Casey DeSantis

So what we saw, for instance, with nerds, if you eat more than 86 nerds over the course of a year as a child, you are exceeding the allowable safe threshold, as I put in air quotes, of arsenic for a child.

If you eat more than six Jolly Ranchers, you are exceeding the allowable level of arsenic for children.

And so when you think about

Halloween and Valentine's Day coming up and Christmas and even yesterday I made the example of when I was in a store with my daughter in CVS and you know she's you know pulling at my shirt sleeve because she wants a candy you know and I just want to try to pacify her so I don't cause a big scene you know

you will just instinctively like, okay, sure, what is one piece of candy and how can it be problematic?

Well, when you make those decisions in aggregate, you know, every week or every month or over the course of a year, you can see how this adds up.

And it goes back to this fundamental principle that parents have a right to know what is in the food so they can make informed decisions to protect their health and certainly the health of their children.

Well, you know, I'll let them speak for themselves.

I don't think that they're arguing that there is indeed arsenic in the products.

And so when we look at it in our analysis, it is an aggregate.

The silver lining, though, in a lot of this, Ben, is yes, while we found a lot of the name brand candies did have problematic levels of arsenic when you're eating it in aggregate over the course of a year.

There are candies that didn't have any trace levels of arsenic in it.

And also, we saw candies in the healthy side, right?

It sounds a little oxymoronic, but the healthier varietal or the organic varietal that didn't have it, which tells you a couple of things.

One, it can be done right.

You can manufacture this stuff better so that you don't have arsenic.

It is not inevitable.

And also, I see as more parents get informed about this, they will vote with their pocketbook, right?

They're going to go and buy the things that they deem to be better for their children.

And that, by inertia, is then going to hopefully kind of tip the scales a little bit of these companies to make better decisions as it pertains to their products so we have a safer array of food out there.