i came across [a heavy metal certificate for cacao powder on their website and i am uncertain about whether the levels of copper, along with other metals listed, are within safe limits.](https://indicorganics.in/cdn/shop/files/Cacao-HeavyMetals_page-0001.jpg?v=1694022786&width=713)
copper seems notably higher compared to the other metals. could someone knowledgeable help me understand if these values are acceptable?
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As others have said, for any reasonable use rate you have very little risk of going over even very cautious limits. (I don’t know about you, but I‘m not eating a quarter of a kilogram of cocoa powder every day!)
To help your understanding, though; the reason copper levels are so much higher than levels of the other metals on that list is that copper is an essential micronutrient and arsenic, cadmium, lead, mercury and tin are not. You need copper to live, and because of that your body has systems for handling it; you can overburden those systems and suffer toxicity, but you’d have to try quite hard to do it by eating normal food. (Swallowing a pure salt of copper would be a bad idea, though, and there have been cases of copper toxicity from e.g. use of copper cookware.) Similarly, copper is also essential to other animals, plants, and so on, which is why there’s (relatively) so much of it in cocoa powder; the cocoa plant also needs copper to live.
Tin, arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury, OTOH, have no biological role (probably) in humans or most/all other multicellular life. As a result, you do not have the same kinds of systems for handling them and the threshold you can tolerate may be much lower; similarly, because the stuff you eat (in this case the cocoa plant) doesn’t use them, there’s not nearly as much of them naturally in your food.
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