I just read that Hershey is being sued because lead and cadmium were found in their dark chocolate. A few weeks ago, they found lead in baby food from just about every company except Gerber. Aren’t they supposed to test for that stuff?
Even the romans knew lead was bad for you when they used it in their plumbing, they just didn’t have anything else to use.
I worked at a assisted living facility and as part of my job, I was in charge of sending water samples to a test facility every month. I had to take samples weekly and date them, it was a pretty strict procedure.
I thought every company that sold food or water was required to test their products to meet FDA requirements, so how the hell does this still happen?
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Sometimes they fudge the tests or send samples they know will pass. There isn’t an FDA representative doing random testing in the factories themselves. That’s how these companies get caught but isn’t normal procedure
There are many ways that heavy metals like lead can end up in our food. For example, sometimes the soil that plants are grown in has lead in it, and when the plants absorb the water and nutrients they need to grow, they also take in the lead. Heavy metals can also get into the water that is used to grow or raise food, and then the food that is grown or raised in that water can end up having heavy metals in it. Finally, sometimes heavy metals can get into our food during the process of manufacturing or packaging, if the machines or containers that are used to make or store the food have been contaminated with heavy metals. It’s important to be aware of these potential sources of heavy metals in our food and to try to minimize our exposure to them, because heavy metals can be harmful to our health if we eat too much of them.
Toxic metals like lead don’t exist in discrete, isolated pockets of pure lead buried deep underground. Lead, cadmium, arsenic, and every other toxic metal exists in everything – every bit of dirt, every drop of water, every plant, every animal – everything on earth contains small quantities of every element in existence.
So how does lead get into food and water? It was there to begin with and it isn’t practical or possible to remove it.
>I worked at a assisted living facility and as part of my job, I was in charge of sending water samples to a test facility every month. I had to take samples weekly and date them, it was a pretty strict procedure.
Which gets to a fundamental problem with toxic metal exposure – very few people understand what the numbers mean and to be perfectly frank, that component of your job was a meaningless waste of money on the part of the senior living center.
The EPA technically set limits for how much lead can be in water. It only did this in the 1990’s when Congress mandated that it do so, despite the EPA repeatedly telling them how bad of an idea it was due to the fact that no one would understand what the numbers meant.
The lead “limits” that the EPA has in place are not hard limits on how much lead can be in your water. They’re an informational guideline that is intended to be used in new construction to identify issues with the plumbing or water supply.
IE, if you build a new house and it tests above the limits for lead, something *might* be wrong with the plumbing. Or it might be that the area just had water that naturally has more lead in it. But it lets you know that you need to check for that. It’s not dangerous to the health of people drinking that water until the amount of lead is *substantially* over the limit.
In general, toxic metal guidelines set by government agencies all work like that – they are goals to aim for, not red line limits that cannot be exceeded.
Because humans evolved on a planet where everything has tiny amounts of everything in it, your body has a high tolerance for all of those normal contaminants. So when the chocolate factory gets load of sugar that was grown in an area with high levels of cadmium in the soil and the levels of cadmium test a little above normal, normally cares because its not an actual health risk – its just a normal part of living on the planet that we live on.
Some of the metals end up in food from coal fired powerplants. For example, mercury is often emitted from burning coal, which then ends up in local waterways and ultimately bioaccumulates in fish. The mercury can also end up in the soil and thus in food grown in nearby farms.
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