I'm a little surprised at the initial confusion about the source of lead, or perhaps it's the way the article has been written. As someone who grew up in India, our school textbooks in the 90s had a list of common food adulterants, and turmeric adulteration with lead chromate was common knowledge to middle schoolers. I recall the curriculum included how to detect adulteration with simple at home tests. After turmeric, the next suspect probably would be yellow lentils.
EDIT: actually the next suspect should be red chillis, adulterated with lead oxide.
On an aside, food adulteration used to be such a common social menace in India in the 70s & 80s, such that it was a common theme in the backdrop of Bollywood films, with the hero taking on local mafia bosses who also dabble in food adulteration. India did a mediocre job controlling the rampant food adulteration, with the last major case I recall being an outbreak of Epidemic Dropsy in 1998 due to contamination of mustard oil. There's been cases every once in a while, though I suspect in those cases it is inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields.
As an ABCD, likewise. My mom told me to specifically buy turmeric at western grocery stores (as opposed to other spices, which could be had for better prices at Indian grocery stores) because of concerns around lead.
tbf lead testing is pretty standard in Indian spice brands for a long time now, though for some reason the brands don't really advertise it. Reputable brands like MDH and Everest would be pretty safe.
This reminds me of how scurvy was apparently well known in the age of sail but sort of forgotten with the industrial revolution. It showed back up again in Arctic expeditions from what I understand.
I don't recall where the the Arctic expeditions slot into this saga, but for ages we understood the lemon link but we hadn't identified Vitamin C yet.
So there was a moment in time where the British Royal Navy was carrying around concentrated lime juice to fight scurvy (hence, Limey). Only the vendor that made the lime juice processed it in copper vessels, destroying most of the vitamin C.
It doesn't take much vitamin C to prevent scurvy. But it does take some.
I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect it's the flavor: iron oxide tastes metallic, lead oxide tastes somewhat sweet. That's partially why you hear about kids eating lead paint chips and not bits of rust.
1. The Water Test: Take a glass of warm water and add a teaspoon of your turmeric powder to it. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes. If the turmeric powder settles down, it is pure. If it doesn’t settle to the bottom and leaves a dark yellow colour, it is adulterated.
2. The Palm Test: Take a pinch of your turmeric powder and rub it into the palm of your hand for a few seconds, then turn your palm over. Pure turmeric will stick to your palm and leave a yellow stain, whereas adulterated turmeric will mostly fall off.
I recall we did simple tests like this in school - we had to bring in samples of foodstuffs from home to do the tests, and the school would provide a positive control. This must have been the seventh grade or so?
inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields
You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free". To think that some people in the US voluntarily drink yellowroot tea because apparently it helps with diabetes is scary - the chemical similiarity between sanguinarine in argemone and berberine in yellowroot is just too great for it to be a good idea.
I don't know anything about the tea you refer to, but "the chemical is similar" is not a great signal, IMO. You can even have the exact same chemical with different chirality having dramatically different effects on the body (eg: l- and d- methamphetamine, and plenty of others).
Not saying it has 0 relevance, but I wouldn't take it to mean much on its own. It's like people being scared of mercury dental fillings because "it has mercury in it, which is poisonous." That doesn't follow.
> You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free"
This was a response to the 1998 outbreak. I remember in the early days it was suggested the culprit was argemone poisoning, and honestly that's what I thought it was all this time. Wikipedia suggests it was adulteration with white petroleum.
One would think that they could've solved the mystery easily without such white woman if everyone knew about that, but apparently one would be wrong. Generations of people poisoned by this practice and everyone was just fine with it?
Are their any trustworthy, mainstream sources of spices in the U.S.?
E.g., if I buy turmeric from Walmart or Whole Foods, can I safely assume that they're monitoring the product streams for lead?
EDIT: I just saw a sibling comment about a company named "American Turmeric". I'm curious about more mainstream sellers, who might possibly monitor other spices as well. I'd prefer to not play whack-a-mole on a spice-by-spice basis.
- "The lack of regulation leaves much of the monitoring of heavy metal levels to companies. [Consumer Reports] contacted all the ones with products in our tests to see how they limited heavy metals."
- "Of the companies that replied to our questions—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Costco, Bolner’s Fiesta, Gebhardt, Litehouse, McCormick, Roland Foods, Spice Islands, Target, and Whole Foods—a few said they require their suppliers to have a program for controlling or testing for heavy metals. But only three—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Bolner’s Fiesta, and McCormick—specifically said they test products in their manufacturing plants for heavy metals."
After reading that article I personally won't trust any I buy from anywhere unless it's from a reputable source and actually states that it's tested/lead-free. Yikes.
I buy from thespicehouse.com - they seem to be careful, but I haven't inquired about turmeric. I should send them an email. (I prefer them over Penzey's, which is the same family, because they have dried fenugreek leaves.)
Some supplement companies/nootropic companies purport to do 3rd party certificate of analysis with microbe, and heavy metal testing. You can find them on Reddit. Can you believe the companies? I kinda do.
If they don't publish them, email and ask for a COA (certificate of analysis) with heavy metal data. If you know your lot #, include that too. It's not perfect, you're trusting not only the company but wherever they sourced their spices from, but they DO have the info, and it's better than nothing. p.s. "random" testing is a joke. Also will second the burlap and barrel rec for turmeric specifically.
Source: worked in spices for a bit.
If you're consuming it as a supplement it's a lot cheaper (and safer) to just make it yourself. The process is basically: cut it up into thin slices, dry it out in the oven, grind it up.
If you're not taking it in supplement quantities, then I'm not sure I'd be tremendously worried about any other contamination...
"Lead in Spices, Herbal Remedies, and Ceremonial Powders Sampled from Home Investigations for Children with Elevated Blood Lead Levels — North Carolina, 2011–2018": https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6746a2.htm
Yeah! I read this maybe a couple years ago and now lead test anything w/ turmeric in it (tea, actual turmeric, etc.) Haven't come up positive yet though, thank goodness.
Can recommend just lead testing things. Test kits are cheap, it's very easy to do, you really want to know if you're eating/drinking lead (especially if you have kids). Also can recommend getting a water filter. It doesn't really fix dishwashing but for drinking or making things w/ water it's very easy -- you can get pretty big tanks where you could conceivably even make a pot of spaghetti and such.
People and companies knowingly contaminating food products with poisons like lead, should be put in jail. Companies knowingly selling such products, should be at least heavily fined, possibly prosecuted as well. Bottom line, this is clearly poisoning (and killing people) to make a few extra bucks. There should be no leniency whatsoever for this clear evil.
54,000 hospitalized and 6 dead from intentional milk contamination
> A number of trials were conducted by the Chinese government resulting in two executions, three sentences of life imprisonment, two 15-year prison sentences, and the firing or forced resignation of seven local government officials and the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). The former chairwoman of China's Sanlu dairy was sentenced to life in prison.
A corporation of any size caught doing this with any amount of knowing about it (i.e. not sabotage by a troubled lone wolf) should be seized, sold for parts, and the proceeds from the fire sale going to the victims and if anything is left over afterwards, the state.
There is no fine value appropriate that isn't "considerably more than the company is worth" for that kind of blatant violation.
You should not get to continue to exist after poisoning people for profit margin.
I don't understand how lead pigments are still legal in some parts of the world at all. What kind of things need a bright yellow color that will slowly poison you if you touch it?
Also, those handheld XRF spectrometers are amazing tech. I wish they were more affordable.
In Europe, many countries banned lead paints for household use already in the 1920'ies or even earlier. In 2003 there was an EU wide harmonization outlawing lead paints. The article you linked to is apparently about some lawsuit where the EU commission had allowed an exception to this.
> "Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient. It's cheaper." ~ Valery Legasov, Chernobyl
The broad outline of these facts has been known for decades (that spice processors intentionally adulterate turmeric with the yellow pigment, lead chromate). These are sold in the First World as well, and are culpable e.g. for acute lead poisoning in children in the USA:
- "The study, in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Public Health Service and the US Surgeon General, also describes several cases of child lead poisoning in the US that have been linked to consumption of spices, including turmeric."
> To mask flawed turmeric, some processors began dusting the roots with lead chromate — an orange-yellow industrial pigment used to color plastics and furniture.
I don't really want lead in my plastic or my furniture either...
In fact, I think there would be a good case for simply banning all mining of lead. Nearly all remaining uses of it (bullets, roof flashing, counterweights, car batteries) seem to still have a pretty high risk of contamination of either the environment or the workers who make or recycle products.
It's used medically, for example for nurses and doctors who work with radioactive tracers; they wear big aprons with lead in it which absorb any radiation that would be ok once in a while but that you don't want exposed to every single day at work.
I wonder if this turmeric spread and was sold in the West. My mother recently started taking "golden turmeric" and insists that it's a cure for a lot of ills. Maybe that's true I don't know, she sent me some articles a couple years ago. It was clear that she was influenced by Facebook groups.
Please ask her to stop taking turmeric often. I couldn't find the source, but I remember a liver specialist on twitter, calling out on such practice. He explained how he had patients with liver failure specifically due to regular turmeric intake, sold as natural medicine.
Doctors aren't necessarily scientists. Anecdotal evidence isn't as strong as randomized controlled trials to establish causation. It could have been the high fat content of many recipes that call for turmeric.
The integrity of health and wellness products is always suspect. The MMS people are especially wingnuts.
It makes me think small-scale sales of spices, compounds, and ingredients on Amazon are at risk for adulteration.
Perhaps what we need is a simplified bluetooth mass spectrometer device with an app setup for testing purity of powdered substances from foods to medications. This seems like a ready-made Kickstarter project an Ivy/Pac-12 engineering bio+ee team could handle. MEMS devices using cheap IR photonics are in the pipe (no pun intended). Gas chrom is like listening to music on vinyl.
I suggest asking your Indian friends where they buy their spices from, and check out your local Indian grocery store - the spices are from major Indian brands and undergo a lot of testing, with additional certification for export to the US.
>check out your local Indian grocery store - the spices are from major Indian brands and undergo a lot of testing, with additional certification for export to the US.
Well, uh, I'm no expert, having just read about this here, today. But what you are saying flies in the face of half of the comments here, doesn't it? What makes you sure that the "local Indian grocery store" is getting high-quality, tested spices?
So they leveraged the Stanford name and got the government to pay attention and take actions. That's great for the people in Bangladesh but still, it's not groundbreaking research that they made it out to be.
Yeah, but then they couldn't have wrote a multi-page flowery article about how smart they were interspersed with social justice. What fun would that be?
Readit News
EDIT: actually the next suspect should be red chillis, adulterated with lead oxide.
On an aside, food adulteration used to be such a common social menace in India in the 70s & 80s, such that it was a common theme in the backdrop of Bollywood films, with the hero taking on local mafia bosses who also dabble in food adulteration. India did a mediocre job controlling the rampant food adulteration, with the last major case I recall being an outbreak of Epidemic Dropsy in 1998 due to contamination of mustard oil. There's been cases every once in a while, though I suspect in those cases it is inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields.
Edit: found this page which is amazing https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/
At the same time, it feels so sad this page is necessary.
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So there was a moment in time where the British Royal Navy was carrying around concentrated lime juice to fight scurvy (hence, Limey). Only the vendor that made the lime juice processed it in copper vessels, destroying most of the vitamin C.
It doesn't take much vitamin C to prevent scurvy. But it does take some.
Why would anyone adulterated red chillis with lead oxide instead of perfectly safe iron oxide, common food colorant?
2. The Palm Test: Take a pinch of your turmeric powder and rub it into the palm of your hand for a few seconds, then turn your palm over. Pure turmeric will stick to your palm and leave a yellow stain, whereas adulterated turmeric will mostly fall off.
https://www.vasantmasala.com/blog/how-to-check-adulteration-...
You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free". To think that some people in the US voluntarily drink yellowroot tea because apparently it helps with diabetes is scary - the chemical similiarity between sanguinarine in argemone and berberine in yellowroot is just too great for it to be a good idea.
Not saying it has 0 relevance, but I wouldn't take it to mean much on its own. It's like people being scared of mercury dental fillings because "it has mercury in it, which is poisonous." That doesn't follow.
This was a response to the 1998 outbreak. I remember in the early days it was suggested the culprit was argemone poisoning, and honestly that's what I thought it was all this time. Wikipedia suggests it was adulteration with white petroleum.
Deleted Comment
The problem with lead in tumeric seems to extend beyond Bangladesh.
Are their any trustworthy, mainstream sources of spices in the U.S.?
E.g., if I buy turmeric from Walmart or Whole Foods, can I safely assume that they're monitoring the product streams for lead?
EDIT: I just saw a sibling comment about a company named "American Turmeric". I'm curious about more mainstream sellers, who might possibly monitor other spices as well. I'd prefer to not play whack-a-mole on a spice-by-spice basis.
You can safely assume absolutely nothing.
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29375003 ("Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead (consumerreports.org)") (2021)
- "The lack of regulation leaves much of the monitoring of heavy metal levels to companies. [Consumer Reports] contacted all the ones with products in our tests to see how they limited heavy metals."
- "Of the companies that replied to our questions—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Costco, Bolner’s Fiesta, Gebhardt, Litehouse, McCormick, Roland Foods, Spice Islands, Target, and Whole Foods—a few said they require their suppliers to have a program for controlling or testing for heavy metals. But only three—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Bolner’s Fiesta, and McCormick—specifically said they test products in their manufacturing plants for heavy metals."
https://www.burlapandbarrel.com/products/turmeric
If you're not taking it in supplement quantities, then I'm not sure I'd be tremendously worried about any other contamination...
"Lead in Spices, Herbal Remedies, and Ceremonial Powders Sampled from Home Investigations for Children with Elevated Blood Lead Levels — North Carolina, 2011–2018": https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6746a2.htm
"Analysis of Lead in Spices Obtained from Bulk Food Stores" (PDF): http://libjournals.unca.edu/ncur/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...
"Heavy Metals in Cultural Products": https://www.epa.gov/children/heavy-metals-cultural-products
Can recommend just lead testing things. Test kits are cheap, it's very easy to do, you really want to know if you're eating/drinking lead (especially if you have kids). Also can recommend getting a water filter. It doesn't really fix dishwashing but for drinking or making things w/ water it's very easy -- you can get pretty big tanks where you could conceivably even make a pot of spaghetti and such.
54,000 hospitalized and 6 dead from intentional milk contamination
> A number of trials were conducted by the Chinese government resulting in two executions, three sentences of life imprisonment, two 15-year prison sentences, and the firing or forced resignation of seven local government officials and the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). The former chairwoman of China's Sanlu dairy was sentenced to life in prison.
Normally I'd call this sort of language hyperbolic, but in this case I'm not sure it is.
You know people are consuming this product. Literally poisoning people to save a few dollars? It's inexplicable.
There is no fine value appropriate that isn't "considerably more than the company is worth" for that kind of blatant violation.
You should not get to continue to exist after poisoning people for profit margin.
Also, those handheld XRF spectrometers are amazing tech. I wish they were more affordable.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434842/
[2] https://speciation.net/News/EU-court-rules-Commission-author...
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2017/high-levels-of-lea... (2017)
- "The study, in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Public Health Service and the US Surgeon General, also describes several cases of child lead poisoning in the US that have been linked to consumption of spices, including turmeric."
In fact, I think there would be a good case for simply banning all mining of lead. Nearly all remaining uses of it (bullets, roof flashing, counterweights, car batteries) seem to still have a pretty high risk of contamination of either the environment or the workers who make or recycle products.
Hopefully the turmeric she takes is safe :(
https://www.oekotest.de/essen-trinken/Kurkuma-Labor-findet-M...
Please inform this to her.
It makes me think small-scale sales of spices, compounds, and ingredients on Amazon are at risk for adulteration.
Perhaps what we need is a simplified bluetooth mass spectrometer device with an app setup for testing purity of powdered substances from foods to medications. This seems like a ready-made Kickstarter project an Ivy/Pac-12 engineering bio+ee team could handle. MEMS devices using cheap IR photonics are in the pipe (no pun intended). Gas chrom is like listening to music on vinyl.
It actually tastes better that way, richer and more earthy.
It does leave your fingers stained, but that is actually a benefit since it is a conversation starter.
https://www.americanturmeric.com/how-we-test-our-turmeric ("Laboratory Results - Buy With Confidence")
https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-laboratory-image24729... ("Royalty-Free Stock Photo: Laboratory with many operated science instrument [sic] and computer")
Well, uh, I'm no expert, having just read about this here, today. But what you are saying flies in the face of half of the comments here, doesn't it? What makes you sure that the "local Indian grocery store" is getting high-quality, tested spices?