Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead | Hacker News Reader

Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead

consumerreports.org

174 pointsjtc331127 comments

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.

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!

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...

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.

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

> also babies and children aren't smokers so there's no equivalency.

Well for sure, but I do remember the thick cloud of smoke that we had to go through... I'm not saying it's equivalent obviously, but still quite amazing that it didn't affect us more.

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.

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.

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 times.

Unless they were eating paint flakes you never were going to see elevated levels.

ISTR that lead dust from wear and tear can be an issue as well though obviously less of one unless you're sanding the paint.

I'd think painting over old leaded paint with modern lead free paint should help alleviate that concern. Unless you're sanding the old paint before applying a new coat.

> We lived in a house with lead for a few years. I had my kids tested every six months.

> It worked, we never saw elevated lead levels.

How does testing them for lead levels result in them not inhaling or ingesting lead?

It doesn't. They meant that their plan to take action if the lead levels rose was a workable one, i.e. they were able to execute the plan. They also said that lead levels in their children never rose. The sentence might have been more clear with an 'and' after the comma, although it was clear enough in context (IMO) without it.

By the time lead is detectable it has done meaningful damage. Yes it’s better to prevent more at that point so don’t stop testing. But testing is a poor prevention mechanism. Lead also does damage below the threshold of detection.

I don't remember all the details now, but the test we were using was extremely sensitive. I believe it was detectable within 1/20 of maximum allowable levels in children.

You had your kids' blood drawn every six months?

> Lead is not safe in any amount particularly for babies.

One molecule is safe, 1000 too. There must be an amount small enough to not cause any detectable changes. And I expect this level to be higher than when most people start to worry and stress causes more harm than a tiny amount of lead present in food or environment.

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.

> 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.

It depends. That's only true if the levels are very high (they can chetalate but it doesn't necessarily improve IQ). I also should have clarified "other sources" to be other trace sources.

The level isn't going to be that high from spices and normal food sources (even the article says it's .1% of a child's lead exposure). Unless they're eating paint chips or around lead fumes from old cars or some other high lead source, the levels will be low. While no amount of lead is necessarily good, there are threshold levels before it truly becomes bad. It's present everywhere in trace amounts.

> 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.

> ...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/

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!?"

If the FDA had a classification of "We'd Prefer You Thought This Was Safe", it would be a more accurate description for a lot of their approvals. They are ostensibly protecting consumers, but they also protect manufacturers by engendering [sometimes misplaced] confidence. It's reasonable to assume that corruption plays into this when it's sufficiently incentivized.

> ...somehow I don't think there's any big-oil type conspiracy to prevent the FDA from checking for heavy metals in spices, specifically

Of course there isn't, but that's also not an argument I think I made. I was indicating the more general trend towards de-regulation in the majority of the US, which likely affects all government agencies, including the FDA and the FCC (see, for example, the unchecked monopolies of most ISPs).

I think of it as a chilling effect by appointment. If you put the oil lobbyists in charge of environmental protection and a lawyer from Verizon in charge of the FCC, it seems to me that, for instance, increased FDA funding for anything, (including food safety) is not going to be the top priority of the Government.

Now, it's possible you're asserting that moves like putting oil and coal lobbyists in charge of environmental protection are somehow unique and do not indicate a general skepticism towards regulation.

I suppose there is no way to emphatically demonstrate that without waiting for a few decades, but would refer you to various surveys about political attitudes towards governmental regulation of companies.

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).

I've been really high on the idea that the simplest (legally/politically viable) solution is to put a cap on the number of people a representative can represent. That's a lot more hands to grease for lobbyist and a lot more ears for constituents.

I think there was one rep per 25k people in 1776.

The large number doesn't matter because reps don't read, right, or debate details of the f*n bills. ALEC, and party lawyers do.

Thyme and oregano are easy peasy to grow at home.

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".

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I'm of the opinion that the suffering we do as a race isn't worth the creativity and pleasure. Plus if you don't exist, you don't know what you're missing out on.

Then kill yourself.

Otherwise, shut the fuck up - you clearly value life.

You are wrong. Killing oneself need lot of courage and suffering. But then you guys will stop anyone who want right to death with nonsense.

Of you really want people to kill themself, make it easy. Otherwise you need to shut the fuck up.

Nope. Overall, the ecosystem collapsing. So human non existence more beneficial. Lot of people that I met also disagree unless they are high on copium and doesn't think honestly.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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?

Clean, pre-industrial air contains about 1 ng lead per m³ which is easily detectable. This means you can detect lead in any thing that lives or has lived.

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.

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.

> 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)

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.

Don't listen to Americans on 'food safety' the majority of our 'food' contains fillers and food additives that cause cancers and birth defects but you _can't_ buy sausages and cheese that Europeans have been eating for centuries

The US has prohibited a number of meat products from the EU for import into the US expressly because many EU slaughterhouses did not meet US standards. As a well-known example, Iberico ham was banned from the US for decades because Spanish slaughterhouses could not pass certification by US inspectors. Historically the workaround for this was to send animals to countries like Denmark, which had slaughterhouses that could pass US certification but that made everything much more expensive. The US import standards are essentially the same as the domestic standards -- certain kinds of food are very difficult to produce in the US too (in recent decades they've been easing up on that to allow some "traditional" foods).

The US definitely has its share of highly-processed and engineered food products of dubious value. On the other side, things like high-quality meat are cheap in the US compared to the EU, so people generally don't bother with oddly processed meat unless you are buying something that is explicitly expected to be highly processed.

This is also very regional. The US produces vast amounts of agricultural goods of all types; depending on where you live, the local agricultural goods approximately round to "free" for the average consumer. As cheap as beef is in the US generally, for example, if you travel to where it is produced you can get amazing -- better! -- product for almost no money. Similarly, when my parents lived in Alaska, crab and salmon was essentially free.

FWIW, "pink slime" is extremely regulated and uses processes that are carefully controlled... you might consider it "gross", but that would really just be an aesthetics issues AFAIK: it isn't "unsafe" (unless you count "not very nutritious" as "unsafe" ;P).

> 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.

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

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.

With * government.

Proper metals testing costs more than that. It's done for cannabis and many of those labs have their pricing online. Even w/o the "ganja gouge" pricing it is not $20 - but it's not $200 either - so, cheap for big companies/government

Amazon test kits have nowhere the sensitivity to reach meaningful detection.

In my country the legal limit for water is 10µg/L, and these tests start detecting at 10-20 mg/L.

>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.

>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?

It's feasible. Perhaps not for everyone.

If you're serious about this (and I don't think you ought to be) the only way you're going to control it is by making sure the land your food comes from is accountable to you. You can certainly find out whether the agricultural land your food is grown on was once something else. You can certainly reasonably guess if there may be high concentrations of pollutants deposited in the soil by examining the history of the land. Maybe the land being used was once near heavy industry, maybe it was a site that once heavily used insecticides, etc.

For example, perhaps the farmland you're looking at is adjacent to an interstate. Leaded gas used for decades will have polluted the topsoil to a greater extent here than on other, more remote, land. You could choose not to buy produce from the interstate farm. This is easy enough to do. Sourcing is one of the most basic skills people ought to have.

I don't think people ought to be worried and go out of their way, to be honest. A great way to do this at home is to grow your own produce in raised garden beds with good, clean, fresh, topsoil.

Well, you could start by growing as many of your own herbs as possible for home use. Basil, thyme, and oregano (to pick examples which are called out in the article as especially concerning) are relatively straightforward to grow in decent quantity, even for apartment dwellers. Since the harms here are from chronic and cumulative exposure, even a couple container-dwelling basil bushes on a balcony or a small DIY hydroponic setup in a closet could plausibly make a meaningful impact in the amount of consumed heavy metals, and a modestly sized garden plot can produce all a typical home cook will need if it's diverse, well-tended, and harvested regularly.

Alternatively, yes, you could go to your local farmer's market and ask the folks selling fresh herbs if they have their soil tested for heavy metals. That seems like a pretty reasonable thing to do, honestly.

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.

"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?

> 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.

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.

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

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.

I only plant food into containers with clean soil that I purchased. I don’t trust whatever is in my yard either.

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.

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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/

>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?

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.

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.

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.

I’ve been looking at doing something similar and the best advice I’ve found is from a local agricultural school and some local businesses that supply native plants in your area.

Clay soil's definitely not gonna work for thyme, it's way too wet and nutrient-dense. You could try double-digging to remediate it, but that could possibly lead to other issues.

Here's some links I found for ground cover plants good for clay: https://gardening.stackexchange.com/a/7665 https://gardentabs.com/ground-cover-plants-for-clay-soil/

As for where to get stuff, search for plant nurseries near you. They may not be tech-savvy so you might have to use the old-fashioned technique of wandering around and asking people (anyone who works in dirt: farmers, gardeners/landscapers, contractors). They will know your local environment and what works best for it and can order plants and seeds for you.

It may not be practical for you, but you could try a hydroponic system like AeroGarden. I was given one last Christmas and grew lots of herbs (I've just moved and haven't unpacked it, but when I do the herbs will be coming out again).

AeroGarden is a pricy brand, but there are probably cheaper ones that do just as well.

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.

You say that like it is a bad thing...

Mostly kidding, I grew up living at a rural property that had mint all over the place. I loved it, but I do understand how much trouble invasive plants can cause.

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

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

Absolutely.

To be really certain you'd have to test your soil.

I don't think you could test seeds without destroying them. But if your soil was clean then you could grow a plant from potentially contaminated seeds and that plants seeds would be far less contaminated.

what about hydroponics

Probably the only reasonable way of guaranteeing clean plant food sources is to use hydroponics, and to manufacture fertilizer yourself. Distilling water is easy, and buying the chemicals for fertilizer seems doable. But you'll want to make your own hdpe containers, and silicone tubing, so you don't get unlisted phthalates or plasticizer. GRAS and "food safe" classifications are fine, for things that are actually looked for, but mistakes are made, and most failures seem to favor producers, not consumers.

The question boils down to the actual harms you're mitigating and what constitutes the appropriate response.

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.

You assume the soil you have is "safe"

Just did a little searching and came across this https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-nov-07-hm-reali...

That person did some lab testing and found high levels of lead in their backyard-grown chard.

> If heavy metals get through whatever food testing is done by the FDA

About that...

> In addition, the limited testing the FDA has done on spices has been focused on harmful bacteria, such as salmonella, not heavy metals, Ronholm says.

Right, there you go. (Although it doesn't say it completely ignores it either, just that it's not a focus.)

I wonder if hydroponically grown herbs would lack them. Could be a business opportunity, if people care enough (or the government steps in to regulate).

The reason for these is probabaly the extreme depths from which water is pumped. The normal shallow ground waters arent this bad with arsenic I would assume.

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.

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

Not the only source. American rice is grown sometimes on old cotton fields, which were sprayed with arsenic to control boll weevils.

Apparently washing the rice does remove quite a bit.

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 much bigger factor. That's also another 'pro' in the column for cleaning your vegetables with white vinegar instead of soap. Acids are pretty good at dissolving metal dust, especially from residual contamination near roads from leaded gas. My yard tested high.

  > 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!

I was under the impression that the majority of the arsenic concentration in rice fields is actually an unintented consequence of pesticides used in the 1800's that persist in the soil still today.

Maybe in the US, but in developing countries it often ground water contamination from natural sources.

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

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.

I'm so glad I live in Austria.

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.

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/

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