(The Defender)—A chemical used in rocket fuel and linked to serious health issues is also present in drinking water and many food products — with the highest levels found in foods commonly eaten by babies and children, according to a Consumer Reports investigation published Wednesday.
Perchlorate is a natural and human-made chemical that’s mostly used in the U.S. as a highly water-soluble salt component for rocket fuel and missiles. It’s also used in the production of other explosives, matches, batteries and plastics.
Perchlorate gets into food through contaminated groundwater used to irrigate crops or make processed foods. It’s also transferred to food from plastic food storage containers and old bleach — which can break down into perchlorate — used at food and water processing facilities.
The chemical is known to cause thyroid issues, which increases risk for metabolic disorders, and disruption of the brain and nervous system development in infants.
Federal regulators responsible for food and water safety have for decades been aware of water and soil contamination at locations where perchlorate has been stored, used or manufactured, according to the report, but haven’t taken the steps necessary to protect public health.
About 67% of the samples had ‘measurable’ levels of perchlorate
To assess perchlorate contamination in commonly eaten foods, researchers from Consumer Reports tested 196 samples of 73 grocery store foods and fast food items and their packaging.
About 67% of the samples had “measurable” levels of perchlorate. Overall, foods consumed by babies and children, along with fast food and fresh fruits and vegetables had the highest levels. In terms of packaging, foods in plastic containers had the highest levels, followed by foods in plastic wrap and paperboard.
None of the foods contained dangerous levels of perchlorate. However, the report said, that several servings of many of the foods in a day could add up to hazardous levels.
Also, because the chemical is present in so many foods, exposure over time can be dangerous — especially for pregnant women and children.
The researchers didn’t name the brands investigated. However, they did contact the manufacturers of the contaminated foods, none of whom responded.
James E. Rogers, Ph.D., director of product safety testing at Consumer Reports said, “Regulators should do more to protect the public from contaminants like perchlorate, but at the same time, parents shouldn’t panic about what we found.”
“Feeding your children a wide variety of healthy foods is the best way to make sure they get the nutrients they need and to minimize the potentially harmful effects of contaminants in food and water,” Rogers said.
Key questions answered by the report:
1. How much perchlorate is safe?
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 2005 set a “reference dose” or safe exposure level for perchlorate at 0.7 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day.
However, according to the European Food Safety Authority, perchlorate is safe at only 0.3 micrograms per kilogram of body weight — less than half the level determined safe by the EPA. Many food safety experts think the EPA’s level is too high, according to Consumer Reports.
Children are particularly at risk, even when the amount of perchlorate in food or water is relatively low because they are small and have lower body weight.
The researchers found perchlorate levels in food ranged from about 2 parts per billion to 79 parts per billion, and food in plastic containers averaged about 54 parts per billion.
The report gave some examples of what those numbers could mean. For a child between the ages of 1 and 2, they found that the boxed mac and cheese they tested would give the child 50% of the European Food Safety limit for perchlorate in a day.
The rice cereal, baby multigrain cereal and organic yogurt they tested each would give a child about 25% of the limit and a serving of cucumbers or baby carrots would provide over 50% of the limit, presumably because it had been irrigated with contaminated water.
2. What are the health risks?
According to the EPA, perchlorate toxicity in humans primarily targets the thyroid gland, which plays an important role in regulating metabolism and is key for normal growth and development in infants and children.
Perchlorate is a known endocrine disruptor that can interfere with the thyroid’s ability to absorb iodide, which the body needs to make thyroid hormones.
In adults, this could lead to hypothyroidism and related issues. But for children, the report said, “Thyroid hormones are critical for brain growth and development, and any disruption to that has the potential for lifelong effects.”
According to the report, research has shown that women with thyroid dysfunction who have higher perchlorate exposures during pregnancy have children who are three times as likely to show negative cognitive effects, including lowered IQ.
3. Why isn’t perchlorate regulated?
Because it is so difficult for consumers to avoid perchlorate, Consumer Reports said it is important for regulators to act — but the EPA and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) haven’t done much to protect public health, despite knowing about the problem since 1985.
At that time, perchlorate contamination was identified in wells near California Superfund sites — remnants of weapons testing by the U.S. Department of Defense — according to a report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Despite several public controversies over perchlorate, the FDA in 2005 permitted companies to use the chemical in food-contact materials. Within a few years, high levels of the chemical were detected in baby food that uses the packaging, the report said.
In 2019, the FDA for the third time denied a petition by food and environmental advocacy groups to ban the chemical from food packaging.
In 2011, the EPA concluded that between 5.2 and 16.6 million people could be exposed to contaminated water, yet the agency continually delayed plans to set perchlorate limits in drinking water. In 2020, the EPA argued that the chemical didn’t need to be regulated at all, because state and local governments were doing so.
After the Natural Resources Defense Council challenged that decision in a lawsuit, a court ordered the EPA to regulate the chemical. The agency said it will propose new drinking water limits by Nov. 21, 2025.
The EPA should also reconsider its recommended safe level, experts said, and the agency needs to set maximum contaminant levels for perchlorate in water, following the leads of states like Massachusetts, where the limit is 2 parts per billion and California, where it is 6 parts per billion, but with a stated goal to lower it.
Tom Neltner, a chemical engineer and attorney who is the national director for the nonprofit group Unleaded Kids, told Consumer Reports the FDA should revoke permission to use perchlorate in food contact materials.
The report also said the FDA could set a limit for perchlorate in food considering the unique health effects on kids.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Well that should give kids LOTS of energy.