The article quoted a controversy between the testers saying there is no safe level and the manufacturers saying trace levels are impossible to avoid. But the article never mentioned a ppb or anything that would resolve the matter.
https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/
I think there will probably be a great deal of controversy about this until some scientists/food scientists take a look at the results and give us their view.
Heavy metals are unfortunately found in soil and can result in contaminated food & other products. The issue is the amount in the product & the amount you're consuming.
You're most likely not going to get lead poisoning from using a pea sized amount of toothpaste twice a day through brushing & spitting it out. If you swallowed the entire tube of toothpaste that might be a different story. This could be a situation where the pros outweigh the cons and it's just one of those inevitabilities we deal with in life. But, it's entirely possible some brands are using very poor quality control and it's highly contaminated.
If you're concerned, you can always get a blood test for heavy metals from your doctor.
The only other issue is that the Lead Free Mamas is providing affiliate links to sell some of the products they test and could definitely be seen as a conflict of interest.
Watching this comment tick down with more and more downvotes from people who get paid cushy software engineer salaries is absolutely comical.
This is slightly unrelated, but I remember in the 2000s, there was a vendor of protein powders who started testing his and other vendors protein powders to see if their labels were true & they weren't protein spiking (adding cheaper collagen instead of whey lying on the labels, essentially). He almost immediately got sued from several large mfgs and had to shut down.
So, for this group, and the fact that they're ignoring cease & desist letters from the toothpaste mfgs they're testing puts them in HUGE legal risk, I suspect, and would not be the least bit surprised if all the funds they're collecting are going to end up in lawyers pockets.
My dude, what do you think those affiliate links are?
But, I went on Consumer Reports recently looking for a good smoke detector and saw they are now using affiliate links for the products they test as well, and I consider them well established and above board. So, everyone will have to make their own ethical judgment on how to take the results.
Summary, the samurai passed all their standard rollover tests and got great remarks from the test drivers about its handling and maneuverability. So they changed the test specifically to make it fail, and kept trying until it failed. Then they presented that failure as happening under normal conditions, singled out the samurai by name, and said it easily rolled in cornering despite their own testing showing it was actually quite difficult to make it roll.
As a result, Suzuki and Isuzu both left the usdm. Today, the Suzuki Jimny is one of the most popular SUVs in the world and America can't have it because consumer reports lied deliberately to American consumers.
For food, you can use lead-free soil in clean-air areas to grow practically lead-free food/feed. You can't well filter it out of the finished product, that's right.
Is it? What harms would that prevent? How much would preventing those harms cost? Is the cost worth the gain?
They may be right that the limits are too high! Lead is really bad! But an article telling me that toothpaste is within the limits considered acceptable by the FDA, with no argument that those limits are too high, is not answering the questions I'm interested in.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead#Biological_effects
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_poisoning
In an ideal world, we would want no lead in our food and toothpaste (etc). But, I'm sure it's not economically possible for manufacturers/farmers to completely eliminate it, but it would be wise to avoid products that contain high levels of it.
Recall the Flint, Michigan lead pipes environment disaster, for example of a worse case scenario https://www.nrdc.org/stories/flint-water-crisis-everything-y...
Several children’s toothpastes, like Dr Brown’s Baby Toothpaste, did not test positive for any metals and did not contain the ingredients in question.
Plaque bacteria are best killed by mouth wash, not by toothpaste, and fluoride doesn't remove plaque itself any better than grit does.
With CPC mouthwash available the "but we need to microdose neurotoxins" arguments sound like 1950's doctors advocating cigarettes more every year.
Once the teeth start coming in, feel free to switch them to fluoride toothpaste?
In fact, I have used nothing but water (don’t worry, it’s fluoridated water!) to moisten a toothbrush and scrub my teeth, and guess what, even without any paste or gel, my teeth get really clean because it’s the bristles that remove food particles and scuzz from the surface of living bone.
Romans developed quite effective hygiene techniques by using powders. Again, a mechanical action of rubbing abrasive material against very resilient and living bones.
You’ll recall that handwashing also derives most of its benefits from the mechanical action of rubbing hands, soap forming bubbles, and those bubbles carrying away dirt down the drain as you rinse them away. “Foaming soap dispensers”, and hand sanitizers, and other fakery are robbing Americans of that all-important mechanical action.
It is actually quite difficult to formulate a natural tooth powder that lasts long enough (shelf stable) because they tend to get nasty with fungus and bacteria growing in the receptacle itself. Modern toothpastes are absolutely disgusting to human palates, because they are loaded with preservatives and stuff so that you can set the tube on the edge of your sink for seven years and not be infected by the substance itself.
It is a shame that worldwide supplies of lead and cadmium are contaminated by traces of toothpaste. Hopefully Secretary Kennedy can fight to Make America Healthy Again.
"The numbers are juxtaposed (in blue) to the “Action Level” proposed by the medical and scientific community in 2021 as part of the Baby Food Safety Act. ... The legitimacy of these levels as “Action Levels”/ “Levels of Concern” (even though they were not adopted as law) is mirrored by the legitimacy of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ level of concern for Lead in water, which is 1 ppb despite the FDA’s official “level of concern” for Lead in water being 15 ppb (you can read more about that here)."
From here: https://tamararubin.com/2025/02/crest-regular-toothpaste/
I only checked crest because I like fluoride.
Crest is at 7980% of the action level for lead, 300% for mercury, and 60% for arsenic.
For lead, later they say they detected 0.399mg/kg, which is 399 ppb by mass. The molecular weight of lead is 207.2. The molecular weight of water is 18.015. I'm not sure how the regulators calculate PPB, but dividing that out, I get 35.5 lead atoms per billion water molecules, which is above 15.
Which would put even the most contaminated products in their chart at the "safer than water" level.
I think it's fair to say we're looking at junk science here.
What consequences arise if the lead content of all supplements, toothpaste, food, water, and other substances is comprehensively calculated?
https://www.fda.gov/food/environmental-contaminants-food/lea...
The action levels for processed foods intended for babies and young children are as follows: * 10 parts per billion (ppb) for fruits, vegetables (excluding single-ingredient root vegetables), mixtures (including grain- and meat-based mixtures), yogurts, custards/puddings, and single-ingredient meats; * 20 ppb for single-ingredient root vegetables; and * 20 ppb for dry infant cereals.
The FDA has not established a specific, legally binding limit for lead content in dietary supplements, but it has developed interim reference levels (IRLs) for daily lead intake. These IRLs are 2.2 mcg per day for children and 8.8 mcg per day for females of childbearing age.
"The federal Baby Food Safety Act of 2024, which is stalled in Congress, called for lead limits in kids’ food or personal care products like toothpaste of five parts per billion (ppb). California’s limit on lead in baby food is two ppb, but it does not include toothpaste."
"Most toothpastes exceeded those thresholds."
"The FDA’s current lead limit for children is 10,000 ppb, and 20,000 ppb for adults. None exceeded the FDA limits."
"The state of Washington recently enacted a law with 1,000 ppb limits – several exceeded that and have been reported, Rubin said, but companies have time to get in compliance with the new rules."
https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/
Maybe HN should just link to this?
Incidentally, apparently, they test based on donations from their reader base. Most of their readers are interested in weird fluoride-free stuff.
If you want them to test more mainstream brands, you can send them money:
https://tamararubin.com/2025/02/lead-safe-mama-llc-fundraise...
I'm not endorsing them, and have no idea how well they conduct their tests, etc. There might be a better way to fund independent testing of consumer products.
The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers
No, it would be totally unworkable to do anything else. Plenty of normal from the ground food stuffs have low but safe levels of toxic substances in them. You wouldn't be able to preserve meat or smoke cheese. The list would go on forever.
I specified artificial for a reason. I'm talking about unnaturally altered environments and manufacturing (and for the most part, its the latter but some activities, e.g. mining or poor agriculture practices, have knock off effects that poison environments).
I'm not talking about naturally occurring lead. I realize trace amounts can be found in things like vegetables and meats even when care is taken to use clean soil (e.g. the soil doesn't have any lead contamination, which unfortunately this is not regulated very well in the US) and clean processing methods.
However, these 'safe amounts' are void of any real effort to understand them in combination. For example, lets say product A is deemed to allow a 'safe amount' of 10000 ppb, product B 8000 ppb, product C 12500 ppb and so on. These ppb amounts are determined without thought to other forms of lead exposure from other products. If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time.
Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences
> If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time
There's simply no evidence to support the broad claim that different toxic substances below their safe thresholds cumulatively are unsafe.
> Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences
Sure, but you can't in practice prevent ever conceivable negative outcome. You have to think about tradeoffs.
It might turn out it's better to simply kill the animal minutes before consumption, as is done in some cultures for fish, rather than killing it weeks in advance and preserving it through refrigeration/drying/salting/canning/etc.
Lead is well known to cause developmental and particularly mental development problems in children. Is it economically feasible? I don’t know. What would you pay for an extra 10 IQ points for your child? Better emotional regulation, fewer violent outbursts? These are all things lead is known to affect. I’d sure pay extra for lead free. I’m sure you could convince a few million hippy parents to go for it too.
As for preserved meat and smoked cheese… if it can’t be done safely I’m not sure I want it. Haven’t preserved meats been linked to pancreatic cancer? Once we discover that we give people the chance to make other choices.
Clearly no one here is saying we should work to prevent lead exposure in toothpaste.
> if it can’t be done safely I’m not sure I want it
Then don't eat smoked cheese.
Then multiply that by 100 to give a likely upper bound of something very hard to measure.
Then make companies pay that as a "harm fee" for each product they sell, as a tax to the government.
Do the same for everything toxic.
Before long, companies will be trying very hard to keep toxic products out of the food chain simply to help their profits.
You are conflating hazard and risk. A thing can be hazardous without being a risk. If you eliminated everything hazardous, regardless of its level of risk, we would not have cars or airplanes or electronics or plastics or most food products. That is an extreme position to take. The correct thing to do is decide on an acceptable level of risk, and enforce that (either personally, or through the gov't; there are pros & cons to each).
I wrote about this a while back in the context of the black plastic brouhaha: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42471665
However, there is a ton of exposure that constitutes inappropriate risk because it can be mitigated reasonably. There's no reason you have to have lead in toothpaste, for example. We know it can be manufactured lead free and work just as well.
We do this through out the food chain and with manufactured goods and even when science changes and clearly suggests that we need to lower exposure levels of a previously allowable amount of a toxin industry fights tooth and nail. It becomes political rather than a strictly health and scientific assessment.
> there is a ton of exposure that constitutes inappropriate risk
Like what? What are the harms that are caused by the too high level of risk?
> it can be mitigated reasonably
Can they? What would the cost to introduce the mitigations be? Are the harms solved worth the increased costs?
These are interesting questions and I 100% believe that there are good changes to be made here. But, a study showing that current products are already below a set risk threshold is not evidence that the risk threshold is too high. That requires a different kind of study & evidence.
If the adverse effects happen decades after you'll statistically be deceased I'm not sure it's fair to say there's no safe level of exposure.
It's not at the expense of consumers and the environment. It could make much of what consumers buy prohibitively expensive, for potentially no benefit.
The state of Washington recently enacted a law with 1,000 ppb limits – several exceeded that” So none exceeded 10,000 ppb several exceeded 1,000 ppb