Lead exposure from routine consumption of coffee and tea from ceramic mugs
foodcontaminationjournal.biomedcentral.com
foodcontaminationjournal.biomedcentral.com
Probably because this abridged title isn't neutral (flagged accordingly). By simply stating "Lead exposure from [x]," the implication is that impactful exposure risk exists.
The original title and even the condensed title (everything after the colon scrubbed) were both at least 18 characters too long, but a better abridgement of the title would've been "A pilot study to assess lead exposure from routine consumption from ceramic mugs" scrubbing the coffee/tea reference as the subject happens to be the mugs themselves
Edit: to look into the title further, you can see that it starts with "A _pilot_ study". This can indicate that the sample size of 5 mugs was not a mistake and the main purpose of the paper is to get feedback on the methodology and a larger follow-up study may be underway and we shouldn't be deriving any (health-related) conclusions from this paper.
As long as you don't live in California.
That was my kneejerk reaction, and then I saw the response to your comment confirming I nailed it.
Heck with reading the article.
Of course, if you're buying on Amazon, who knows.. but you are very, very unlikely to have this problem with people who make pottery for a living (like local artists, or reputable Etsy shops)..
Shouldn't we assume all this mass-produced pottery found on the shelves of Walmart and Bed Bath & Beyond is being made as cheaply as possible?
I don't know about you, but the only time I see non-MADE IN CHINA pottery these days is used, at the thrift store. New stuff isn't generally coming from some domestic artisan who cares about poisoning their neighbors more than a bigger profit.
Amazon clearly doesn't use a mater compiler either. They buy their mugs from people who make pottery for a living. Perhaps the distinction is different? Maybe people who make pottery for a living in the developed world? Or perhaps people who make pottery for a living at smaller scales?
When the focus is mass production it stops being a craftsman's job and rather becomes a calculated process designed to extract as much profit as possible with little regard for anything else.
It's not even a thing you usually find in stores as a hobbiest in the states.. if someone is using lead, it's going to be most commonly a cost cutting measure... Or for a specialist purpose
ASTM D-4236 conforming glazes will contain warning labels that clearly indicate that they are "non-toxic" or "dinnerware safe".
Of course, toxicity means that it pretty much isn't used any more, so alternatives have been developed. They're just harder to work with.
If you can't trust the origins of pottery on Amazon, why can you trust the origins of anything on Amazon?
And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.
Because many (most?) categories of goods are consolidated into an effective oligopoly of reputable brands, where these brands push competitors out of the market in basically every respect — in brand-recognition, in advertising payments, in number of reviews, in review score, in "link juice", etc.
So even when there are garbage Shenzhen e-waste products being marketed on the same website, in the same category as the thing you're looking for, you won't see them if there are real products to be had, because the first five pages are all the real products. (Unless you're doing very specific searches, using very unusual keywords that the well-known brands would never think to buy.)
This is why the experience of shopping on Amazon is a different experience than shopping on a site like Wish or AliExpress: Amazon has both the e-waste and the stuff from well-known brands, and if you stay "on the happy path" of using the site, you'll end up mostly seeing stuff from well-known brands.
The only time this falls down is when there are no reputable brands in a category. Such as in the category of kitsch stoneware. For those categories, Amazon and Wish/AliExpress become effectively the same site.
> And if you can't trust the origins of anything, you can't count on safety regulations and standards that you take for granted.
I mean... most of the things I buy on Amazon, I'm not putting in my mouth. What's the worst a christmas ornament is going to do to me? Get glitter on the floor?
I do understand the cases you're referring to — electronics and such — but in those cases, there are import regulations that actually prevent things like "burns your house down" electronics from coming into the country, with actively-maintained blacklists of products. Some few dangerous items might slip through the cracks and get imported anyway (especially at first, in unusual+novel categories like "negative-ion wellness products"), but one email to US Customs is usually enough to get these things sorted out, and the whole category will disappear from the store the next day. (See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7TwBUxxIC0)
Just search for anything on Amazon right now and you can see what I mean. I ran afoul of this when I needed a humidifier last year, but just now I searched for "phone charger" and the front page was mostly brands that exist solely on Amazon and some tiny Facebook page
For example, if you search for a good mixer, you’re going to get reputable brands at the top like KitchenAid, Cuisinart, etc. Conversely, when I went to buy a pull-up bar last year, there were only Shenzhen knockoffs because there are no big-time players in the pull-up bar industry.
There’s probably a nice parallel to be made between this subject and first-party and third-party games made for certain gaming consoles.
Top results:
Hamilton Beach
KUCCU
VIVOHOME
Cuisinart
Vospeed
CUSIMAX
Aucma
This query betrays a certain level of naivety about the game theory of keyword-advertising.
Individuals who are shopping for a phone charger, don't tend to search for "phone charger." Instead, they look at the particular phone they already have, and decide they want a charger (or more likely, a second charger) that's compatible with it and guaranteed to make it charge as fast as it can. So they search e.g. "iphone charger" or "samsung galaxy charger."
We reductionist engineering-minded people might think "those are both just USB-A -socketed 5V1A DC switching-mode power supplies; and what do people call those? Phone chargers!" and so search "phone charger" — but that's a mistake.
The above individuals, because they're the majority, are what the brands are all competing over with their keyword-advertising spend. So when you search e.g. "iphone charger", Apple has paid to be there at the top; and the up-market third-party vendors like Anker who want to snatch your sale away from Apple have also paid to be there at the top.
But no individual is really just looking for an unqualified "phone charger", so when you search that, you get to see a page of stuff that nobody has paid Amazon for placement on; where instead, it's all ranked by how much scummy heuristic keyword SEO manipulation each listing can pull off.
(I say "individual", because there are institutional buyers who are really trying to buy unqualified "phone chargers", because they are buying them to install in e.g. hotel rooms, without any knowledge of what kind of phone a customer is going to have. So you might notice that there are some reputable brands in among these listings, but that the listings are for ugly unbranded flush-mount phone chargers, rather than consumer chargers. Commercial phone chargers, per se. Electronics that are components of a build, rather than standalone products.)
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As a tangent: the "happy path" for Amazon is actually all about browsing, not searching.
How do most people get to an Amazon listing? Not by typing words into Amazon's search box. For most shoppers, typing a keyword search into Amazon is done about as frequently as asking a clerk to help you find an item in a grocery store. And as with that flow, while it's certainly supported as a customer-service mechanism, it's never been intended as the primary item-discovery mechanism. Amazon isn't Google; they don't have a "so make a freeform text field for it, and let some ML find it in an index" view of the world.
Instead, people find things on Amazon mostly through these three paths:
• Searching a product category on Google, and then clicking through a paid keyword advertisement placed by one manufacturer that takes you to an individual Amazon listing for that manufacturer's product
• Clicking an Amazon affiliate link embedded in a review webpage/video, or as the target of an ad in Facebook/Instagram/etc.
• Clicking around on the Amazon website itself, starting on the home page; going into various "departments", looking through "Hot New Releases" and "Top Sellers", etc.
Approaching Amazon through any of these flows will land you on listings that somebody, at some point, paid to take you to. And that means that the category the listing sits upon is valuable, and is worthwhile to fight over. So in turn, all the "More items to explore" listings linked from that page will be that product's keyword-advertised rivals, trying to lure you away from the original listing.
The best way to shop for a humidifier on Amazon isn't to search Amazon for "humidifier." It's to search Google for "humidifier"; click through to a review site listing the best humidifiers (e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/the-best-humidifi... ); click through the first Amazon affiliate link you see on that page; and then look at all the humidifiers that are fighting over your known-high-value eyeballs on that listing page. Try it! I promise you it works. (The speedrun version of this process, if you already know a popular brand of humidifiers, is to just search "[popular brand] humidifier" on Amazon. All that brand's rivals will also be paying to show up there.)
I guess you could just admit you're completely wrong about Amazon search rather than change the subject to Google search
Similarly, why should I trust Walmart to not sell similarly contaminated items in store? If Amazon can get away with, wittingly or not poisoning, their customers, then as history shows it is a short matter of time before their competitors cut the same corner.
https://www.insider.com/amazon-selling-toxic-toys-lead-poiso...
> Amazon has been selling thousands of products that have failed federal safety tests, including children's toys containing four to 411 times the safe limit of lead.
I am not aware of similar problems with poisonous products being sold through the physical storefronts of Whole Foods or Amazon Fresh.
However, if in fact Amazon's physical grocery stores are just as bad as its website, then you absolutely should not trust Amazon grocery stores not to sell you pesticide contaminated foods.
Purchasing decisions by buyers are probably not based on whether or not the seller produces pottery for a living. I'd wager price, convenience (fast shipping, etc.), size, and design matter far more to a buyer.
Here's how the mugs were selected:
> The five mugs chosen for this study were selected because they were found to contain lead in a screening-level assessment. Specifically, 24 mugs from the authors’ office were tested using an Olympus Innov-X Delta handheld X-Ray fluorescent (XRF) analyzer. Each mug was measured once with the XRF gun at its highest sensitivity setting, which required the tester to hold the analyzer over the mug for 45 s. The three mugs with the highest resulting lead concentrations (1,223 to 7,034 mg/kg) were selected for the present study. These mugs each had decorative elements and will be referred to by their predominant colors: Green Decorative, Yellow Decorative, and Red Decorative. In addition, two representative mugs were selected from the batch of office mugs baring the authors' company’s logo. These will be referred to as Black Logo1 and Black Logo2. All five mugs selected were in active use in the authors’ San Francisco, California, office environment, and were typically washed daily in an automatic dish washer. Four of the five mugs were purchased in the U.S., and one was purchased in Europe (Red Decorative). The mugs all appeared to be in good condition, with no obvious signs of damage or wear.
The types of mugs found in a standard office probably match the types of mugs many people have in their homes. Regardless, lots of coffee is regularly consumed in an office environment.
I believe the results of this study are a little more relevant than your comment suggests.
That sounds like an interesting toy. Pity it costs about $15.000. But checkout the video in this listing:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Xrf-Analyzer-Price-Ha...
You just point it at things and it says what are they made of. Magic!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdfHVcU8U7U
There are some significant limits on what it can analyze, but it's terrific for learning about metal alloys.
That's true until having been poisoned suddenly matters more.
But laissez-faire and buyer-beware I guess. Who needs any safety regulations at all, when we can all live in a utopia where every purchase needs to be evaluated by every consumer for every possible way it could cause harm?
Also does firing ceramics in a kiln release even more toxic chemicals in the finished ceramic?? I’ve always suspected this was inherently creating some toxic byproduct from the intense heat.
Thanks!
It's particularly common on 'artisan' home-made ceramics, due to the ease of working with lead glazes.
Wikipedia even has a section on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_glaze#Lead(II)_oxide
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2006/1179/made
I'm not 100% sure of the maximum safe lead per day, though I did find this
https://www.hse.gov.uk/lead/health-effects.htm
> The occupational exposure limit for lead in air set out in the Regulations is 0.15 mg/m3, and blood lead suspension levels for males and females are 60 and 30ug/dl, respectively. For young workers (under 18) the blood lead suspension limit is 50 μg/dl.
But someone with better dotUKfu may provide a better source!
I doubt it. I put my stainless steel containers in the oven with no ill effects, so there probably isn't some plastic coating on them. Are you confusing disposable metal food containers (eg. aluminum cans) with stainless steel bowls/cups?
1. https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20110712/some-aluminum-water...
Same for water containers, pure stainless steel is much better than aluminium (which is coated) as when it inevitably gets dropped and deformed you won't have any leeching issues.
But seriously, my lay understanding is that PTFE is one of the safest things that could exist, for some substances/activities at least.
(being serious, the article is blatant clickbait, ceramics are just fine, spectroscopy can detect parts-per-billion and that says nothing about actual harm, while linear-no-threshold theories are shit.
--
and we're worrying so much that our health suffers more from worries than from most anything else)
This is an interesting (and maybe not too rigorous) method of selecting research samples, and points towards the need for another study: How representative was this 5:24 ratio of lead bearing mugs? Greater or less than what you would find in the broader mug population?
It's also fun to imagine how the researchers came about this:
--Was it boredom? ("Hey Shannon, I'm in between projects, how about we go see if there's anything in the kitchen area that could be dangerous?")
--Maybe serendipitous? ("Shannon, I just read an excellent novel that happened to mention the role that lead plays in ceramics an enamel finishes. Let's have go at the office mug collection and see what we find!")
--Brute force? ("Lead seems to get into everything these days... let's test every single thing in the office.")
Some test results: https://tamararubin.com/2019/02/made-in-france-c-2013-yellow....
However, even if we ignore the possibility of harm to the end user, I think the author of that blog makes a great point: "By using high levels of Cadmium in manufacturing, Le Creuset has – apparently for decades – been causal in contributing to “the demand for” the mining, refining and manufacturing of a toxic pigment that can (and does) poison others (workers, communities, waterways, the planet) through various processes/at multiple points throughout their manufactured products’ life cycles."
It's still not as low as I'd like for a simmering pot/dutch oven, but it is clearly in the decorative outer coating. Also not surprising Cadmium's in bright yellow... lucky it's not Uranium!
https://www.artsy.net/artwork/lucie-rie-lucie-rie-rare-urani...
Clear glass might look boring, but it’s a lot safer!
Oh that's good to know, do you have a source?
Note that only one mug here produced coffee that was over the FDA limit for lead in bottled water (and still below the tap water threshold).
Now, the foreign mugs, or vintage mugs, or handcrafted mugs you buy at a local market from a local artisan who may or may not be using lead-free glaze? There you have to be careful. NYC had severe lead poisoning cases from this just a few months ago: https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/574547-lead-poisoning-....
Many of my mugs are from gift shops. I wonder if they are FDA approved?
Only a few have a manufacturer name.
I could buy lead testing kits and check out all of my mugs at home. It looks like that would cost around $40 a test which seems a bit high for checking every mug I own given the low risk indicated in the link.
And this was after screening for the mugs with the highest concentrations of lead in their ceramic glaze. I think we're done here.
0.882 - Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) 0.37 - SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) 4 - Cite Score
This is a place where niche papers get published. Springer runs tons of crap journals.
(for reference, SJR scores for all journals: https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php)
Especially for general-interest studies like this, if the results were impactful and well done they'd be published in a better journal. Assuming that this is done well (I have no idea), the fact that it's in a super-niche journal means that it's likely not surprising/interesting to anyone in the field.
It's not going to win a Nobel prize – but I don't think that should be the bar for taking food safety research seriously.
> Overall, the potential for lead ingestion from contaminated ceramic mugs is minimal when compared to other sources, such as food. The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) reported that the average daily intake of lead from food sources in the general population is approximately 56.5 μg/day (ATSDR 2007a). In comparison, the maximum daily lead intake from drinking 3.3 eight-ounce cups of coffee based on the data collected in our study resulted in a dose of 6.71 μg, over eight times less than the average daily lead intake from food. Nonetheless, exposure to lead should be minimized to the extent possible.
For more info, check out this blog [0]. The design is a little much, but it's quite informative. The author is a mother whose kids got lead poisoning, so she bought a XRF spectral analyzer and now posts lead test results for tons of items. I've found it a useful resource.
[0] https://tamararubin.com/2019/12/which-ceramic-coffee-mugs-ar...
From the article: "Total Lead content in the glaze or coating of modern mugs (as detectable with an XRF) is not regulated. As long as mugs are not leaching Lead at the time of manufacture (when they are brand-new), they are considered to be safe to use — even if the Lead content of the glaze is very high. However, for context, the amount of Lead considered unsafe (and illegal) in the paint, glaze or coating of a newly-manufactured item manufactured and sold as “intended for use by children” is 90 ppm or higher. The good news is that, since children’s items are regulated for total Lead content (as of 2008), newly-purchased children’s mugs legally must have coatings below 90 ppm Lead [and my findings have confirmed that manufacturers are generally complying with this law — although I recommend sticking with children’s items manufactured in 2011 or later, as it took a while for the companies (and their supply chains) to get up to speed in their compliance with the new regulations]."
As a matter of fact, I ordered a new glass mug set from Amazon using a link in her article (which I assume is an affiliate link) out of gratitude for her work.
Edit: ignore me. I’m confusing lead with iron. That’ll teach me posting while drinking.
Also good to read the comments from real pottery artists to put it into perspective.