Should I Worry About BHT in My Kid's Cereal?

BHT: Should I avoid it at all costs? My kid is currently loving a certain brand-name cereal that rhymes with Money Crunches of Boats. It was featured on a super-valid social media site (lol) as a food this person would never feed their kid because of the BHT. Are his daily breakfasts (and sometimes lunch and dinner) sending him to an early grave?

—I eat it too

Money Crunches of Boats is delicious, so I do not blame your child (or you!) for liking it. BHT (full name: butylated hydroxytoluene) is a chemical used as a preservative in foods, packaging, cosmetics, etc. Its uses have overlap with another preservative, BHA, and in some cases, it’s replaced that. You have, in your life, a lot of exposure to BHT. This could be through other foods, your shampoo bottle, your lipstick, and so on.

Like many things in this class, BHT is problematic at high doses. In animal models in particular, it has been shown to have impacts on lungs and the endocrine system and possibly to play a role in tumor growth. These impacts in animals, though, do show up only at very high doses, far beyond what you’re getting out of the environment or your food.

What is hard about this discussion — and all related discussions of, say, forever chemicals — is that it is probably correct to say both that less exposure is better and that it may not make sense to make significant changes to your life to avoid these. At the levels that you’re exposed to, there is no immediate known health concern. And cutting out a particular cereal would make only a tiny, tiny difference.

There is experimentation and advocacy around removing these chemicals from our environment and figuring out other things to replace them with that do not have these possible effects. That is good! This is the direction this issue likely needs to go to make a real difference, not individual small changes like ruining your child’s breakfast.