If you’ve discovered your child is among the 78% of Michigan’s tested children who had levels of lead in their blood (or the 5% at a “dangerous elevated” level), you may be scrambling to research what you can do to help your child heal.
Initial research may show you that there’s not much you can do to help your child heal from lead poisoning besides remove the lead exposure and merely hope they get better.
I know when I discovered my triplet toddlers were lead poisoned at their twelve-month appointment last year, I was devastated as I researched how dangerous and permanent lead poisoning is.
But there’s more to the story.
There are a variety of ways you can help support your child’s brain and body from healing, such as providing a stimulating, academic environment and ensuring your child receives attentive nurture.
RELATED: 5 Ways to Heal Damage After your Child’s Lead Exposure
But you can also help heal your child in the kitchen! There are a variety of foods proven to help support the body as it heals from lead exposure.
Here are the foods I’m baking, brewing, and buying to help support my triplet toddlers as they heal from their lead poisoning — and a bit of the “why” behind them too.
Note: check with your pediatrician on all of these recommendations to make sure it makes sense for your family!
Baking tips for healing lead poisoning
Add iron to everything
Anemia and lead go hand in hand — lead exposure decreases a child’s iron stores and anemia makes a child more likely to absorb lead. So anything high-iron is going to be great for your child.
A great way to add iron is getting a cooking tool like the Lucky Iron fish, which fortifies your food with iron. Anything that you bake or boil, use the Lucky Fish before to fortify it with extra iron. Making pasta? Set aside an extra 10 minures to make it iron-fortified pasta.
Baking an apple crumble? Boil the apples in iron-fortified water. Making soups? Oatmeal? Rice? Even smoothies can become fortified — boil your produce in Lucky Fish water before freezing and blending.
I use my Lucky Fish for everything I possibly can. It does add a little over 10 minutes to cooking time, but I love knowing that something so simple helps make my children’s meals healthier.
An alternate iron supplement is beef liver capsules. Okay this sounds gross, I know. But organ meat is touted as one of the most dense nutrition sources available for humans.
When my triplets were just starting solids, I was worried about their iron levels (as I’d been diagnosed with severe anemia during pregnancy), but it wasn’t safe to do an iron supplement without them having a blood test themselves (which they didn’t get till 8 months).
So I prioritized iron-rich meals for them, and purchased these natural beef liver capsules to add the desiccated organ powder to their food for an extra and safe iron boost.
It does have a dusty taste, so I only used it with meat (like a meat pouch puree) or something with a strong taste to help disguise it. (Definitely check with your pediatrician when adding iron!)
Make iron-rich protein fritters
My toddlers love these — and one of them is picky. One of the things I love about these fritters is how customizable they are. I always try to make them with chicken, but one day I was out, and I made a veggie version with black beans that tasted delicious.
I recommend serving with Greek yogurt swirled with diced garlic and lemon juice as a dip.
If you prefer a recipe, this is a great one to start with. You can cook these in a skillet or bake them in an oven, and you can also dice apples or broccoli (sauteed first) to add.
If you’re confident with just playing it by ear, here’s what I do: mix a diced apple (boiled with the Lucky Fish for extra iron points!), diced cooked chicken breast+, diced garlic, and an egg with enough flour to hold it together. I enjoy adding hemp hearts for extra nutrition and cheese (mozzarella works well) for extra calories.
For several months, one of my kiddos was working through an egg sensitivity, and using chia seeds as a replacement worked just fine.
Make berry cookies.
Berries, especially blueberries, are amazing for helping support the body in healing from lead by modulating proinflammatory molecular pathways and oxidative stress.
I make my berry cookies like I make my fritters — I usually always switch up the recipe!
Here’s a great one if you enjoy being by the book: you’ll need oats, peanut butter, banana and blueberries.
These cookies are filled with B vitamins, iron, zinc, potassium, antioxidants, folate and manganese.
I usually add chia seeds for antioxidants and omega-3 fatty acids. Sometimes I swap oats for chickpea flour, which is high in iron, protein, and fiber. Sometimes I add an egg or vanilla extract. These types of cookies are so healthy — and what kiddo doesn’t love cookies?
Garlic, garlic, garlic.
Garlic may be one of the most powerful anti-lead ingredients we know about. Fresh garlic is particularly good, but really you can’t go wrong with any variation.
Try to put garlic with anything you can. Making chicken nuggets? Sprinkle with a little garlic powder, or make a garlicky dipping sauce. Eating pasta? Add some diced garlic to the sauce. Having pizza? Mashed potatoes? Roasting veggies? Garlic, garlic, garlic.
For accessibility, I dice several cloves of garlic at the beginning of the day, so I can easily sprinkle it on whatever the kiddos are eating throughout their meal and snack times.
Include any foods with calcium, zinc and vitamin C
These are amazing at helping lower lead levels and include foods like cheese, milk and yogurt (calcium); meat, eggs, fish, legumes, nuts (zinc); and lots of fruits and veggies (vitamin C) like plums, broccoli and strawberries.
You may be seeing by now that so many of the foods that contain one good thing for fighting lead, often contain another — or pair well with another!
Meat has zinc and iron. Broccoli has vitamin C and pairs amazingly with garlic, which is an anti-lead super-herb.
Tips for brewing
Save iron-infused fruit and veggie juices.
My kids don’t drink regular juices, which often have nutrients but an unfortunately high sugar content and little fiber, which makes it much less healthy than eating a whole fruit.
For my kiddos’ juice, I boil fruits and veggies with a Lucky Fish for them to eat (or to cook into cookies or fritters), and save the boiled water for them to drink. My kids definitely are picky about their fruit and veggie combo: they did not like the juice that contained beets, but the apples and carrots juice they thought was delicious.
It has a very mild flavor, so if your kiddo is accustomed to typical juice, this may not be a hit. But for my toddlers, who could either choose water or this mild iron-infused juice, they enjoyed it!
You can also save this water to use in smoothies or cooking.
Tips for buying
You can read more about tested lead-free children’s foods in our article here. As far as what I personally buy for my kids — several Once Upon a Farm snacks have tested lead free, so I purchase quite a few things from them, like their puffs, melts and soft-baked bars.
I also get Go-Go Squeeze applesauce pouches (not cinnamon; cinnamon is notorious for testing high in lead) and Pure Organic layered fruit bars as they test lead free.
Additional snacks I use are Serenity Kids meat pouches, Bamba, and string cheeses. These haven’t been tested, but I’ve read the ingredients and since they don’t include any notoriously-high-in-lead ingredients, I’m okay with using them until I learn otherwise.
For snacks and meals, I always serve whole foods first (fruits, veggies, cheeses, meats, yogurt, etc), but let’s be real — with toddlers, and triplets at that, there are many times I need to reach for something in an easy package. But these are the choices I make right now!
