Lead-tainted cinnamon recalled

Mar 13

Officials on high alert after 2023 applesauce contamination

By Forrest J.H.

It has been a bad few months for cinnamon.

The Food and Drug Administration called out six retailers for selling ground cinnamon with elevated levels of lead. Extended exposure to the products named in the recall could have negative health effects, but no illnesses related to the recalled cinnamon have been confirmed. Lead exposure can be especially harmful to children.

Ground cinnamon sold under the brand names La Fiesta, Marcum, MK, Swad, Supreme Tradition and El Chilar showed lead concentrations between two and four parts per million, according to the FDA.

If ground cinnamon from one of these brands is in your pantry, it would be most safe to just throw it away. The lot codes of affected products are available on the FDA’s announcement, but the agency could not reach the distributor of MK brand ground cinnamon. At the time of this writing, that distributor has not followed the FDA’s recommendation to voluntarily recall the products and has not provided lot codes to indicate which batches could have been affected.

Government officials discovered the lead after testing a smattering of ground cinnamon sold at retailers across the country. It is not clear how the contamination may have happened.

Any amount of lead exposure can affect one’s health, but children under the age of six would likely experience worse symptoms and are more likely to be exposed in the first place. Signs of lead poisoning could include abdominal pain, anemia, weakness, fatigue and more severe neurological symptoms like seizures and brain degeneration, according to the Centers for Disease Control.

The FDA and CDC both strongly recommend anyone who suspects they may have consumed lead talk to their doctor about getting tested because symptoms may not show until long after exposure.

Cinnamon consumers, producers and regulators are on high alert after a much more serious lead contamination in applesauce late last year. The FDA announced that recall in October and has since received reports of just under 500 cases of potential lead poisoning among people 44 states who ate cinnamon-flavored applesauce from three brands that have all since recalled the affected products.

Not to diminish the importance of the current lead scare among ground cinnamon, but the 2023 applesauce incident was far more severe. Lead levels in those affected products were thousands of times higher than found in the recalled ground cinnamon this year, posing a significant threat to the consumer’s health.

Even worse, the FDA found highly elevated levels of Chromium in the cinnamon used to flavor the applesauce. The FDA suspects lead chromate may have been added on purpose to increase the cinnamon’s weight and enhance its color, resulting in a more profitable product at the expense of human health. Chromium’s health effects are not well understood, but certain Chromium compounds are known to be carcinogenic.

That cinnamon was processed by a company called Carlos Aguilera in Ecuador, where regulators say the company no longer operates. The whole cinnamon sticks imported to Ecuador from Sri Lanka passed Ecuadorian officials’ inspections, suggesting the lead chromate was added during the grinding process.

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This article’s ingredients

FDA takes steps to ensure safety of cinnamon products sold in the US

FDA news release

March 6, 2024

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-takes-steps-ensure-safety-cinnamon-products-sold-us

Health effects of lead exposure

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood lead poisoning prevention

September 2, 2022

https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/lead/prevention/health-effects.htm

Lead and Chromium poisoning outbreak linked to cinnamon applesauce pouches

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, childhood lead poisoning prevention