Wonder Bread: Lead Ink Logo

Many years ago (maybe 30) there was a news story that a package of Wonder Bread had its colorful logo printed on the inside (i.e., simply the bag was somehow turned inside out before the bread was inserted).

The ink from the logo therefore was in direct contact with the bread and the kids eating it ingested the ink which incredibly was lead-based; they suffered acute lead poisoning.

One would then ask how much lead other kids were getting just from handling the usual packaging which of course was always near bread…

I would hope that this problem was long ago corrected but I wonder if there is still lead in food packaging.

Has anyone else heard about this?

This sounds like an urban legend to me. In order to suffer acute lead poisoning, a child has to ingest a significant amount of lead. Even eating lead based paint chips usually only leads to elevated Pb levels which causes bad symptoms over months of exposure. There have been cases of acute lead poisoning in children, usually when they ingest something made of pure lead (eg toy coins made of lead)

I cannot imagine that the tiny amount of lead that could be transferred from a painted logo to a loaf of bread could ever cause acute poisoning.

Definitely was a newspaper article.

Not sure why one could conclude it was a tiny amount of lead from the logo, although whether it was actually acute lead poisoning or simply elevated blood-lead levels, I am not sure.

Bear in mind that it could have been repeated exposures as there were many pieces of bread in the package.

I wouldn’t be surprised at all if lead-based ink is still used in products manufactured in China, given their history; even if the bread (or other food) is made in the U.S. the packaging may have been made elsewhere.

While not the same as food packaging, as recently as 2006 the FDA issued an advisory regarding lead in lunchboxes (presumably made in China). Here is another advisory regarding lead in candy wrappers (and for all I know some manufacturers are still getting away with it, I presume that they don’t test every single wrapper).

Also, I wonder just how much lead was in the Wonder Bread packaging to cause acute lead poisoning just from incidental contact, this coming from somebody who spent much of their childhood playing with lead solder based electronics (and had a bad habit of handwashing, although I do wash my hands now, in addition to holding parts in my mouth like one might with nails or such, though most parts are now lead-free, including solder, at least those I don’t get from discarded appliances).

As for chronic exposure, I had my blood lead level tested about 5 years back and it was well below the limit for adults (I had it tested, as my own suggestion, because of unspecific symptoms which turned out to be caffeine related, probably from drinking too much soda, since they went away after stopping). Of course, metallic lead generally isn’t as easily absorbed as organic lead compounds (and is more dangerous for children either way).

While it sounds like an urban legend, it’s not, and it wasn’t (isn’t) specific to Wonderbread brand. Here’s a contemporary article from when it was in the news: Calhoun Times and Gordon County News - Google News Archive Search

There is still sometimes lead in the ink used on plastic bags, especially on bags that come from China or Mexico. Lead may not be used on surfaces which come into contact with food, but as a study in 1991 found, sometimes people turn those bags inside out and reuse them to store other food. This is most dangerous when you store something acidic (like a pickle, or a peeled orange) in an inside out bag. The acid can cause the lead to leach into the food.

It’s exceedingly unlikely that a person could suffer *sudden *acute lead poisoning even from an acidic food stored in an inside out lead-printed bag. But if such a food was eaten every day, lead levels could build to toxic levels over time - and not a very long time.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0876/is_n61/ai_11975954/

Only use storage containers which are designed for food, and only use them as intended and for as long as they’re intended.

The amount of lead that could conceivably be in a single printed logo that would fit on a bread packet is far too little to cause acute symptoms, even if the logo was pure lead and they bit it off the bag and swallowed all of it.

The problem with lead is not that it is a very strong poison, but that it is a cumulative poison that stays in the body, so low level exposures that you might get from something like this could be harmful if they continued for months or years, because eventually a large amount of lead would build up in the body. However, one logo’s worth of lead by itself would be effectively harmless.

Inks did sometimes contain lead, indeed, people used to get a fair bit of low level lead exposure from reading newspapers, but the story as you tell it, acute poisoning from the logo on a single bag, is clearly bullshit. Even most regular newspaper readers, who were almost certainly ingesting a little lead from the newsprint every day for years on end, never got sick from it.

Thanks for the info – I simply visualize moms touching the bag and then the bread; there would be a certain amount of exposure just from that since I am pretty sure the logo ink would rub off.

I think another possible problem is packaging made from recycled materials. If even food-containing packaging can have lead in it by design then recycling such packaging introduces lead, not to mention recyclables that were never supposed to be in contact with food.

The solution is pretty effing simple after 2000+ years: We should not be using lead and other toxins unnecessarily.

Don’t get me started on leaded gasoline…

What is your definition of sick? Diminished reaction time is a fairly objective metric that correlates highly with lead levels. Lead is really bad if somewhat subtle stuff.

Maybe if it was reused and reused and reused until it started to crack and fade, but with normal bread bag use, it shouldn’t. It takes an acid to release the lead from the ink, and we don’t have (very) acidic fingers.

I’m not sure how the levels of lead add up, to be honest, but I’m reading that as 1 orange in an inside out bag (say, in a lunchbox) could lead to 4 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood, and that babies and children can’t handle more than 10. Is that 3 oranges in 3 days, then? Do we simply add 4+4+4? I’m honestly not sure, but it doesn’t sound like it would take very long to build lead up to unsafe levels at that rate.

The story (again as I recall after many years) was that somehow the ink was actually on the bread. Maybe, come to think of it, the bread was hot/warm when put in the inside-out wrapper and this affected the ink of the logo.

Anyhow, assuming it was in the news then, why would it have made it there if the kids had no symptoms?

According to this page, it takes several weeks for an adult to excrete 99% of the initial dose of lead, but children only excrete 32% in that time, so it would take several months for the lead absorbed by one orange to be eliminated in a child (possibly also dependent on the initial level). Plus, if the orange were in a lunch box, it would be exposed for several hours, instead of 10 minutes, which would be hazardous even for an adult to regularly consume.

unfortunately, the same mentality that leads to knee-jerk outsourcing of manufacturing also leads to said manufacturers to give in the the temptation to use prohibited materials to save a cent here or there.

Good point, but we don’t know that for sure (unless you have other data) - the curve for lead dissolution might be steep. The orange may absorb all the lead it’s going to in 10 minutes, or 98% within 10 minutes, and then no more without some added variable like friction or heat.

In any event, I won’t be storing food in reused printed bags anymore. Bread bags can get used for cat litter or rubber bands or other items that won’t be eaten. Reuse and recycle are good, but it’s also good to know the limits. :slight_smile: