Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

https://www.consumerreports.org/food-safety/your-herbs-and-spices-might-contain-arsenic-cadmium-and-lead/

by jtc331 • 5 years ago

174 119 5 years ago

postpawl• 5 years ago

All the thymes and oreganos? Wow

The good news is both of them are easy to grow indoors or outdoors, and they're perennial. Perennial herbs include rosemary, lavender, marjoram, tarragon, sage, mint, parsely, lemon balm, chives, sorrel, yarrow, chicory, savory, bay laurel, lovage, hyssop, anise, chamomile, bergamot, alfalfa, clover... the list goes on. You can use them fresh, or make your own dried herbs.

On top of that, variants of thyme work as a hearty no-hassle replacement for grass, and it even flowers.

christophilus• 5 years ago

Do you have a recommended place to get those? Also, I’ve got clay soil here, and thyme has never done well for me. I’d love to replace swaths of my lawn with it, as I really like it’s appearance and fragrance, so any link to those varieties would be much appreciated.

jffry• 5 years ago

A tangential word of warning for anybody feeling inspired to DIY some fresh herbs: mint spreads very aggressively. If you want to plant some, put it in a pot on a patio or pavement to stop it from getting into the ground.

If you do not, in a few years you'll have mint growing absolutely everywhere.

jobe_br• 5 years ago

Pretty easy to grow your own, from seed even, but most plant nurseries will have these in their herb section.

Aardwolf• 5 years ago

Any risk of getting those elements in them if you grow them yourself, through the soil, water, fertilizer, products or the seeds?

dsizzle3• 5 years ago

It's not clear where the heavy metals are coming from. One possibility mentioned in the article is the soil itself. I wonder if even potting soil is tested for heavy metals? If heavy metals get through whatever food testing is done by the FDA, McCormick, etc., I don't have great confidence that soil testing is any better. That said, I would think growing your own is safer.

BostonEnginerd• 5 years ago

I wonder if those plants are just particularly good at leaching lead from soil.

Phytoremediation is an area of active study for cleaning toxic soils.

refurb4• 5 years ago

Arsenic in rice is due to exactly that, pulling naturally occurring arsenic from the water used for irrigation.

DantesKite• 5 years ago

I read somewhere that tea leaves are great at absorbing fluoride from the ground.

Eelongate5• 5 years ago

CONSUMER REPORTS tested 126 herbs and spices from 38 brands for arsenic, cadmium, and lead. (We did not test spices that tend to be used in baking, such as cinnamon and nutmeg.) We tested two or three samples from different lots of each product.

This testing is frustratingly sparse, couldn't they find garlic powder in Trader Joe's? They're missing many brands for many of these spices. And I don't think you can bake heavy metals out of food, so why did they omit cinnamon?

What is a concerned consumer like myself supposed to do now? Eat food without spices? Buy test kits and test spices myself? I guess I could write a letter to my congresspeople to tell the FDA to do their goddamn jobs, but I don't expect that to work.

smegger001• 5 years ago

You mean you expect the government to fund themselves enough to actually do there job?

Eelongate5• 5 years ago

How much did CR spend to buy these spices? A few hundred dollars? A thousand at most? I don't know how much the tests themselves cost to run, but I can find lead test kits on Amazon for under $20. The biggest cost would doubtlessly be manpower so.. put some interns on the job?

But yes, I expect the FDA's lame excuse will be "Gee wiz we wish we could do our jobs but we need another billion dollars for what you're suggesting." Such is the way with the American government.

malwarebytess2• 5 years ago

What am I supposed to do?

Nothing, probably. Heavy metals come from natural sources in the ground as well as from the air which then settles into the topsoil. They also come from decades old insecticides/pesticides or old infrastructure left to rot on farms.

Cadmium and arsenic in particular are among the most abundant substances on the Earth. Every bit of food you eat likely has them both.

If you are worried and want to reduce exposure, probably the best you can do is buy local instead of imports. Know the land your food comes from and its history.

gruez• 5 years ago

If you are worried and want to reduce exposure, probably the best you can do is buy local instead of imports. Know the land your food comes from and its history.

from the article:

Also troubling: There was no single predictor of which products contained higher levels of heavy metals—for example, brand name didn’t matter, and neither did “organic” or “packed in USA” claims.

I'm also not sure how feasible it is to "Know the land your food comes from and its history". What are you supposed to do, go to the farmers market for all your herbs, interview the farmers, and then somehow determine heavy metal concentrations from that?

Eelongate5• 5 years ago

It's not just a matter of heavy metals in the soil getting accidentally sucked up by the plants. From this PDF linked from the article: http://article.images.consumerreports.org/prod/content/dam/s...

In addition, we investigated possible adulteration, specifically the addition of bulking and/or coloring agents, in four of the 15 spices that are commonly adulterated in these ways.

So at least in some of the cases, deliberate adulteration with heavy metal containing dyes/etc is a real possibility. This should be (probably is?) a criminal matter but it seems the FDA isn't particularly concerned about it. This disturbs me.

ClumsyPilot• 5 years ago

"buy local instead of imports. Know the land your food comes from and its history."

I am happy to study history of all 300,000 square kilometers of farmland, but are the producers of this toxic crap going to pay for my time or health damage they inflict?

OneLeggedCat• 5 years ago

This testing is frustratingly sparse

A very common problem with Consumer Reports. Very. They also never make that shitty data's origins easily available for critique.

I have subscribed to them for over twenty years. This has always been a problem with them. Good intentions (that's my belief), but poor statistical execution and evidence.

Natsu• 5 years ago

Looking at the reports, it seems more like the problem is with certain spices especially basil, ginger, oregano, and thyme more than any particular brand. Some of those seem to be all red or very close to it.

That said, there are a few spices where some brands are just terrible compared to all others. And I do see that there are a few common brands like "Great Value" that seem rather below average, failing where many others succeeded, which may be worth avoiding.

But yeah, I wish they had more consistent tables of these spices.

code_duck2• 5 years ago

You can grow your own (assuming you can find clean soil…). I harvested enough oregano this year to last months.

01100011• 5 years ago

Yeah but get your soil tested. Lead and arsenic are natural and there's nothing saying they aren't in your soil. Pollution from old lead paint or nearby roads is real.

oasisbob2• 5 years ago

I find it frustrating that they didn't test many foreign brands, but recommend against import nonetheless.

Laxmi Turmeric is the one Indian (for import) spice brand I recognize on the list. Testing Devi, and the other common import brands, as well as true desi brands would have been interesting.

"Curry powder" is a weird one to test. Might as well compare Italian blends as well.

_abox• 5 years ago

In 31 products, levels of lead were so high that they exceeded the maximum amount anyone should have in a day, according to CR’s experts.

Uhh there is no amount of lead anyone should have in a day. It's cumulative and harmful and we don't need it for anything.

Think twice about bringing back herbs and spices from travel abroad. Heavy metal content can be much higher in those products, according to other research. U.S. companies may buy the highest-quality herbs and spices to import, Ronholm says, which could leave lower-quality versions to be sold in the country of origin.

Depends from where of course. I'm pretty sure the EU has stricter food safety regulations than the US. Though enforcement varies by country.

oasisbob2• 5 years ago

Uhh there is no amount of lead anyone should have in a day

That's very easy to say, but it's another thing to require that products with lead above the level of detection should be kept from markets and destroyed.

Start clearing products with any detectable heavy metal content, and you'll start clearing shelves.

zamfi• 5 years ago

Start clearing products with any detectable heavy metal content, and you'll start clearing shelves.

Great. And maybe then producers will take it more seriously?

nradov• 5 years ago

Lead is present in the natural environment. Avoid it as much as you reasonably can, but it's impossible to eliminate it entirely from your diet.

refurb4• 5 years ago

Uhh there is no amount of lead anyone should have in a day.

Unless you want to isolated yourself from everything, you're going to be exposed to things like arsenic, lead and other toxins from natural sources. That's why we have minimal allowable exposure limits.

jandrewrogers2• 5 years ago

I'm pretty sure the EU has stricter food safety regulations than the US.

Interestingly, the US is notable for having just about the highest food safety and quality standards in the world, and these regulations systematically block the import of many food goods into the US. Per this source [0], the US is second after Canada; other sources move the countries around a bit but the US is always right up around the top. The US has long been accused, correctly in my view, of being obsessed with excessively sterile and verifiably clean food supply chains beyond any statistically reasonable health concern, which has precluded the import of many popular products from the EU to the US.

The US has many problems but strict regulation of food quality is not one of them, they are aggressively skeptical by default. I don’t know if it is constructive but it is definitely a thing the US does.

[0] https://impact.economist.com/sustainability/project/food-sec... (sort by quality and safety)

GekkePrutser• 5 years ago

I thought the US was not as good because of the conditions locally in slaughterhouses, using "pink slime" in burgers etc. Those things definitely don't fly in the EU. I read about these in "Fast Food Nation".

I have a feeling the US is stricter when it comes to importing foods but not as strict with locally produced items. But I don't have a good reference of this. If I'm wrong I'm sorry.

doitLP2• 5 years ago

I hate this. I’m up to my eyeballs trying to keep my newborn away from all the toxic shit that’s in every part of his life, BP* in plastics, flame retardants in clothes and mattresses and rugs, heavy metals in baby food and now in herbs, micro plastics in food, radioactivity and mercury in farmland around coal fired power plants, etc etc etc.

The negative externalities on dangerous chemicals is so very high; what am I supposed to do, test my fucking pepper? The burden of safety is squarely on the consumer after it’s already too late to prevent. I don’t know what to do anymore. At this point it’s safe to assume he is ingesting poisons that affect child organ and brain development in everything.

stephen_g2• 5 years ago

I hate it too. The one thing that does make me a bit optimistic is that firstly that for quite a few of the big issues, things are gradually getting better (leaded petrol having been phased out, PBDEs are on the way out, average quantities of things like phthalates and PFOA in people's blood I believe are dropping in most places). The shift away from fossil fuels could be another massive health improvement - studies on fine particulate matter in the last few years show that they might be far, far worse for our health than was thought, and phasing out especially diesel and petrol for transport, as well as coal power and switching homes from gas to electric appliances will make a huge difference.

But it's also comforting to me seeing what smokers do - if they can suck down that many toxins, time after time, day after day, and it still takes decades to kill them, then as a non-smoker (in a country where smoking is very well regulated so you don't get exposed to a lot of second hand smoke either), that does give me comfort in how robust the human body is!

cinntaile• 5 years ago

I think a big problem is that we invent so many new chemicals each year where the long term consequences are unknown. [0] Sure when we notice that their downsides outweigh their upsides, they usually get regulated away. But by then they may already have caused a lot of damage and it could take many years before they are completely gone.

[0] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/science-falling-wo...

jiggawatts• 5 years ago

Obstetricians and paediatricians around the world noticed an increase in average birth weight recently. It was attributed to a combination of less pollution due to COVID lockdowns reducing traffic, and reduced stress levels because more people were working from home.

Where I live, the air seemed pretty clean before. During the height of the lockdowns it was something else. The air was so clear that you felt like you could just reach out and touch the city skyline across the harbour. It was unreal how big a difference less cars on the road made.

ggherbo• 5 years ago

wow, completely missing the point. also babies and children aren't smokers so there's no equivalency.

childhood is naturally fastest growth period anything disrupting hormone balance because of these traumas can drasticaally affect the rest of the childs life. think making them a mouth breather from disrupting immune system triggering asthma or allergies. this all connected and most people don't realize how much they are hurting their kids indirectly or even directly

refurb4• 5 years ago

The kids have always been exposed to this stuff, it's unavoidable. Focus on the big wins and don't worry about the small stuff - law of diminishing returns. Eliminating ppb of lead isn't going to move the needle versus getting your kid immunized.

You'll drive yourself crazy otherwise.

doitLP2• 5 years ago

Thanks. I generally agree but the definition ‘small stuff’ is in relation to how harmful it is. I cook a lot at home and I use a lot of spices — including the brands that tested high for heavy metals. Lead is not safe in any amount particularly for babies. The hard thing to know is what things I should and shouldn’t be paying attention to.

giantg22• 5 years ago

Honestly, don't worry about this. We use plenty of spices and my kid's lead level was extremely low (undetectable if I remember right). They will test your kid at some point too. This, and other potential sources, are only a problem if the test shows there's a problem.

HWR_14• 5 years ago

This, and other potential sources, are only a problem if the test shows there's a problem.

While true, at that point it's a problem with no good solution.

trevyn• 5 years ago

what am I supposed to do

Not have any more kids, and discourage others from having kids as well, because you know that they will come to harm.

quadrifoliate2• 5 years ago

...what am I supposed to do, test my fucking pepper?

I think a large part of the USA keeps electing politicians whose philosophy seems to be absolutely that – you "get the choice" to test your pepper or not, and market forces will eventually drive out the bad pepper companies.

This can be backed up by the fact that one of the past administrators of the Environmental Protection Agency was a thinly veiled oil and gas lobbyist [1], and the other one was a former coal lobbyist who relaxed standards on mercury [2].

So, thinking through the options, a few suggestions that look at solving the problem from all sides possible:

- From the data available to you, avoid the spices that are more likely to have high levels of heavy metals – thyme and oregano in particular seem to have higher levels for some reason

- Raise awareness of this report to trigger the capitalism response. If the companies are embarrassed enough on social and regular media, they will be motivated to control their heavy metal levels when it has an effect on sales.

- Keep electing politicians that are less likely to roll back environmental regulation. This is going to take a long time to have a systemic effect though. Voting in local elections is especially important, people often ignore those.

- Maybe, test your pepper? Food heavy metal tests seem to be commercially available [3]. Groups of concerned parents could pool in for a test of common spices.

----------------------------------------

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/feb/22/scott-pr...

[2] https://apnews.com/article/health-ap-top-news-virus-outbreak...

[3] https://www.agqlabs.us.com/food/heavy-metals-food-testing/

fennecfoxen• 5 years ago

I know there's a lot to be said about $POLITICIANS and $POLICY generally, but somehow I don't think there's any big-oil type conspiracy to prevent the FDA from checking for heavy metals in spices, specifically. Did they check for them in the more regulation-on environment of the Clinton administration? The Obama administration? Might there be more nuance than "regulations on!" "regulations off!?"

Pelam• 5 years ago

Maybe add to the list some kind of long term campaign to have true multi party system (N > 2). Get rid of the first past the post etc. A separate green party is pretty universal in those.

It is probably hard to prove, but it would make sense that the calculated manipulation by commercial ”special interests” is harder and more expensive when it has to influence multiple parties (instead of 2).

amanaplanacanal2• 5 years ago

Thyme and oregano are easy peasy to grow at home.

mherdeg• 5 years ago

What I've tried to do while parenting is focus on relative risks and mitigate the worst ones.

For kids the major mortality risk is "unintentional injury" (https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/LeadingCauses_images.html). This is further classifiable into categories that represent risks we can mitigate (https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/childinjury/index.html): car crashes, suffocation, drowning, poisoning, fire, falls.

This means you can dramatically improve top-line safety just by doing stuff like

* take fewer car trips and always carefully adjust the fit of carseats

* follow best practices for safe infant sleep (alone, on the back, in the crib)

* be careful around water, introduce swimming lessons as a layer of protection against drowning at ages 1+ (AAP recommendations changed recently on this as evidence changed)

* keep medicine and poisonous cleaning supplies out of reach or out of the house

* keep smoke detectors and fire extinguishers maintained; teach basic fire safety plus how and when to call 911; try to avoid cooking burns

* play on soft surfaces and keep an eye out for fall risks

But yeah, I really don't know which long-term effects of environmental exposure to toxins are the ones I should try the hardest to mitigate.

My current belief is that the best long-term thing we can do for the kids is ensure they don't start smoking. The second worst environmental toxin I think I see right now is added sugar; or more generally an unhealthy diet. My read of the data is that there's evidence that unhealthy diet practices (correlated with high dietary added sugar) could, in the long run, lead to an increased risk of obesity, which dramatically increases the long-term risks of top causes of mortality, like heart disease and cancer.

I don't really have a good sense for how "diet and exercise" stacks up against "avoid low levels of arsenic in the spices I'm feeding the kids" but my gut feeling is that it's like 10x-100x more important.

I did like the idea from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/23/parenting/home-flame-reta... that the best thing you can do is buy less stuff. If you're worried about exposure to environmental toxins then buy fewer, less diverse things (stuff you use and food you eat) and hope those are good ones.

Another long-term risk I've been particularly interested in mitigating is skin cancers from sun exposure -- I've been trying to be conscientious about putting sunscreen on the kids when the UV index is in the 6+ range and they're outdoors for 20+ min. This is a very long-term risk and it's sobering that it might not materialize while I'm around to see the results.

People who worry about chemicals do worry that some sunscreens might be worse than others (for example the folks at https://www.ewg.org/sunscreen/report/executive-summary/ produced some attractive charts arguing that you should avoid oxybenzone and stick to zinc oxide). I'm not sure the data show that "choice of sunscreen" is the same order of magnitude as risky as "using or not using sunscreen". Still, if you want to limit your risk to extra potential toxins, it's easy enough to pick exactly one formula and stick to it -- so we've been buying only zinc oxide sunscreen for a while, figuring that it's the same thing that's in Desitin and the kids are getting plenty of it. Whether this was wise I don't know (haven't seen any medical recommendations updated to reflect the results of https://today.oregonstate.edu/news/osu-study-after-two-hours...) but it's easy enough to buy less stuff, or buy fewer kinds of stuff, and that gives some peace of mind.

Overall though my hunch is that the "miscellaneous bad chemicals" stuff is long-tail risk versus "safe driving and healthy diet and exercise".

apsurd• 5 years ago

just want to applaud you for your care and effort in such a great well-rounded reply.

tbh the top comment peeved me instantly. "oh so now that one has kids, suddenly eyes open, the world is terrible and it is now time to care so much about righting its wrongs!"

I guess i'm just a childless person talking.

And my useless eye rolls are thankfully washed away by your level headed, comprehensive, action-based reply.

Thank you

foreigner• 5 years ago

I gave up on this when I caught my kid licking the bottom of his shoes . They survive.

mark-r3• 5 years ago

Mine didn't even bother with the shoes, she just licked the pavement directly. She's in college now.

Cthulhu_• 5 years ago

Best thing to do is to not worry about it too much, because stressing about it won't fix it. It's not in quantities that cause concern unless you overfeed yourself and your kids on these things (like, pounds), same with most other dangerous things in food.

They start to flag things up as dangerous WELL before it even comes close to being dangerous even if you eat extremely high consumption of products.

birksherty3• 5 years ago

Best solution is to not having kids. This is if you think for the kids first. There is no reason to have kids that is for the benefit of the potential child.

But nobody likes that. People's selfish wish always comes first before the potential kid's benefit. So kids will have these toxins in their body in the end and any problem that comes with it.

amanaplanacanal2• 5 years ago

Existence feels like a benefit over non-existence. But this is a philosophical problem rather than a measurement problem.

sizzle• 5 years ago

Also kids toys have all sorts of crap chemicals in them even lead was found in many cheap imported toys off Amazon, etc. that little kids are showing in their mouth.

I can only imagine what I was exposed to as a kid by parents that simply weren’t educated in exposing my developing mind and body to these unregulated chemicals in everyday objects.

nate_meurer2• 5 years ago

There's more. Here's a good resource on common household lead hazards: https://tamararubin.com/topics/. She tags her posts blog-style so it's easy to browse.

Here are the things that I found in my house:

- Dishes and cookware, especially vintage and fancy glazed shit. It's a fucking crime how many popular brands use heavily leaded glazes in their products. The vintage Lenox stoneware I got from my parents tested at 4000 ppm at the eating surface, where the glaze was chalking off into our food.

- Small metal toy charms and cheap kids' jewelry. Commonly made from pewter, and often swallowed by small kids and babies.

- Vinyl miniblinds. Up until the late 90's vinyl blinds were heavily leaded. The dust they shed as they degrade in the UV light from the window is a common route of childhood lead poisoning.

- Dirt around old houses. If a house with leaded paint was ever sanded or scraped, the soil around around it can contain shockingly high amounts of lead, which is easily tracked into the house.

These are just the ones that I encountered when my kids were little. Tamara's website has a bunch more. The good news is that the consumer landscape has vastly improved in the last decade, so most of these are easily avoidable once you're aware of them.

donatj2• 5 years ago

Grow and dry your own. That might be a particularly good idea if you use a lot of basil

Growing your own food to avoid heavy metals is actually horrible advice. To be done safely you need to get your soil tested; especially in more urban areas your soil is often just as bad or worse than the soil these were grown in.

Remember, burying used motor oil after an oil change rather than recycling it was common practice late into the twentieth century.

nimih3• 5 years ago

Testing your soil is relatively inexpensive[1] and pretty straightforward to do. Further, if the goal is to grow herbs, you can easily stick to gardening in containers or raised beds, where you get to completely control the growing medium. If you're in an urban area, those are probably the most realistic options for you anyways.

[1] https://www.sites.google.com/site/healthygardeners/testing-l... reports that costs range from $10-$200, depending on the accuracy and range of tests you're interested in.

donatj2• 5 years ago

Spending potentially a couple hundred dollars to grow a couple dollars worth of spices is a big ask.

sparker72678• 5 years ago

The cumulative increase in anxiety this article is likely to cause is going to drown out the negative health effects of the elements themselves.

I'm all for cleaning up production, our food, and all the rest. But trying to make everyone afraid of everything, all the time, is not actually helpful.

whatshisface• 5 years ago

Nobody's going to clean anything up unless they feel like it's worth paying attention.

perihelions• 5 years ago

Here's the hazard values sorted by brand, for brands with 3 or more products listed:

    ["365 Whole Foods Market", [0, 0, 0, 1, 1]]
    ["Badia", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
    ["El Guapo", [0, 0, 0]]
    ["Great Value", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
    ["Happy Belly", [0, 0, 3]]
    ["Kirkland Signature", [0, 0, 1]]
    ["La Flor", [0, 0, 1, 3, 3]]
    ["McCormick", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
    ["Morton & Bassett", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1]]
    ["Penzeys Spices", [0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]
    ["Sadaf", [0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]
    ["Simply Organic", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1]]
    ["Spice Islands", [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 2]]
    ["Tone’s", [0, 1, 2]]

Here's a Ruby snippet to mine the relevant data from the OP page, as csv:

    require 'nokogiri'
    
    doc = Nokogiri::HTML(File.open(ARGV[0]).read)
    
    doc.xpath('//div[@class="OneWholeSpice"]').map do |nd|
      spice = nd.xpath('div[@class="spiceTitleBar"]').first.inner_text
    
      # workaround for one missing </div>
      nd.xpath('//div[@class="OneWholeSpice"]').each {|nd| nd.remove}
      
      brands = nd.xpath('.//ul[@class="spBrand"]/..').each do |nd|
        brand = nd.xpath('.//span[@class="sbCopybld"]').first.inner_text.strip
        rating = nd.xpath('.//div[@class="noReccommendCircle"] | .//div[@class="noReccommendCircleKey"]').length
           puts "\"#{spice}\",\"#{brand}\",#{rating}"
      end
    end

MrYellowP• 5 years ago

I'm so glad I live in Austria.

stephenitis• 5 years ago

The spice selection is so minimal here in Austria.

Grocery shopping feels a little more sane though. I don’t get lost in the aisles of stuff.

throwaway599281• 5 years ago

Open a drawer or cabinet in any kitchen in the U.S

When will Americans actually implement proper consumer rights and enforcing the laws that guarantee the quality of goods for sale? Isn't that one of the FDA's responsibilities?

phendrenad22• 5 years ago

Why do these articles never bother to mention or even speculate on how heavy METAL got into a bunch of crushed LEAVES. It boggles the mind. Is it obvious to everyone but me? Are we supposed to not wonder? Does nobody know the mechanism?

mark-r3• 5 years ago

You do know that plants pull their nutrients from the soil, right? How is a plant to differentiate a nutrient from a poison?

phendrenad22• 5 years ago

Yes but how did the heavy metals get into the soil? If I grow herbs in my backyard, will they also be contaminated? There's more to the story and a good old fashioned "five why's" would be nice.

xyzzy21• 5 years ago

Yes. And "earth biscuit" loved kale is a #1 concentrator of cadmium as well - it's part of it's genome as a plant. You can't completely avoid these things.

Similarly radiation is unavoidable even if we never had discovered the bomb. And with the threat a magnet pole reversal, that could become a major thing for a few 100-1000 years.

What doesn't kill you makes you and yours stronger.

Also the first part of the article about "reducing salt" - it turns out the 1950s papers on the connection between salt and cardiovascular disease is so flawed as Design of Experiment and execution that it borders on fraud.

The origin cholesterol and cardio paper has the same flaws and probably should not be taken seriously. Correlation is not causation but BAD correlation due to fundamental study flaws certainly isn't.

Add to this the "linear thinking" usually used to justify treatments and habits to change, when metabolic systems are HIGHLY nonlinear and pretty much the entire medical profession deserves a FAIL.

mark-r3• 5 years ago

Do you know why they add iodine to (iodized) salt? The nuclear testing we did way back when put so much radioactive iodine into the atmosphere, it was getting into the soil and taken up by the plants we were eating. The body excretes excess iodine, so putting non-radioactive iodine in the salt allowed our bodies to eliminate some of the radioactive stuff.

momdad420• 5 years ago

Idk about the nuclear testing putting "radioactive iodine" in the atmosphere, but as for the addition of iodine to salt, that's not the origin. It was added to prevent health issues from iodine deficiency, such as goiters. In fact the invention of iodized salt predates the invention of the atomic bomb by several decades.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3509517/

b9r5• 5 years ago

One lab that regularly tests for heavy metals, albeit in dietary supplements rather than spices, is ConsumerLab [0]. Their detailed findings are behind a paywall, which is unfortunate, but probably necessary for them to provide the service. And there is little public funding in the US for testing food for heavy metals.

[0] https://www.consumerlab.com/

oregano• 5 years ago

Looks like myself and Thyme have some serious detox to do.

Seriously though- I’m a pretty picky shopper - exclusively organic (when at all possible) for any/all foods regardless of cost. Even herbs and spices. Seeing oregano and thyme fail all tests is very concerning. My initial thought is to try to pivot to fresh herbs but I’m not sure that option is necessarily safer.

Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

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