Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

Unless they were eating paint flakes you never were going to see elevated levels.

If the FDA had a classification of "We'd Prefer You Thought This Was Safe", it would be a more accurate description for a lot of their approvals. They are ostensibly protecting consumers, but they also protect manufacturers by engendering [sometimes misplaced] confidence. It's reasonable to assume that corruption plays into this when it's sufficiently incentivized.

What I've tried to do while parenting is focus on relative risks and mitigate the worst ones.

For kids the major mortality risk is "unintentional injury" (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses_images.html). This is further classifiable into categories that represent risks we can mitigate (https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/childinjury/index.html): car crashes, suffocation, drowning, poisoning, fire, falls.

This means you can dramatically improve top-line safety just by doing stuff like

* take fewer car trips and always carefully adjust the fit of carseats

* follow best practices for safe infant sleep (alone, on the back, in the crib)

* be careful around water, introduce swimming lessons as a layer of protection against drowning at ages 1+ (AAP recommendations changed recently on this as evidence changed)

* keep medicine and poisonous cleaning supplies out of reach or out of the house

* keep smoke detectors and fire extinguishers maintained; teach basic fire safety plus how and when to call 911; try to avoid cooking burns

* play on soft surfaces and keep an eye out for fall risks

But yeah, I really don't know which long-term effects of environmental exposure to toxins are the ones I should try the hardest to mitigate.

My current belief is that the best long-term thing we can do for the kids is ensure they don't start smoking. The second worst environmental toxin I think I see right now is added sugar; or more generally an unhealthy diet. My read of the data is that there's evidence that unhealthy diet practices (correlated with high dietary added sugar) could, in the long run, lead to an increased risk of obesity, which dramatically increases the long-term risks of top causes of mortality, like heart disease and cancer.

I don't really have a good sense for how "diet and exercise" stacks up against "avoid low levels of arsenic in the spices I'm feeding the kids" but my gut feeling is that it's like 10x-100x more important.

I did like the idea from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/parenting/home-flame-reta... that the best thing you can do is buy less stuff. If you're worried about exposure to environmental toxins then buy fewer, less diverse things (stuff you use and food you eat) and hope those are good ones.

Another long-term risk I've been particularly interested in mitigating is skin cancers from sun exposure -- I've been trying to be conscientious about putting sunscreen on the kids when the UV index is in the 6+ range and they're outdoors for 20+ min. This is a very long-term risk and it's sobering that it might not materialize while I'm around to see the results.

People who worry about chemicals do worry that some sunscreens might be worse than others (for example the folks at https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/executive-summary/ produced some attractive charts arguing that you should avoid oxybenzone and stick to zinc oxide). I'm not sure the data show that "choice of sunscreen" is the same order of magnitude as risky as "using or not using sunscreen". Still, if you want to limit your risk to extra potential toxins, it's easy enough to pick exactly one formula and stick to it -- so we've been buying only zinc oxide sunscreen for a while, figuring that it's the same thing that's in Desitin and the kids are getting plenty of it. Whether this was wise I don't know (haven't seen any medical recommendations updated to reflect the results of https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/osu-study-after-two-hours...) but it's easy enough to buy less stuff, or buy fewer kinds of stuff, and that gives some peace of mind.

Overall though my hunch is that the "miscellaneous bad chemicals" stuff is long-tail risk versus "safe driving and healthy diet and exercise".

It's feasible. Perhaps not for everyone.

If you're serious about this (and I don't think you ought to be) the only way you're going to control it is by making sure the land your food comes from is accountable to you. You can certainly find out whether the agricultural land your food is grown on was once something else. You can certainly reasonably guess if there may be high concentrations of pollutants deposited in the soil by examining the history of the land. Maybe the land being used was once near heavy industry, maybe it was a site that once heavily used insecticides, etc.

For example, perhaps the farmland you're looking at is adjacent to an interstate. Leaded gas used for decades will have polluted the topsoil to a greater extent here than on other, more remote, land. You could choose not to buy produce from the interstate farm. This is easy enough to do. Sourcing is one of the most basic skills people ought to have.

I don't think people ought to be worried and go out of their way, to be honest. A great way to do this at home is to grow your own produce in raised garden beds with good, clean, fresh, topsoil.

"Interferes negatively with your endocrine system". Happy now?