And one day you'll care how other people feel inside

[sovay]

I suppose I got about an hour this evening between receiving the all-clear from my new neurologist on the consumption of chocolate and discovering the recent report on lead and cadmium in dark chocolate, which was extremely upsetting. I had spent part of this weekend with my mother rolling our traditional fudge for Christmas. I was able to reassure her that the baker's chocolate she uses for the recipe rated safely in the expert study, but I continue to feel that chocolate is not supposed to contain heavy metals. It's difficult enough when it's full of shredded coconut or nuts. Actually it upsets me viscerally when food is not safe, the way that feels like cheating or cruelty; it is one of the things that should not happen. It's being a rough week and nothing feels safe and you should be able to treat people without poisoning them.

Comments

[phi]

If it helps any, that study used the California Prop 65 limits for determining a safe threshold. Prop 65 is problematic for many reasons, but take lead as an example. The lead limit is 0.5 micrograms/day according to CA. As a comparison, the federal EPA standard for drinking water is 15 parts per billion (or 15 micrograms per liter). In Cambridge our water leaves the reservoirs at 5 ppb (5 micrograms/liter) and could potentially pick up more lead depending on the type of pipes and solder joints it passes through in the way to the tap. That's more than 18 times the prop 65 limit if you drink the recommended 8 glasses of water a day. And yet, my child who guzzles tap water all day (I don't know how much exactly, I don't meter it, but definitely somewhere less the adult recommendation of 64 ozs and more than the 4oz he'd be capped at if we followed the CA guidelines), has never had detectable amounts of lead show up in any of his annual lead screening tests.

In other words, that article was the kind of scaremongery clickbait that I am determined is its own form of terrorism, to keep the populace so frightened and broken down by all the everything that we have no spoons left for collective action on things we _can_ fix.

[asakiyume]

Thank you for this information! I agree that scaremongering is extremely disabling -_-

[sovay]

In other words, that article was the kind of scaremongery clickbait that I am determined is its own form of terrorism, to keep the populace so frightened and broken down by all the everything that we have no spoons left for collective action on things we _can_ fix.

I don't traditionally think of Consumer Reports as scaremongering as opposed to providing information on which vacuum cleaner really sucks, so that is especially obnoxious. Thank you for the numbers.

[edit] What are the problems with Proposition 65?