A third of chocolate products are high in heavy metals | Hacker News Reader

A third of chocolate products are high in heavy metals

consumerreports.org

295 pointsgeox199 comments

Serious question: what is the actual story or solution here?

Are food manufacturers breaking California law or not?

And given that it's the cacao beans themselves with lead and cadmium (not factory contamination or something), is the solution to test every batch from each farm individually, and then just throw half the beans into the garbage? Or shut down half the cacao farms worldwide because of tainted soil?

Or is this pretty much in line with food safety levels generally, there's nothing to be worried about, and California guidelines are overly strict?

I just find it unfortunate that the article presents all the facts but basically zero analysis or context.

This problem is not specific to cocoa.

The seeds of many plants concentrate lead and cadmium whenever they are found in their environment, so with most seeds and nuts there is always a risk of high lead or cadmium content.

In most countries there are legal limits for the lead and cadmium content of seeds and nuts, but the limits are much more lenient than for other products, because there are few sources of seeds and nuts that are not affected, so setting low limits would eliminate most products from the market.

So the only recommendation is like for fish, which should not constitute a too large part of the food due to the risk of high mercury content, also most seeds and nuts should not be a too large part of the food, due to the risk of high lead and cadmium content.

The pollution caused by human stupidity has converted some of the healthiest foods into health risks.

In second to last paragraph, you mean that for these reasons of contamination, fish and chocolate should not constitute too large a part of one’s diet, correct? Just trying to clarify.

Yes.

Consuming them from time to time should not be a problem, but eating a chocolate (or fish) every day presents the risk of excessive intake of contaminants.

Unfortunately, most of us cannot afford to make a chemical analysis of every food we buy, to determine whether it is safe or not for consumption, so it is better to be cautious.

Even the legal limits for the lead and cadmium content of cocoa and of most seeds and nuts are rather high also based on the reasoning that on average they should be only a minor part of the daily intake.

Seeds like grains that make up most of people's diets and the diets of most livestock? That doesn't sound great.

Actually products like white flour or white rice have significantly less contaminants than whole grains.

I do not agree with the propaganda about whole grains being healthy. Whole grains have more contaminants and more anti-nutrients, e.g. phytic acid.

Whole grains would be healthier in comparison with white flour or white rice only for someone who would eat nothing else, and even then they would not be healthy enough.

A healthy diet should include processed grains like white flour or white rice as a source of cheap proteins and of energy and it should also include some sources of healthy fat and many other sources for the nutrients that are necessary only in small quantities, like vitamins, minerals or proteins rich in lysine (which is insufficient in cereals). Whole-grain products have inflated prices, while a combination of e.g. white flour with various vegetables is simultaneously cheaper and healthier.

Relying on whole grains to provide what is missing in white flour or white rice is completely inefficient and it also adds the risk of an excessive intake of contaminants.

How did you come to the idea that processed foods are part of a healthy diet

not all processed foods are healthy, but also not all raw foods are healthy either. most of the issues with processed foods are with the ultra-processed foods, those foods that are manufactured into a food product with minimal or no cooking required. and there's the stuff like iodine or niacin fortification and pasteurization, which we know has had systemic positive effects on nutrition.

there's also where exactly you draw the line for processing. fermentation is like the oldest food preservation method we have (kimchi, cheese): is that processing? the raw diet people even believe cooking of any time is processing.

Nothing is healthy, everything is just varying levels of bad for you. Its all about minimizing.

Any kind of food must be processed by removing the parts that are not edible or are contaminated or contain various harmful substances.

This kind of processing is always good.

The kind of processing that is bad either adds to food substances that are not food, e.g. conservants or colorants, or it destroys useful components of the food, like vitamins or unsaturated fatty acids, by heating or other harsh treatments.

The useful part of the grains, which cannot be obtained from other sources at a similar price, are the proteins and the starch, which are needed by a human in large quantities daily. Everything else that is contained in the whole grains can be found in countless other vegetables that are better sources than the whole grains.

that being said, whole grains do cause less glycemic spiking and are important for diabetics.

What you're missing here is that whole grains (or whole foods in general) are biologically active with phytochemicals such as phenolic acids, flavonoids, lingans, etc, which their processed counterparts generally have less of (or none at all). These compounds get into our body and then work in many ways (many of which that we don't fully understand) to improve important markers of human health.

Plant food is biologically active in ways that animal products are not, and I think people who eat exclusively meat as a source of protein are missing out on a lot of opportunity from the chemical activity of plants that has been shown to be health promoting.

Whole foods do have more antinutrients but in studies I've seen most authors conclude that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I agree that I am concerned about the metals in whole foods though; and careful sourcing is important (and even then sometimes insufficient).

There are many other vegetables, from which other parts than the seeds are eaten, and which provide large amounts of biologically active phytochemicals.

Seeds, like those of cereals or of legumes, are a necessary part of food because they are the only part of the plants with high content of proteins.

Because of their disadvantage of also concentrating pollutants, it is preferable to use them mainly as a source of proteins and starch, which does not require the use of whole grains, and to get any desirable phytochemicals from other parts of plants.

In the case of oily seeds, the extracted oils (if they are obtained by cold pressing or supercritical carbon dioxide extraction) contain most of the phytochemicals but much less of the heavy metals. For instance, cold-pressed sunflower oil is a better source of phytochemicals than raw sunflower seeds, because the latter, like cocoa, have frequently high contents of lead and cadmium.

So there are ways of processing that improve the quality of the food ingredients. The kinds of processing that are bad are typically those which add undesirable substances to food, not those which remove undesirable substances from food.

I'd love to see more research on how soaking and sprouting impact contaminants and antinutrients. It's known that they reduce some antinutrients already, but an accurate map of every chemical in seeds(including the proteins we want) at each stage of sprouting would be great.

In addition to some of the other comments here mentioning whole grain benefits, I remember doing some brief research here and seeing that processed grains like white rice or white bread tend to be inflammatory while brown rice and whole grain bread are anti-inflammatory. Not sure if that just makes this a "pick your poison" situation or what.

Fish also have selenium which counters the mercury effect.

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FS437

Eat a lot of fish like the Japanese, you might even become less violent for some reason :)

(disclaimer: I make bean-to-bar chocolate)

As background, food often concentrates whatever is in the soil, and cacao perhaps more so. The shell around the cacao bean is a big filter, and tends to accumulate stuff. This concentration isn't specific to cacao, e.g. see rice and arsenic, etc etc.

Volcanic soil naturally has a lot of cadmium, for example, so you end up with it in the final product for cacao from some regions. The growing areas more popular with large manufacturers (i.e. cheaper cacao) just so happens to be areas with high cadmium levels, so there is a a bit of a correlation between cadmium levels and the size of the operation.

I've been told that pretty much all larger chocolate organizations do test each batch for cadmium, lead, etc. The smaller ones are usually sourcing cacao from higher quality distributors, and those distributors also test everything (and also do transparency reports on labor, handling, and such).

Fundamentally, the guidance on what is an acceptable level is not clear, though I cannot speak for the decision making at the companies listed in the article. CA's particular threshold considered low, and you can get equal amounts of Cd/Pb from a lot of other food sources (generally people don't eat multiple chocolate bars per day, but they might have a cup of rice and get a similar amount of cadmium). Maybe that's also a problem.

Lead though, really should not be in there. It's not from the soil, and it's mostly in the shell, which should be removed in processing.

Thank you -- that's very helpful context!

Great post. I’m dying to know what company you have/work for? Theo by any chance? AFAIK bean to bar is highly unusual, done by only a dozen or so companies. You appear to be living the dream!

https://spinnakerchocolate.com/

Why yes, I'm brimming with envy. Very cool!

I was told a few years ago that bean-to-bar was done by very few companies. But I've since heard that it's had kind of an explosion that somewhat parallels the popularity of beer microbreweries, with a huge boom in sales of chocolate-making equipment.

Based on the turnout at the Northwest Chocolate Festival last month, I can confirm it has exploded :-)

I put about a tablespoon of cacao nibs in my breakfast cereal every morning. They are tasty and high in fiber. I guess I have to do some calculations on cadmium exposure.

I thought the lead was from beans left outdoors to ferment near machinery / vehicles / industrial sites with lead in the emissions.

Yes (usually drying, less so fermenting), which varies a lot country to country. Still, mostly it should end up in the shell that is removed.

> (and also do transparency reports on labor, handling, and such).

Where would one find these reports?

An example: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ab9229aa9e0287fbf927...

Do you know if there's a repository for them?

If someone wants to know, for example, about the sourcing of a chocolate bar they just bought?

Not to my knowledge :/

Ah I was afraid of that.

As far as I can tell, zero consumer chocolate products can be guaranteed to be made from just 'Uncommon Cacao' product, and not intermingled with other less transparent intermediaries, so it's of little interest to the end consumer.

Most tiny makers do single origin from distributors like Uncommon, but you'd have to ask.

Most chocolate you see in a store, though, yes :(

I'm just always blown away by the niche expertise you find on here! Thanks for the info.

You should see how much lead is in the average carrot.

Last I checked, baby carrots can have similar lead/lb as the chocolates they're talking about here.

And people chow down on carrots thinking they're "healthy".

Can you provide some back up on that? I can't seem to find anything.

See table 7 in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91554-z

Carrot is just one example. 0.027 mg lead / kg carrot.

Or 0.027 micrograms lead / g carrot.

According to the asyousow.org report linked above more than 0.5 micrograms lead per day is bad, which is just 20g (0.7oz) of fresh carrot.

Celery and beetroot are not far off either, around half the lead of carrot by weight.

I don't know that a study conducted in Poland with polish goods actually gives you the lead & cadmium levels in an average carrot. Thank you for providing the study though!

It's hard to find data for commercial vegetables in the US. I did find one study looking at urban gardens (e.g. carrots grown in your backyard if you live in the city) and the levels were like 100x the Polish figures shown above.

Odd how the only one that had levels in the teens was Lindt, from Europe. Seems like manufacturers could and should be doing more in the USA.

Not sure if all Lindt products in the USA are made there, but they do have a manufacturing plant in New Hampshire.

Note there is a good site for checking your chocolate:

https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem...

It's nice that Consumer Reports made OP free for non-subscribers.

Thanks! The results were what I expected and depressing, but at least now I know.

What were you expecting?

I personally can't see any kind of pattern anywhere at all, except dark chocolate is (logically) higher.

Also, one-time testing isn't going to reveal much. Since different manufacturers are constantly getting different batches of beans from different farms, wouldn't the heavy metal content in any chocolate bar be essentially random? E.g. Cadbury's might be low in April, high in May, and then medium in June.

Makes you wonder if there's any way to "synthesize" whatever it is that makes cacao make cacao or something to the effect of the way various opioids and flavors are already synthesized en masse, although obviously in the opioid case we're probably not gonna get around having to grow poppies forever.

Okra is vaguely related to cacao, and you can process the seeds to some sort of ersatz substance with similar flavor compounds, but it lacks the saturated fats with a melting point similar to human body temperature that makes chocolate interesting.

So just add bacon fat?

> Shhhhhhh!

— Nestlé/BigNesqwik

High quality chocolate has a ton of different flavours in it. It’s extremely complex. Just like coffee, tea, wine, beer, vanilla, spirits, cheese, mushrooms (and so on; basically any luxury food). We can’t synthesize what makes these things taste good because it isn’t just one compound, it’s thousands.

Even something very basic you can make at home, such as caramel, can’t be synthesized. From a very simple precursor (white sugar aka sucrose) you apply heat and the result is thousands of complex molecules. This is why caramel tastes good (like an actual food) but plain white sugar tastes pretty bad (because it’s just an ingredient).

Don't you fix these things by using the market, fine Cadbury an extra 5% pa of gross revenue if any bars are found with > N ug of any particular heavy metal. Tax all companies an extra X% if their products are in the bottom quintile for 2 consecutive years. Maybe don't fine them if they can show a person who eats their products at the 99% level, for a lifetime, would be below the level of toxicity -- the CEO can eat that much of the metal to demonstrate they're convinced that the toxicity figures are correct!

In theory the chocolate producers will get a lower price unless they do what they can to reduce heavy metals.

Of course the farmers get screwed in places where others have shipped their heavy-metal lawn waste ...

Some level of uniformity that the issue is about as universal as it sounds across brands based off the description in the article. It is, and that kind of sucks.

I mentioned this to a friend earlier and he said something along the lines of “yeah I thought this was pretty well known” so… I didn’t get the memo anyway and I am a somewhat frequent consumer of very dark chocolate.

A bunch of organic chocolate products from Newmans Own, Trader Joes, and Whole Foods’ brand are the worst offenders.

Well shit, am I supposed to make brownies using just cannabis? The alternatives are all crap Hersheys/Mars chocolates

Does cannabis concentrate heavy metals itself?

I can't endorsed this source, but there are plenty of others https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-12-cannabis-heavy-metals...

The hemp seeds, like most seeds, also concentrate lead and cadmium.

The other parts of the plant have only low concentrations of metals. Nevertheless, when any plant part is burnt, the ashes concentrate all the metals from that plant part.

Yeah it seemed that going out of way to source from most artisanal producer in exotic locations may correlate with higher levels? Not strictly true but seemed like a correlative trend in my quick pass through results.

Maybe the guy growing cacao in the roadside ditch in the valley watershed needs some of that fair trade money, but soil quality may not be highest concern.

Those … are all corporate knock-offs of co-ops. what did you expect?

Better quality control?

Newmans Own isn’t a corporate knock off of a co-op. It’s corporation started by Paul Newman that donates all of its profits to charity.

fair, Newman's is usually pretty good about this stuff.

Yeah, pretty depressing, since 85% cacao (just a small amount) really helps keep my sweet tooth in check.

I like to buy from local independent chocolatiers and now I'll have to think twice about that. I can call them and ask them if they test their chocolate sources for heavy metal but somehow I doubt many are doing that.

(from experience)

Most local chocolatiers (e.g. truffle makers, etc) use bulk chocolate already produced from companies like Valrhona, so it may have the same issues.

Most local chocolate makers use distributors to source their cacao beans, and those distributors test the batches. The regions with high Cd/Pb levels tend to be regions that those distributors avoid.

You should always ask, though.

I wrote to our favoured UK brand (Willie's Cacao) and got a strong statement about their testing regime and the reliably good results. I guess I have to trust what they say but it's good to have some reassurance.

Nearly all of these tests were done in 2014. I wonder how different the results would be today. Probably not much, unfortunately.

In fact I would expect them to be very different, to the point of just being random. Tons of brands on that list that will pick their supply by price, and it will probably even differ by what batch they get.

You can sort on date and there are some (many) more recent ones.

I did that originally, but most have had some other filters active or something, because I remember seeing less than a page of results newer than 2014...

I just tried it again, and it didn't get as old as 2014 until page 7 of 10.

Meta point here but Consumer Reports is doing really solid work for the consumer and is a nonprofit that needs donations - please consider subscribing/supporting.

I really hate that Facebook has turned this sentence into something that used to have nothing to do with them that you did not intend and that is absent from your sentence in spirit but for the letter- like connotation they have legally purchased forever now.

whoa! Consumer Reports is a non-profit. TIL.

It’s interesting to see the charts with a binary threshold where green is good and red is bad: https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem...

The threshold is based on heavy metals per serving. I suppose it makes sense that dark chocolate would be flagged more frequently because it has a higher concentration of cacao per serving.

It also means that for some of these products, eating half as much dark chocolate would give the same dose as someone eating twice as much milk chocolate. Good reminder to consider the absolute dose rather than binary thresholds.

Yeah, I don't like the binary threshold at all. 3.8 is green, while 4.3 is red? That hardly makes a difference to your health.

Meanwhile, both 0.2 and 3.8 are green, while 4.3 and 19.2 are red? It doesn't distinguish at all that one is 4x or 20x worse or better than another.

A color interpolation would be far more informative for health.

How much chocolate do you think the heaviest "chocoholics" consume? Demographically (in terms of money and in reference to the consumer), who do you think is most likely to be "vulnerable" to this reality? What's the extent of the harm possible or does it compound indefinitely like bioaccumulation or whatever?

My wife consumes a lot of chocolate. She would subsist solely on chocolate if that was possible. I have no idea how much she actually consumes, but I’m never surprised to find empty chocolate chip bags in the garbage.

If you love your wife, show her this article. I have no remaining commentary on the matter otherwise

Oh, I did. She just laughed. Chocolate is way too important to her to care about lead poisoning.

Did she laugh at my comment if I may ask or are you only referring to you showing her? You got me curious and hopeful now

I did not read your comment to her. Sorry. If I did, I’d have to spend time explaining what Hacker News is.

Someday. Please.

I suppose it just gets across the message that many products aren't compliant at an assumed one serving per day. But yeah, for seeing which levels are meaningfully different thus which products I should really be avoiding, it's not as useful as it could be.

> It also means that for some of these products, eating half as much dark chocolate would give the same dose as someone eating twice as much milk chocolate.

Looks like they used the chocolatiers' serving sizes, which might differ between dark and milk chocolate products already.

And so do dried herbs and spices. I wonder how the levels compare.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...

Great point to bring up! I learned of this a while ago and saught out sellers who said they tested their products for contaminants like that and found only 2! Hopefully this is not against guidelines to list but the sellers are Starwest Botanicals and Mountain Rose Herbs. Starwest seems to be a little more strict/upfront about testing than mountain rose but products from either should be significantly safer than what you find in the grocery store (which I now avoid like the plague).

For convenience, here's the primary source at the end of the chain of links (at depth=5):

"Expert Investigation Related to Cocoa and Chocolate Products: Final Report"

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59a706d4f5e2319b70240... (pdf, 381pp)

The file is from March 2022, and the article October 2023. Curious why it would take 1.5 years to go from investigation to report.

That's what we get when we pretend recycling stuff while all we do is sending the bad stuff to the very same countries that are tasked to grow our food.

Serious question: say burning garbage had no detrimental impact, it would be the best solution right?

We know that's not the case (don't we?) so how do we move through that particular "solution-tree" to get to the right practical solution/implementation?

Not sure if what I'm saying is cogent but I feel like there's an ideological game of hide and seek not being played or someone is "it" and simply leaving the rest of the players to hide but they lobbied against a rule that allowed for unoffical games of hide and seek and insisted they are only ever "it" and the rest of the players can't gather and create their own non-sanctioned game that disincludes the current player and that the current instance can never actually end to allow for a new game.

Japan incinerates essentially all of their trash, and it's not a polluted hellscape.

So why aren't we doing that? Like what's the rub? And it better not be BigRecycling or imma lose my mind right now (you know what I mean) :/

Long ago, they tried burning trash in other countries and it was just basically an open burn pit, so incineration is a political no-go. Even though now it's possible to attain essentially complete oxidation and no nox/sox/ash in flue gas.

You're telling me that a/the solution is to do exactly what all the "burn baby burn" people are sort of saying in some sense?

The solution is to burn everything and aggressively scrub the exhaust

Dingdingding! So how do we make it happen? Is there anyone with "eco"-credibillity who is saying exactly this?

>Nevertheless, every incinerator produces excess GHG emissions and therefore every state’s GHG emissions intensity is higher than it would be without incinerators. These results are consistent with those of Tabata [83], who analyzed 727 power-producing incinerators in Japan and found that only five did not produce excess fossil CO2 emissions.

Ya but do they quantify the corresponding emissions created in the aggregate by our alternative efforts to deal with waste disposal and if that is the case, is it still clear that "our" way is superior to "Japan"'s way with respect to:

1) GHG emissions 2) palpable and visible environmental pollution/damage 3) cost 4) reliabillity (labour/cost/lack of long-term potentiation of any existing or novel variable that is reasonably foreseeable based on existing knowledge as informed by current data

Like, by you saying what you're saying and if Japan indeed operates in their way, than there's a contradition to the effect that Japan's really being hurt more than helped by it and its one of those "dolphin" areas for them

We're still burning coal and gas for power - burning thrash is win/win in that regard. Problem with incinerators is nobody wants one in their backyard, despite safety claims.

Is that like legit the rub that I'm talking about? Imma be so fucking pissed if this is ultimately all-rooted in freakin NIMBYers and Boomer Entitlement in general bullshit

Also, I feel as if the world hears they can burn their garbage so thats one less thing to worry about going forward, makes the world and hopefully everyone in it a little more receptive to the idea of everybody pooling our funding (to replace other garbage garbage programs in place) and start where emissions are worst and burn baby burn however it can be done properly.

Its insane we're not already doing this if all the other stuff is more likely than not true.

Obviously burning is not the only alternative to shipping trash to poorer countries with loose or non-existent enviro and handling standards.

Burying our own trash in landfills (regardless of location) has a lot of upsides if done well and maintained correctly. We still wouldn’t want to be growing our crops atop it - I don’t think..

I want to get to the bottom of WHY we even need to even ponder any of those or extend the line of inquiry any further if Japan's approach "works"...

That Japan does this and it "works" is blowing my mind right now. That is extremely compelling and provocative in the context of this discussion so now I wanna know why we're making this more complicated by insisting on searching for a solution to a problem that already has one, however inelegant or politically inconvenient it is.

I am not accusing you when I suggest we're making this more complicated, just making a hopefully reasonable inference that if burning works and this all comes down to a political communication/advocacy ("PR issue"), then I will happy join the "burn it all" crowd). But, you know, respectfully.

There's got to be more to this story if its true as to why we are even still discussing this issue

While that is an issue, I don't see why you think that is connected?

The article only mentions contamination in phosphate-based fertilizers.

One example, Ghana, second largest cocoa exporter in the world is also the home of the largest e-waste dump site.

I don't know the current status, but Ivory Coast, 1st producer used to have large dump sites it was struggling to manage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDjDGrrDD7o

Lead and Cadmium are inherent in volcanic soil, and is thus something they're going to have to process out.

As someone who regularly consumes large amounts of dark chocolate and has for decades, is there anything I can do to reduce the accumulated heavy metals, short of injecting chelating agents(assuming that would even work)? And I'm not suggesting chelation therapy, just mentioning it because I have heard it is the usual treatment for acute metal poisoning.

Literally by donating blood. That's the most effective way to gradually clear heavy metals.

But they're also stored in your fat tissue. When you burn fat you temporarily leak those metals back into your bloodstream.

I can only find references to blood donation lowering PFAS levels, not heavy metals, but it does make some sense.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6523211/

So cocoa got heavy metals from soil, makes sense.

But why does it have significant more concentration than other crops?

The researchers conclude that while cocoa bean shells may be one source of lead, most contamination occurs during shipping or processing of the beans and in manufacturing. Further research on those stages of the process will help to isolate the source.

source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1281312/

it doesn't really:

>The FDA estimated dietary exposure of children to Cd and Pb from 2014 to 2016 based on Cd and Pb concentration data from the FDA Total Diet Study and food consumption data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey and determined that dietary Cd and Pb from all sweets (i.e., candy, gelatin, jelly, sugar, and syrup), including chocolate, comprises 1.2 and 3.5% of total dietary intake, respectively.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32293881/ https://sci-hub.se/10.1021/acs.jafc.9b08295

From the linked report:

- "Excessive nib Cd levels occur due to several main factors: 1) Theobroma cacao is a natural Cd accumulating plant species compared to others grown on the same soils; 2) topsoil Cd increases from deposition of litter and harvest debris on the soil surface; 3) Because cocoa roots remain in the topsoil, tillage to incorporate soil amendments harms the trees; 4) Most cocoa soils in South America and the Caribbean (LAC) are strongly acidic with pH as low as 4.5, so low that soil Cd is highly phytoavailable; 5) Some cocoa soils were historically Cd contaminated by mining wastes (minor part of land in cocoa production); and 6) some cocoa soils are naturally Cd enriched from parent rocks (e.g., marine shale) which makes these have high Cd:Zn ratios and thus have very high Cd phytoavailability. In these soils, beans can reach 10 mg Cd/kg rather than the 0.8 mg Cd/kg limit usually enforced on bean imports in the EU. One location in Colombia has 27 mg Cd/kg topsoil, 100-fold background levels. Other areas with high Cd:Zn problem soils growing cocoa were identified in at least Ecuador, Honduras, Peru and Trinidad & Tobago."

- "Cocoa plants absorb Cd into roots on a ZIP-family Zn transporter, not on the NRAMP5 transporter used by rice. Zn2+ in soil solution strongly inhibits Cd2+ uptake; thus higher Zn2+ in soil can reduce Cd in cocoa beans. The Cd:Zn ratio in the soil solution strongly affects Cd accumulation in cocoa trees and beans. Unfortunately, surface applied ZnSO4 does not rapidly leach into the rooting zone soil, and foliar Zn sprays are ineffective in reducing Cd in beans. Surface applied ZnEDTA as a Zn fertilizer could leach Zn into the rooting depth soil. But ZnEDTA costs much more than ZnSO4."

This ought to make Halloween a little creepier. Everything we've got for the Candy Bowl this year has chocolate in it.

The FDA hasn't just dropped the ball here, they've set it down and kicked it away from them. They seem dead set against regulating the food industry to protect consumers (aka doing their job). Food companies could produce chocolate safely, but they don't want to because it would eat into their profits. They're fine with poisoning us to make a little more money, but if they weren't allowed to sell chocolate at all unless it conformed to a federal limit they'd do it because selling chocolate would still be massively profitable.

We really need to put pressure on the FDA to do their job and set federal limits for the amount of heavy metals allowable in our foods. Our food supply seems to be getting less and less safe all the time. Why are we letting these FDA employees live off of our tax dollars if they refuse to work for us?

It’s a difficult problem to solve. There is a very sleazy revolving door between regulators and regulated industries. Industries will essentially send people to work as regulators and represent the industries’ interests while in their government posts. These people then return to industry to command much higher salaries. In this way, government service is a stepping stone to a better private sector job.

But it would be hard to shut this down because regulatory bodies need industry insiders working for them. You don’t want the agencies to be composed of people who couldn’t hack it in the private sector.

This is one of the reasons I am skeptical when people reflexively suggest more government regulation as the solution to all problems.

> But it would be hard to shut this down because regulatory bodies need industry insiders working for them. You don’t want the agencies to be composed of people who couldn’t hack it in the private sector.

I think this problem (the need for industry players in regulatory bodies) is overstated by many. In particular, you don't need them in leadership roles, they can just consult. We could also write a law to close the door on their return to an industry after working as a regulator, but we don't. My conclusion is that the corrupt practices continue mainly because the corrupt people want them to.

I think you do need them to be providing significant input and direction, because otherwise you are likely to wind up with regulations that are divorced from reality. Focusing on a single issue in isolation -- even one as important as "safety" (as suggested by the sibling comment) causes a cascade of unforeseen consequences.

As to outlawing the return to the private sector, that makes it career suicide to touch a government job. I don't see how that will bring high quality candidates to these posts.

> As to outlawing the return to the private sector, that makes it career suicide to touch a government job. I don't see how that will bring high quality candidates to these posts.

This is an easier problem to solve than the one we started with: people not incentivized to do their jobs as regulators (and often they do the opposite, just creating a moat for the companies they regulate.) I don't think successfully leading a regulatory body is career suicide even if they can't go take a payout in industry afterwards, but even so there are lots of ways to balance out that disincentive to work in government that doesn't involve undermining the whole effort at regulation (as the status quo revolving door does.)

I'll agree that there are some cases where it'd be useful to have someone with familiarity with the industries they regulate on staff.

This case in particular is one where in-depth insider knowledge or decades of industry experience shouldn't be an issue since setting "safe" levels of poison is entirely about the negative health impacts of heavy metals on the consumer and the specific means for reducing the levels of those poisons in the products themselves can be left entirely to the "experts" at the chocolate factory/cocoa farm. Regulators can just set a level deemed "safe" and it falls on the corporations to either offer a safe product or, if they are unable or unwilling to meet the standard, find a new way to make money that doesn't involve the mass poisoning of the American public.

We could bring just about any random person in off the street and have them consult with medical experts to develop the standards. In fact, the farther away from the food industry that person is the better.

I'd argue that the more a regulatory agency is focused on the health and safety of the consumer, the less important it is for the regulators to be intimately familiar with the industry being regulated. At least, when we're already aware of the health problems and know what to test for. Industry insiders may be able to help identify products or chemicals in cases where companies know they are selling dangerous products and are hiding that information from the public, but it seems that someone with close ties to the industry wouldn't be very likely to act as a whistleblower in those cases anyway.

The author of the article does not seem to be able to make a good distinction between cacao and cocoa. For instance, they wrote “cocoa plant” but there’s no such. There’s a cacao tree and it grows pods (similar in size and shape to a small American football) and these pods contain beans surrounded by pulp. These pods are cut from the cacao tree, the mushy pulp is allowed to ferment and dry over a period of many days, and then the beans from desiccated pod are what ultimately get transformed into powder and then we get what is referred to as the cocoa butter—-from cacao tree to cocoa butter. Finally, it’s a complex process of churning the cocoa butter with the addition of milk and lecithin to get the tasty end product chocolate. In most cases it is mostly milk chocolate and lecithin with a smaller percent of cocoa butter.

The native origins of Cacao trees are in the Amazon region (Brazil, Colombia, Peru) but have a rich history of being transplanted to other regions around the world since colonial times, largely for commercialization. In present day, the top growers of cacao trees are in Africa. 70% of the world’s cocoa come from Cameroon, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, and Ghana.

The CR article fails to make the connection as to where in the lifecycle the heavy metals are introduced.

I’m pretty sure the heavy metals are introduced from the soils in certain regions, maybe most regions, where cacao is grown.

I think you may have applied a little unnecessary pedantry. In many languages there is only one word used to describe the tree and the finished product, and that’s most of the time enough to figure out what people are talking about in context.

Among nutritionists and cooks, there is a big distinction. There’s cacao powder and there’s cocoa powder. There’s also a big difference between cocoa versus chocolate, which is really milk chocolate.

The real question is which soils contain the pollutants. Is there a statistical significance among cacao trees grown in the Amazon region versus African region, for example, and why.

Ok, but it’s pretty obvious to anyone reading that cocoa plant and cacao plant refer to the same thing. And if the only difference between cocoa powder and cacao powder is the heat used in processing, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t change the heavy metal content, so it’s irrelevant.

It’s funny your make such a big deal out of this and then say something like “chocolate is really milk chocolate.”

> the only difference between cocoa powder and cacao powder is the heat

and this is why it’s important to know your cocoa from cacao

Grape vine - grape fruit - wine

Cacao tree - cacao bean - cocoa

> For instance, they wrote “cocoa plant” but there’s no such

They’re both accepted names for the same plant

> For instance, they wrote “cocoa plant” but there’s no such. There’s a cacao tree...

Cacao and cocoa are more interchangeable than you think:

> Theobroma cacao (cacao tree or cocoa tree) [1]

The usage shifts according to country and industry. Where you live/work I have no doubt it's called cacao, but in another region it will be the opposite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theobroma_cacao

Grape vine -> grape fruit -> fermentation+processing = wine

Cacao tree -> cacao bean -> fermentation+process = cocoa butter -> +milk+sugar+lecithin = chocolate

[0] https://www.webmd.com/diet/difference-between-cocoa-and-caca...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cocoa+tree%2C+...

You can clearly see both "cocoa tree" and "cacao tree" in common usage. Currently "cacao tree" is a little bit more popular, but in 1980 "cocoa tree" was slightly more dominant, for example.

And it's not like there's any necessary reason to distinguish between the two words/spellings.

Related. Others?

Do I need to avoid dark chocolate now? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35216973 - March 2023 (62 comments)

Hershey sued over chocolate containing heavy metals - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34179115 - Dec 2022 (9 comments)

Lead and Cadmium Could Be in Your Dark Chocolate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34016384 - Dec 2022 (11 comments)

Research reveals ways lead and cadmium in chocolate may be reduced - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34014515 - Dec 2022 (82 comments)

Consumer Group’s Test Finds Lead, Cadmium in Some Chocolate Treats - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11359270 - March 2016 (1 comment)

On the plus side, these tainted chocolate bars provide better X-ray shielding.

like the article says, the takeaway isn't to panic, but just to consider dark chocolate a food you don't overindulge in. obviously you want to avoid contaminants, but some degree of exposure is part of life, and it's the dose that makes the poison.

I know I'm spending too long on HN when I start panicking about every day normal things to consume or do incase it poisons me, causes cancer, gives me alzheimer's or something else that makes top page posts. The health-nut side of HN is what lets it down and makes it a depressing place to hang out in.

Just eat a balanced diet and exercise. Don’t smoke, drink, or do drugs (if you do then do them sparingly). Everything else won’t move the needle and should be mostly ignored - someone is selling you something or gaining a click.

Luckily for the American health care industry people ignore that advice and do their very level best to oppose it at every turn.

Well a big green tick for me on all those points. Thanks for being a voice of reason!

> Just eat a balanced diet and exercise.

I've never seen a particularly good definition for "balanced diet", and many communities that are super healthy have diets that don't look balanced at all.

the problem is these submissions are incentivized to scare the shit out of you, but not to be honest about “how worried you should be about it”. this heavily applies to MSM stories as well.

once i understood that, i got more aggressive about hiding this kind of content, or taking it with a huge grain of salt.

There is no safe level of lead exposure, though.

How are you defining a "safe level"?

Everyone in the world has been exposed to some amount of lead and most live out relatively long and healthy lives.

Comments like these are always so annoying to be honest.

It takes the responsibility off the food manufacturers to do really simple things like, let’s not put toxic chemicals in food, and instead writes the whole thing down with flimsy statements like “well you’re already poisoned to some degree, should be fine though.”

But its not entirely wrong there is some natural background level of expected exposure for things like lead, arsenic, mercury, etc as they are naturally occurring part of our environment. wanting to know what the floor is when talking about exposure to these toxins helps you understand the scale of exposure.

In what environment should we be expected to naturally encounter lead, arsenic, and mercury?

Just about anywhere in the world that's not a sterilized room.

I still think it’s a disingenuous argument because we’re talking about elevated levels in food production.

Not really for example there a naturally occuring high levels of arsenic in the ground water and soil near near cooks inlet Alaska, there's lead in Idaho, and cinnabar (a naturally occuring mercury contain mineral) in California, uranium in Arizona Colorado New Mexico and Wyoming.

It's not disingenuous when people are talking about treating any level like an elevated level.

Arsenic levels in soil can naturally vary depending on minerals under the soil. So you can get more if say you are eating a root vegetable that you need to wash the dirt off vs less from an above ground vegetable.

Unfortunately I have learned a lot about this bc our region has unnaturally elevated levels of lead and arsenic die to pesticide use in the past. But can also just be bad luck and natural.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK231016/#:~:text=The%20....

Arsenic is naturally found in most water to varying degrees. It is an essential but poorly understood micronutrient. Its toxicity is similar to selenium, another essential micronutrient, so it isn't unique in terms of the dose response. Some plants concentrate it but that usually isn't bioavailable.

Background lead levels are sometimes high naturally but those geographies are relatively rare. Lead is usually industrial pollution.

Mercury chemistry in nature tends to have very poor bioavailability. Dietary mercury is almost exclusively industrial pollution where mercury is integrated into molecules that are much more bioavailable.

My point is that your requirement can't be absolutely zero lead. If you have sensitive enough equipment, you're always going to detect some amount of common contaminants.

> let’s not put toxic chemicals in food

You make it sound like adding lead is an intentional act. Surely if it required no effort, food manufacturers would remove all of the lead. I don't know how much effort is required, but reports like this and testing by regulators is likely required to encourage them to put in more effort to get the lead down to a reasonable level.

Sounds like a regulatory problem.

This absolutist stance made sense when our equipment wasn’t sensitive enough to detect low levels reliably. A lot of reports would literally say “not detected” and it would be interpreted as “not present”

Modern equipment and techniques can reliably detect very low levels of lead. Nearly every chocolate product will contain some tiny level of lead.

There are 469 entries on this database: https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem...

Only a handful of them were so low that it’s listed as not detected. I’m sure if they were motivated, they could have used more sensitive equipment to quantify the actual level of lead in those products too.

That’s why it’s no longer useful to insist that there is no safe level of lead, because you’re going to be consuming tiny amounts of lead in anything you eat or drink. Past a small enough threshold the effects really are negligible.

This issue I sense with respect to whether there are truly any safe exposure amounts is that the moment you say anything greater than zero, you give wiggle room for companies (hell, even governments and regulatory bodies in general) to fuck around and pretend their negligence in allowing an-after-the-fact higher amount product was due to some arbitrary reason that ignores the fact that there really shouldn't be any of the thing at all for practical purposes and that, consequently, this thing really can't exist or be allowed to continue being marketed. Folks interested in the language that this evokes have zero issue doing this with drugs, why so serious (in terms of incompetency) with respect to this?

> This issue I sense with respect to whether there are truly any safe exposure amounts is that the moment you say anything greater than zero,

If you set all of the limits at zero, we wouldn't be eating anything.

You wouldn't even be eating vegetables from your own garden.

The point I'm trying to make is when you have any tolerance at all for hard no things like lead, it only extends the Overton window of regulation so far, to the point where you're allowing for a defense when it needs to be an absolute liabillity. Lead intoxication (both acutely and chronic) is an absolutely castastrophic public health problem. It has to be absolutley unacceptable and legally made to essentially be indefensible where it can be objectively proven a chain of events flows from commercial activity of defendant company to the inclusion (or failure to remove it from) the product and seperately for any harm that results to customers.

If no company can legit handle the liabillity aspect then it needs to be like nuclear weapons and "handled by the government" even though that opens its own range of potential issues. That is the least-worst arbiter and threat actor who handle's other such things.

Paying for damages sounds like that's also allowing nonzero amounts.

And I don't know what you mean by the government handling it. Surely you don't mean the government handles all food production, but I can't figure out how else to interpret that.

Lying about tolerances in service of an overton fight is not something that sounds very good to me.

> lying about tolerances

Wat?

You're saying we can't tolerate nonzero amounts.

As pointed out, actually doing that would mean no food.

Since you brought up the overton window, it sounds like you want to claim we don't tolerate any at all, while actually tolerating it so people can eat. That would be lying.

Look, if you're correct that there is and will inevitably be minute traces of lead throughout the food supply and you're implying that this is not a reality that can be changed because its basically just how it is on a basically molecular model, than yeah we can't necessarily make it full-blown absolute liabillity.

That sure as hell doesn't mean that concessions aren't made on the part of operating companiea to ensure their windfall in removing the biggest threat to their business upon discovery of their future criminal wrong-doing does not being part of their operations. Like how that company in China added some bullshit additive to baby formula that ended killing and maiming a bunch of Chinese babies.

The absolute balls firstly, but second, they had lots of splaining to do as if thry were in AbsoluteLiabillityNation, which China's legal system certainly seems to be. Heads rolled off to prison disgraced and disrobed economically speaking and I'll bet they don't have a similar crisis for a good long time but obviously the odds of fraud there, like anywhere else, tend towards non-zero...

I don't think I said that at all. I disagree with whatever it was you said to the effect that I believe laws likely currenty have the general anticipated and sometimes also measured quantities of heavy metals and other toxins that regulation built-in to the laws themselves in a sort of dual-chicken-egg type deal. I agree with you that the government just can't let the "regulate to the point of the people's starvation from overregulation conducted by a fundamentally incompetent govermment" happen. Just cuz I'm a dreamer doesn't mean I'm dreaming when it comes to RealPolitik.

I'm just saying that, there needs to be more buy-in from industries everywhere to self-police and just do the right fucking thing more often that not and almost always if even nominally possible. Giving companies loopholes and allowing other retarded parlor games in corporate governance and whatever the hell else is done in and by large corporations that ends up affecting us all in the end always. And its disproportionate, they often get off with the golden loot and we all have to hold the bag and split the post-mortem costs

Here is a good paper on that issue: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4116340/

The best detection method can now measure below 1 part per trillion. That's one microgram of lead in 1 kilogram of material.

Its kind of ironic that dark chocolate is more a rich person's thing on a practical level and that the shittier the chocolate (in the sense of real chocolate content which is heavily used as a proxy for quality), the safer it might be

Not the first time. White bread was originally a rich person's food compared to whole grain. It cost more to produce white flour. Now we promote whole grain and charge more for it.

Lol, I feel that way about anything "white" in terms of breads and such except like if its with italian food

Unfortunately (or fortunately? But I’m guessing this affects them to given the description of how this happens) I don’t see any brands I actually eat on this list, save for Lindt, but we’re talking one of those chocoballs two or three times a year.

They identify ones that are over the limit and ones that are under, but even the ones that are under aren't significantly under - it's not like a 100x reduction.

Sam's choice has 99% cadmium - only 1% below the limit. They point out that no level of cadmium is safe... so how can they say it's okay to eat Sam's Choice chocolate? Maybe they need to describe their limit choice better. It seems like they might have tested everything then chosen their limit so that half the products were okay.

Hershey and Nestle are addressing the problem by slowly replacing chocolate with brown-dyed wax so that no one realizes that there is no longer any actual chocolate in the products. Cadmium intake is down 15%, and profits are up 42%. That's win/win.

Correction: It's a brown "waxlike substance". Paraffin was too costly.

So... Tootsie rolls?

They've been user testing this product for decades!

This is interesting

Goal 2030: be the healthiest in the cemetery

There’s a joke I like a lot (fair warning: it is a stupid one).

An elderly husband and wife die in their sleep on the same night. They both appear before the pearly gates, where St. John takes them on a tour of the heavens, ending with the banquet hall. The table is overflowing with all sorts of delicious foods—sweets, beautiful cuts of meat, cakes, cocktails, etc. This puts the husband in a foul mood, which further degrades into full-on sulking when he sees the liquor cabinet and the humidor. Eventually, his wife says to him “okay, dear, out with it. What did I do wrong this time?”

The husband glares back at her and mutters under his breath, “you and your damn bran-muffins… we could have been here years ago.”