Sept 14, 202610:00 AM

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Parenthood comes with endless worries. Will they be OK at preschool? How are we spending so much on a birthday party? Is [whatever behavior they’ve picked up this week] normal, or a sign of impending doom?

In this list of concerns, one of the top ones is often food. There are so many choices to make when it comes to what to feed your children, plus children can have strong opinions about what they will and won’t eat. And then there’s the fact that preparing food takes time. Now, parents might also be worrying about harmful contaminants in their kids’ snack foods. According to a new Consumer Reports investigation, there are apparently a range of dangerous substances in a range of popular packaged items. It’s easy to read the report and come away with the idea that eating too many granola bars or bags of pretzels could be doing harm to your family without you realizing it.

Fortunately, the data contained in the report are not nearly as worrying as the bright orange warning labels placed next to many common snacks make them seem. While it’s probably a good idea to try and rely a bit less heavily on packaged snack foods, there’s no major danger from allowing your tiny humans to have their regular packet of fish-shaped crackers. They aren’t super healthy, but they are not going to hurt you.

The team at CR purchased samples of a variety of lunchbox foods—everything from Takis to oat bars—and tested them for several chemicals that they described as contaminants. CR does these sorts of tests regularly. They often look at various heavy metals and other contaminants that the organization thinks are too common in American food. The problem is that the risks posed by most of the chemicals that they look at, in the amounts they report finding, are often blown wildly out of proportion.

In this latest round of testing, the most common “contaminant” that the team found is a chemical called acrylamide.  “In animal studies, acrylamide has been shown to be a neurotoxin that can also cause cancer,” the report explains. Acrylamide is also used in paper and plastics production, the report notes. It sure sounds like a scary industrial chemical that we should all be worried about!

But acrylamide is also a totally natural byproduct of cooking starches. If you heat up food—by frying it in a pan, for example—it will usually form some amount of acrylamide without adding any other ingredients at all. (To be fair, the report notes this too.) While very high doses of acrylamide are associated with cancers in animal studies, it’s generally not thought to be harmful in the amounts you find in food. There is no evidence that even reasonably high dietary exposures to acrylamide cause health problems like cancer. As an epidemiologist, I simply would not be worried about my kids eating acrylamide .

CR also looked at chemicals called glycidyl esters. This is a group of chemicals that have been shown to cause cancer in high doses to lab animals but have never been studied in humans. Still, yes, you wouldn’t want your child to mainline glycidyl esters. The European Union has recently updated its safe threshold for glycidyl esters to be 50 micrograms per kilogram of product, based on a review that found that these chemicals really start to be concerning at levels 1,000 times that. So, 50 mcg is an extremely conservative number. The most concerning product that CR tested in terms of glycidyl esters was Takis Fuego tortilla chips. It’s not entirely clear how much of the substances was in these chips, but the report seems to imply that it was 3.42 micrograms in a 28 gram serving. That’s between two-to-three times the EU safety threshold—but still substantially lower than the point at which glycidyl esters have been shown to be a concern. This is the sort of issue that is potentially of concern at a very high level—it could conceivably cause a handful of illnesses in a population of millions of children—but even for young children is not high enough to be an individual concern.

The rest of the testing is a very similar story. Three products contained some amount of chemicals called phthalates, but the CR testing only found nanograms of the stuff in those snacks. Many of the products contained some amount of heavy metals, but again in quantities that are so low that they’re barely detectable and certainly not a worry to human health. Yes, really, heavy metals in very small quantities can be fine in food.

In all honesty, I found these results pretty reassuring: The main “contaminant” of concern that CR found was acrylamide, and that’s by far the least worrying thing to find in food. The amount of certain chemicals in a few snack foods might exceed very, very conservative limits—eating those foods on a regular basis will not be the thing that makes or breaks your child’s health; in fact, it will likely not even affect it. We’re all strapped for time, and instead of fretting over whether your kids’ crackers are contaminated, you’d be so much better served spending that time cutting up some extra veggies to add to their lunchbox as well. It’s good that there are people out there trying to ensure that our food is safe from unwanted chemicals. But the take-home message for me from reading the CR report is actually that these popular snack foods are safe.