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Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

consumerreports.org

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Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#121

Post by nate_meurer »

_dark_matter_ wrote: post #44
doitLP wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We lived in a house with lead for a few years. I had my kids tested every six months. I even made sure I understood which type of test they were conducting. My thought was that this is a long term problem; if levels start rising, then we would take immediate action. Kind of a pull vs. push model. It worked, we never saw elevated lead levels. Way easier than worrying about every little thing and monitoring them at all…

You had your kids' blood drawn every six months?

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#122

Post by nate_meurer »

doitLP wrote: post #28

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…

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.

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#123

Post by mark-r »

foreigner wrote: post #73
doitLP wrote: post #28

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

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

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#124

Post by mark-r »

xyzzy21 wrote: post #102

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 articl…

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.

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#125

Post by mark-r »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #97

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?

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

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#126

Post by andrekandre »

hinkley wrote: post #116
andrekandre wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

washing and also soaking for several hours/overnight and/or boiling it with lots of water (and pouring it out) can greatly reduce it iirc btw, afaik, naturally, brown rice has more has alot, basmati rice seems to have the least https://sites.dartmouth.edu/arsenicandyou/arsenic-in-rice-an...

The study I saw implied that most of the metals were on the surface as dust, so you could rinse about 60% off. I would expect the bran, containing a lot of the protein and minerals, would have more in it, and also make it more difficult to remove surface contamination. Incidentally there are also some studies challenging the heavy metals in broadleaf plants link. The newer studies suggest surface contamination is a m…

  > The study I saw implied that most of the metals were on the surface as dust, so you could rinse about 60% off.

  > The newer studies suggest surface contamination is a much bigger factor.
interesting!

then maybe i dont need to overdo it with rice, sounds good.

  > That's also another 'pro' in the column for cleaning your vegetables with white vinegar instead of soap.
sounds good, sometimes i skip the rinsing and washing but that is good motivation to keep it up, thanks!

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#127

Post by momdad420 »

mark-r wrote: post #124
xyzzy21 wrote: post #102

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 articl…

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.

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/

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#128

Post by phendrenad2 »

mark-r wrote: post #125
phendrenad2 wrote: post #97

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?

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

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.

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#129

Post by nimih »

donatj wrote: post #118
nimih wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ra…

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

Luckily, you can spend a couple dozen dollars instead. Or do the other thing I mentioned where you don't worry about soil contaminants at all.

Of course, we're on a tech forum full of highly paid professionals, talking not about living frugally, but about avoiding heavy metal ingestion. Spending $200 up front to replace a weekly $2-10 recurring expense (i.e. buying those same herbs fresh from a local grocer) seems eminently reasonable for this audience if it's in the service of improving overall health.

Re: Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

#130

Post by stephen_g »

ggherbo wrote: post #106
stephen_g wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

Lots of babies and children used to be big second hand smokers, get exposed to asbestos fibres if work was being done on their homes and schools, possibly get exposed to DDT spraying in certain areas, have lead paint and lead pipes in their homes, breathe in fumes from leaded petrol with higher sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions than today's cars.

The point is that a lot of things are finally heading in the right direction. For endocrine disruptors especially, more people and agencies now know and care about them in a way that they didn't even 10-15 years ago.

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