There is a lot of testing available, that would be very good to have the results for, especially in our food.
Heavy metals are easy. A little more expensive are the organic compounds: think herbicides, fungicides, insecticides.
There is no agency that monitors those ingredients in food, not even in baby food.
Fresh strawberries in January in central Canada are awesome, but at what cost, to long term health? No one knows.
There is sadly, no agency that over sees that for consumers.
The consumer report review actually is a bit reassuring in that most brands _don't_ really have high lead levels, it's the cadmium you have to be concerned with. This matches what ConsumerLabs similarly found.
However both reviews indeed show a lot of brands have high cadmium, with the worst offenders about 2x the california 4mcg limit. But this is the limit present in food, it doesn't tell you how much is absorbed. I assume the california limit might already try to account for this, but in the large scale 2x over the limit doesn't seem that bad, it's basically within order of magnitude.
Especially when non-invasive screening of food products for lead (& other heavy metals) sounds very easy to do at scale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-ray_fluorescence#Usage
I had never heard of them before until reading this article, they seem like a good organization to donate to.
https://thechocolatelife.com/cadmium-in-chocolate/
However both reviews indeed show a lot of brands have high cadmium, with the worst offenders about 2x the california 4mcg limit. But this is the limit present in food, it doesn't tell you how much is absorbed. I assume the california limit might already try to account for this, but in the large scale 2x over the limit doesn't seem that bad, it's basically within order of magnitude.
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https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem...
And here is the Hacker News post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34033799
The overwhelming majority of their product line is focused on milk chocolate.
Also, the expensive brand Hu I got at Whole Foods is on the lead list and the Ghirardelli at cheaper stores isn’t. Whoops.