Feel terrible about children having rice cakes when young

[chocolatelimesaredelicious]

Hello,

Not sure this is the right thread necessarily, but I just wanted to offload about a subject I'm really worried about.
My children are now 12, 10 and 7 (twins).
When they were young, baby rice cakes were the "trendy" healthy snack, suggested by health visitors and seen as a good substitute for biscuits.

I used to feed my children them quite often - we always had a bag of baby rice cakes on the go. I think they probably had about 8 a week. When they went to pre-school, they were often given big rice cakes as a snack with fruit-maybe once or twice a week or so.

Fast forward to 2020....last week, I came across an article saying that rice cakes have dangerous levels of arsenic in , and that children under 5 should not have them, particularly not infants as they raise the risk of getting certain cancers later in life. Looking around more, I saw that Sweden have banned rice cakes for under 6s.

I actually emailed the Professor in charge of this project, and he said that individual risk of getting cancer from rice/rice cakes was relatively low, and that also stopping after 5 years would have helped as cancer risks were calculated on a lifetime's worth of exposure.

This made me a feel a bit better at the time, but since then I have become increasingly worried about what I might have done all those years ago to jeopardise my children's health. And I keep on remembering all those rice cakes I fed my children...

Any tips on how to not be consumed by guilt about this?

Also..do spread the word not to feed infants rice cakes...

@Zandathepanda they're okay, but not ideal, it lacks 3 essential amino acids that children require and cannot be gained by a veggie diet. It's not difficult information to find, just google it.
I don't think there is any correlation between IQ and vegetariansim, the only one I can find shows inverse link between veggie children and IQ level.

OP sorry to derail your thread but at least it shows lots of people have a difference of opinion on diet. To state the obvious, the 3 amino acids you think vegetarians can’t get (have no idea which) can’t be that essential as my family have lived a combined 105 years without them. I taught health and nutrition at schools and colleges. We will have to disagree on your findings over veggie kids and IQ too. You may have got confused with the original fish-oil studies which unfortunately were sponsored by a fish oil company and were biased as the children keen to do well were the ones that used the fish oil. That’s not to say fish oil is not good just that headlines can be deceiving. Interestingly, I had lectures from a fishing expert during my MSc (a long time ago) who said 30% of fish from the sea around the U.K. had cancer and the heavy metal pollution was so high in oily fish he wouldn’t eat it anymore. It was that that gave me the confidence as an inexperienced pregnant woman to ignore the health visitors advice.
OP don’t feel bad about the rice cakes. There are lots of examples like the one I am giving about the importance of fish where there are lots of different viewpoints and you can only do what you thought was best at the time.

Thank you everyone for your comments.
The quest to try and feed one’s children healthily is exhausting!
I hope that one day I can box up the rice cakes issue in my mind and move on... not quite there yet though!

When DS was little the devil food was raisins. I have a dentist in the family and he said ages ago that these werent good for childrens teeth.

I think rice cakes are ok. Werent rusks full of sugar and didnt some baby teething tonic contain alcohol?

Honestly if you are so anxious about what you fed your child then I think you need to seek professional health. It’s not a normal level of anxiety to be contacting a professor about an issue.

@Wolfiefan

Honestly if you are so anxious about what you fed your child then I think you need to seek professional health. It’s not a normal level of anxiety to be contacting a professor about an issue.

Or to consider a healthy diet for you kids to the extent of finding it ‘exhausting’

Honestly OP, the next danger could be causing anxiety around food in your children , or causing them to rebel and become junk junkies as they gain independence.

I say this not to give you more worry and anxiety but to encourage you to seek some support around your anxiety. You will be happier, your children will still be healthy, and in the long run, more healthy.

Unless you live in a bubble, growing all your own food and watering only with filtered water with all the toxins removed, then just LIVING in the modern age is riddled with risks; food we eat, air we breathe, driving, flying, paddling in the sea... someone, somewhere has done a study that proves it's all bad for us.

Of course, taken at a population level it may be. But I think there's a study somewhere that proves that the majority of accidents in the home happen on stairs, but there isn't a national drive for bungalow building. Because that majority number, spread out over the population as a whole, is still teeny tiny.

My son ate rice cakes and a whole heap of other things, if you,are getting this worked up over food I also agree with another post I read and advise you to get proper help with it

How old are your DC now OP?

I'm another one who fed my DC on rice cakes when he was a toddler . He had a lot of rice cakes , plain ones , organic ones , apple flavour ones , marmite flavour ones .

The thing is that health advice changes all the time . There is no point on beating yourself up for something which you did in good faith at the time . Advice on baby weaning is different now, and as another poster said , putting babies down to sleep on front, then on side , then on back (no idea on current advice )

Then there's advice like eat oily fish , they are good for you . But not too much and not to young children due to levels of mercury (again, too late )

My DS is now a strapping 19 year old . I would doubt that there would be a long term effect of what he ate when he was 3 years old , but if there is, there's nothing I can do about it now (I'm more concerned about his alcohol intake and his willingness to follow Covid safe rules to be honest )

Honestly. Everything we do that is ‘good’ today is going to be ‘bad’ next week. You can’t do good for doing bad these days. Go easy on yourself. Your kids are fine. The professor has told you that as well, so don’t hate yourself. It’s so hard being a parent and trying to ‘get it right’. We can only the best with what we’ve got and what we know at the time. Who knows what’s next on the hit list?!!

Hi @sleepyhead

I have just come across your comment.
(The one about teething on lead cots, and lead in the fuel)
I have just used a heat gun on an old door frame, and had an after thought that perhaps it may contain lead, and I have just breathed it in.
Am I over reacting? Health anxiety?
I only found out I’m pregnant yesterday! 😕
Your comment kind of put my mind at ease!

• Sorry for the random comment 🤭

At least you weren't feeding your kids beef burgers when the BSE crisis was developing... the fear that any of us could develop vCJD at any time because of something we'd innocently eaten was fucking terrifying when that was at its peak. It still gives me chills tbh.

And hey, you missed the arsenic wallpaper trend too, so that's good.

This is a fun article: modernfarmer.com/2015/08/secretly-poisonous-plants/

We have to try and do our best to give our children a chemical free life

Water and oxygen are chemicals, so a chemical free life would be pretty short.

I think if the professor in charge of the study in question can’t reassure you then it’s unlikely that Mumsnet will!

I think that if rice was a real risk, you would expect to see higher incidences of cancers in countries where rice is a staple part of the daily diet, e.g. Japan, India.