I give up. With all the warnings about everything from potato chips to muffins, and now this, I’m switching to just pure sugar when I want something sweet.
Food for Thought: Leaden Chocolates – Here’s something that might give you pause after Halloween: Chocolates are among the more lead-contaminated foods. A new study has probed the source of chocolate’s lead and concludes it’s not the cocoa bean. Its concentrations of the toxic metal were among the lowest recorded for any foodstuff.
The new study shows that dark chocolates, including bittersweet and semisweet candies, had the highest lead concentrations—roughly 30 to 70 nanograms of the heavy metal per gram versus just 11 to 35 ng/g in milk chocolate. Dark chocolates are the types frequently used in gourmet confections and in most chocolate chip cookies. They also contain the highest concentrations of heart-friendly chemicals
“Good evening Ladies and Gentleman, here are tonight’s news headlines: The Food and Drug Adminstration has bad news for those of you out there that eat food, meanwhile, the EPA has warnings for those of you out there that breath air or drink water….”
Have you heard about the dangers of pure water? People have been known to take a single breath of it and die immediately.
Reading the whole article, it’s likely the source of the lead contamination can be determined — given the motivation to do so. There is no mention of the problem occurring with chocolate from countries other than Nigeria. It would appear that it would be in the interests of importers from other nations to do the same study — unless they think there’s something in their own processing stream that will produce the same effect.