour product we have tested (using independent, third-party laboratory testing) that has resulted in a positive for an unsafe level of Cadmium:
  • Gold Medal Flour also tested positive for an unsafe level of Cadmium.
  • You can see the full laboratory test report for the Gold Medal flour at this link.
• One might assert that flour is often combined with other (ostensibly Cadmium-free) food ingredients to make finished foods, and therefore the Cadmium-level in finished foods made with this flour would be lower (diluted by the volume of the Cadmium-free ingredients). This argument is not an appropriate argument given the following considerations:
  • At 18 ppb Cadmium, even if the finished product were only 50% flour (and the other ingredients were Cadmium-free), the Cadmium level of the finished product would be 9 ppb, which is still far above the Action Level proposed by the scientific and medical community.
  • The packaging of this particular product emphasizes that the product is ideal for BREADS and ROLLS, which are nearly 100% flour (after any water content evaporates with cooking). This means these finished products will also have a Cadmium level in the range of 18 ppb, which is 360% of the Action level proposed by the Baby Food Safety Act of 2021.
• Given the message from King Arthur to a Lead Safe Mama community member (at the top of this page) stated that the company does test the “grains” for “heavy metal residues,” combined with the company’s statement in that same communication that there is “no history of issues,” our hypothesis (based on this and other testing of similar products) that the Cadmium is likely a contaminant of the finished product added by the manufacturing process is supported.
  • Machines for milling and grinding often contain moving parts with Cadmium-based coatings (to protect them from rust or compromise in other ways).
  • These machine components are designed to wear over time and are expected to need replacements periodically as they wear.
  • When these components wear, microparticulates of heavy metals can wear off into the foods being produced by these machines.
• Lead Safe Mama, LLC’s recommendation to King Arthur Baking Company (and Gold Medal, General Mills, and others) is that these companies do an audit of their food-contact machine components (using XRF technology as a preliminary screening tool would work — and would also be relatively inexpensive) to determine which metal components of their machining process test positive for Cadmium in either the coatings or substrate. We expect they will identify multiple possible sources of Cadmium contamination in this way.
• Additionally, these companies may want to conduct laboratory testing for Cadmium in their raw ingredients at every step of the process (pre and post-milling/ grinding/ processing) as a way to confirm (or disprove) this theory.
• In the meantime, we (Lead Safe Mama, LLC) recommend (to our readers and the general public) avoiding flour and flour-based products as much as possible (until there is better accountability in the processed food industry in the United States).
• We also want to share that we did conduct laboratory testing on one organic wheat flour-type product (not grown or processed in the United States) that we found to be “non-detect” for Cadmium, Lead, Mercury, and Arsenic (within the noted limits of detection for the laboratory we use). This one product — which we identified as “non-detect” for toxicants — would be a good alternative to other flours until the industry can address this issue as a whole. Here’s a link to this safer product (on Amazon), and here’s the laboratory test report for this product.
• The laboratory test results for this one product (noted in the point above) also clearly demonstrate that it is obviously possible to produce a flour that’s free of toxic heavy metals. This is NOT some unattainable goal.

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Takeaway

The laboratory food testing Lead Safe Mama, LLC has been completing since March 2024 has been an eye opener for us, with many unexpected outcomes (in addition to several outcomes we anticipated based on our work with families dealing with mysterious sources of toxicant exposure).

One point we want to emphasize: We have serious concerns that the over-consumption/ over-reliance on flour-based products in this country may be a significant contributor to the epidemic of cancer in the United States, given flour products produced in the U.S. seem consistently contaminated with Cadmium.

While the manufactured/ packaged food industry is quick to blame the heavy metal contamination of these processed foods on soil-contamination, we would like to strongly encourage the processed food industry (and the FDA) to take a closer look at the processing equipment used to make these products (and the manufacturing environment for these products) as this inquiry may reveal a more likely source of heavy metal contamination for many of these processed foods. In our experience, soil contamination is not a likely primary contributing factor to contamination of the end-product for processed, packaged foods.

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Some additional reading & links that may be of interest:

1. This link leads to a spreadsheet showing all our food testing — completed and in-progress (since March 2024).
2. Here’s the Lead Safe Mama affiliate link to purchase the test kits we use for this testing.
3. Check out our landing page with links to all of our results for the food products we have tested.
4. Here’s how to send your own food samples into a lab for testing (the cost is $195 per single food sample tested for Lead, Cadmium, Mercury, and Arsenic) or how to collaborate with Lead Safe Mama, LLC on the food testing we’re hosting.
5. Browse the Food category of articles here on Lead Safe Mama dot com.

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Amazon links are affiliate links. If you purchase something after clicking a Lead Safe Mama, LLC Amazon affiliate link, we may receive a percentage of what you spend at no extra cost to you.

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