Lead in Chocolate?

[-]gwillen3y103

I mostly agree, but I'm particularly surprised at the results for the Hershey's 45%. That's not all that dark (i.e. children might want to eat it), and 2 oz is not all that much chocolate for a child to eat, and it looks like 2 oz would be enough to rise above the less stringent FDA limit for children.

[-]jefftk3y31

Technically it wouldn't be above the FDA limit for lead for kids if they're eating 2oz, because that's measured in ppm not ug/d. But yeah, that might be the most worrying one on there.

[-]swimchord3y51

I have cocoa powder for breakfast every morning (mixed with yoghurt, fruit, nuts). Since my understanding is that cocoa powder will have the highest concentration of heavy metals (relative to other chocolate products), I wanted to do an extremely quick investigation to see if I reached a similar conclusion to you.

From consumerlabs.com (I haven't paid for their full report yet, just viewing the free summary): "most cocoa powders to have high concentrations of cadmium -- around 1 to 1.5 mcg per gram -- which is much higher than the World Health Organization limit of 0.3 mcg per gram. The dark chocolate bars we tested had concentrations which were about 1/10th the amount found in cocoa."

The serving size for the cocoa powder I have currently is 1 Tbsp=5 g. I would estimate I use less than 1 Tbsp in my daily scoop (maybe 3 g), but I'll stick w 5 g as an upper limit.

Assuming that my brand has an above average cadmium concentration (in reality, I have no idea), let's say 2 mcg/g.

So perhaps I'm getting (5 g)*(2 mcg/g)=10 mcg of cadmium per day from cocoa powder.

You cite the EPA limit as 1µg/kg/d. I found a source that says "The EU has set a TWI (tolerable weekly intake) limit for cadmium of 2.5 µg/kg body weight"--this is 0.35 µg/kg/d.

I weigh about 55 kg, so my limits would be 55 mcg/d (EPA) or 19 mcg/d (EU).

So my cadmium consumption from cocoa powder alone could be about half the EU limit for total cadmium consumption. This is not scarily high, but doesn't seem great either, since there are significant sources of cadmium in the diet besides chocolate. This study of Americans says: "The average dietary Cd consumption in the population was 4.63 μg/day, or 0.54 μg/kg body weight/week, which is 22% of the tolerable weekly intake (TWI) of 2.5 μg/kg body weight/week." This study of Belgians says: "The population mean, median and 95th percentile of the dietary intake values were 0.98, 0.85 and 2.02 µg kg⁻¹ body weight per week respectively. Two percent of the Belgian adult population has a dietary Cd intake above the recent TWI of 2.5 µg kg⁻¹ body weight established by EFSA in 2009. Cereal products and potatoes contribute for more than 60% to Cd intake."

So my personal conclusions:

I would definitely buy low-cadmium cocoa powder if it were easy to buy and easy to identify (and have confidence in the measurements, etc)
Assuming I can't find a good source of low-cadmium cocoa powder, I haven't really decided whether I will reduce my consumption of cocoa powder. Probably I will just because the cost of not eating cocoa powder seems low to me. But I won't really obsess over it.

I didn't look into lead.

[-]Mateusz Bagiński3y40

Any suspicion about where these metals may be coming from? Cocoa, milk, or sth else?

[-]Daniel V3y20

Thanks for the analysis, and I mostly agree with your interpretation (having done no further research into this myself), but I'm confused how dividing by 1000 is the problem here. The levels are "basically fine" because 9*-they are well below the FDA/EPA limits, but the CA levels are only about 1 order of magnitude lower, not 3. If they had divided by 100, would we be interrogating their divisor choice? (The current implication is that that arbitrary approach would have been fine since it would correspond to FDA/EPA levels). It makes me think that maybe the impetus to question the arbitrary approach mainly stems from the conclusions not fitting our palate.

[-]jefftk3y31

I think if the proposition had required the state to set a level for ongoing exposure, that would be fine. But instead it tells the state that the way they have to do that is by determining the level of single dose that just barely doesn't give birth defects and dividing by 1,000. This is a really rough proxy, and ignores things like how quickly different materials are shed from the body. Learning that they were using such a rough measurement mostly pushes me in the direction of ignoring their level and paying attention instead to the levels that the federal government sets.

(I also initially misunderstood the role of the 1000x adjustment and edited the post based on Facebook discussion)

To answer your question, if they instead had a divisor of 100 or 10 I would still be advocating to put very little weight on their limit.

	µg/d	ppm (µg/g)
CA Prop 65 lead MADL	0.5	0.018
FDA kid lead limit	3	0.1
FDA pregnant adult lead limit	12.5	0.44

	µg/d	ppm (µg/g)
CA Prop 65 cadmium MADL	4.1	0.15
EPA child cadmium limit	25	0.88
EPA adult cadmium limit	58	2.0

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

41

41

41