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Comment by downWidOutaFite | Hacker News Reader

I don't know the chemistry but it would be great to have cheap home tests for this stuff. The only available accurate cheap tests are for lead, for more comprehensive heavy metal tests you're looking at $200-400 and weeks of waiting.

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Not really possible. The simplest setup for analyzing metals in foods and juices (and supplements) is atomic absorption spectroscopy, which involves digesting the sample in strong nitric acid IIRC.

AAC setups appear to range from $5,000 to $25,000 (depending on features like multi-sample processing automation etc.) at present. A lab capable of safely handling nitric acid digestion (fumes a bit) needs an effective chemical fume hood, which are at least $20,000 for a fairly basic small hood, and each metal you want to test for requires a separete protocol. See for example:

https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-12/documents/70...

You can do a bunch of different metals at once with ICP-MS but those systems cost around 10X as much as AAC.

Sure, but isn't this the kind of thing we expect the government or "FDA" to monitor regularly? It's peanuts for them to regularly have each company that sells more than X million dollars per year to send them a representative sample of their products for testing.

I agree, for food, though it would still be nice to be able to "trust but verify". But the more common use case is testing water from old sketchy pipes.

Minor nit, but you really don't want to trust companies to send a sample. You would need to ensure samples are acquired through the consumer supply chain by the FDA.

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