Lunchables Aren’t Healthy. But the Lead in Them Isn’t the Problem.
Lead is one of the great environmental villains. There are many products, chemicals, and pollutants that we worry about these days, but lead is one of those things that we all know to really fear. It causes cancer, influences development, lowers IQ, and negatively affects our ability to reproduce. In short, no one wants lead in their food.
All this makes the noise about a recent Consumer Reports study all the more worrying. Earlier this month, CR published a report that showed that a variety of children’s lunchbox snacks—including the holy grail of the playground, Lunchables—had “potentially concerning” amounts of lead in them. The report also noted that these treats have high levels of sodium. CR then called on the Department of Agriculture to remove Lunchables and other such “lunch kits” from the National School Lunch Program, and many alarming stories from other media outlets followed.
But the reality of the findings isn’t so scary. If we take these results at face value, what CR has shown is that these children’s snack kits are probably fine—at least as far as lead contamination goes.
According to the publication’s brief methodology, CR testers purchased snack packs from U.S. grocery stores, then tested them for lead contamination. They found lead in all 12 products tested, and gave the amount of lead as a percentage of the maximum allowable dose level from the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment. CR states that its testers chose this level because “California’s lead standards are the most protective available.”
If you look on CR’s website, the percentages look quite scary—brand-name Lunchables had 74 percent of the MADL, for example—but when you dig into the details, the levels of lead here are vanishingly small. To explain this, let’s consider what the MADL is. In the late ’80s, California adopted a series of regulations that require businesses to declare when they are exposing people to levels of toxic substances that are 1,000 times below the highest amount of the substance that is known to not produce any negative effects in people. In other words, the regulation takes the highest safe dose that we are aware of for a chemical. Then, it divides that safe dose by 1,000 to get the MADL.
For lead specifically, the MADL is set at 0.5 micrograms a day. A microgram is one-millionth of a gram (or roughly three 10-millionths of an ounce). The OEHHA website offers scant information on how the 0.5 figure was chosen. I asked the OEHHA about this, and they sent through the original documentation for the implementation of the policy.
The MADL was set in 1987 based on concerns about workers breathing in lead, that documentation explains. Specifically, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the time had set a safe limit for workers of 500 micrograms per day for inhaling lead primarily in the form of dust or fumes. That was considered a safe amount to breathe in each day over a lifetime—an amount that would not cause any health issues, even for reproduction. The MADL was then calculated as 500/1,000, which gives us the 0.5 microgram/day number.
The policy documents reveal quite a lot of discussion of this level being too low. For one thing, you absorb about five times as much lead from breathing it in as you do when eating it. Additionally, there were a number of studies that showed that substantially higher levels of lead than the MADL failed to cause reproductive issues in rodents. However, the regulation requires that the California government “be certain” that the level of exposure is safe. That means there is no issue with setting an MADL too low, only too high, and therefore the lower threshold was chosen at the time.
What does this mean in context? Well, if Lunchables have 74 percent of the MADL set by California, they would therefore contain 0.37 micrograms of lead in total. That is 0.00000037 grams, or 0.000000013 ounces of lead per Lunchables kit. This is, by definition, at least 1,000 times lower than the safety threshold for inhaled lead in workers exposed to dust and fumes every day.
All in all, this is a genuinely negligible quantity of lead. Even for kids who eat these snacks daily, the rate of lead exposure is absolutely minuscule. The concentration of lead in Lunchables and other snack boxes for children is similar to the levels in dried raspberries or fresh celery.
Of course, lead exposure is never good. No one wants lead in their children’s food. But as with all chemicals, the dose makes the poison. These levels are so low that they manage to come in well below the incredibly conservative California MADL, which is by far the lowest threshold around.
None of this is to say that Lunchables and other snack boxes are particularly good for your kids. As CR also notes, they are high in salt and are full of various other things that children shouldn’t eat all the time. These boxes are, after all, just crackers, processed meat, and cheese. That’s not a healthy lunch by any definition. But they’re not actively dangerous.
The bottom line is that you don’t have to stress too much about lead in your children’s food. The levels that CR has found are well below the lowest amounts that have been shown to cause any health concerns. Yes, the snacks aren’t great for your kids, but it isn’t because of the heavy metals.
Special thanks to the California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment for its help with retrieving historical documentation.
