Do I need to avoid dark chocolate now? | Hacker News Reader

Do I need to avoid dark chocolate now?

nytimes.com

43 pointsrendaw62 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20230319090005/https://www.nytim...

Thank you.

It’s interesting how these things can be “healthy” and “unsafe” at the same time. Or maybe it’s because some of these health effects are often quite far-fetched (“may improve X”, “contains compounds which has, in other contexts, been known to be important for Y” whereas e.g. lead is very strongly correlated with negative effects.

Makes me wonder on an “absolute scale” what we’re really talking about here: “-100 for heavy metals, +5 for polyphenols”. If that’s the case, some things are clearly very bad, even if evil white bread comes in at -80.

Everything is "healthy" and "unhealthy" depending on its amount. Good example is table salt. Too little and it feels unsatisfied, too much and it will poison you.

I think that the only things that are unhealthy in a "discrete" way are prions. Only one is enough to fuck you up.

Plenty of toxins are only harmful to humans, in any amount.

Dark chocolate would be healthy if weren't for the unsafe contaminates that show up in testing.

The dose makes the poison.

NO! With lead, there is no safe amount.

Well, that's a very small dose.

Some doses accumulate over time, so we treat them more seriously. Like the effects of lead and mercury.

This a personal pet peace of mind in science literature. Two things will be reported on as being bad for you using the same sort of language and affect public opinion. But if you actually read the study, one shows rare interaction reduces your lifespan by a decade and the other takes a lifetime of interaction to reduce your life expectancy by a month.

Admitting that the article is a "What should I do?" personal health advice column - it still struck me that the contamination has been well-known for decades, yet there is no hint at either the chocolate companies or regulators caring enough to even consider doing anything. (I don't count empty-platitude press releases from the former as "doing anything".)

Idea: The FDA equips a few inspectors with good XRF (XRay Fluorescence) testers, and plays a "let's drive the most-contaminated ~3% of the products out of the U.S. market" game.

The levels have been recently lowered, IIRC.

Disappointing that the NYT didn't actually buy some bars and have them tested, and report real numbers from the wild.

The quality of reporting on non-headline stuff in the NYT seems to be falling as of late.

This article doesn't really tell me anything.

Here are the tests consumer reports did a while back: https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...

Yeah, that is cited in the article along with https://www.asyousow.org/environmental-health/toxic-enforcem...

Consumer Reports is just blogspam now. If you read anything they write about a topic you're expert in, you realise how much bullshit they spew. It's all just garbage to slap ads around.

> It's all just garbage to slap ads around.

The whole internet feels like that nowadays.

I didn't see any ads on their chocolate article, and according to wikipedia they don't accept any advertising.

They sell the articles to other parties, so the more they churn out, the better. It's a content mill.

Below is an example of a factually incorrect article that they sold to the Washington Post:

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/supplements/supplemen...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/02/06/kava-lobe...

So the solution is to buy quality chocolate made from good beans grown in Central and South America, without child and slave labor. Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Homer Simpson suggestion: what if we put massive magnets in the production process?

That is in fact quite common in food production, but all it accomplishes is removing metal filings from processing machinery. It can't remove molecular metal contamination from the food itself.

Also, lead isn't ferrous.

Thanks! Was hoping someone would break that down.

It's also related to food industries using blue sticking plasters: they are made so that they will set off the same metal detectors that are looking for bits of broken machinery.

Or ferromagnetic

I'm surprised that raw ingredient sourcing wasn't mentioned or maybe it was but I missed it.

To me, reducing your intake doesn't make as much sense as paying for traceability and certification.

This article doesn’t mention that the levels are well above the CA legal limits, or whether those limits are useful/relevant. It also doesn’t explain if the body ever purges these metals, or how the contamination occurs (IIRC, the lead is suspected to be deposited on drying beans that are roadside, and the cadmium is from the soil.)

Are there any more comprehensive articles? I don’t find the recommendation here to be especially convincing or well-researched.

https://www.jefftk.com/p/lead-in-chocolate

Why would dark chocolate be worse than any other chocoloate (apart from concentration). If it's truly worse even per piece of cocoa, is it about the cocoa butter?

Just a matter of concentration. 80% of 100g is more than 40% of 100g. It's that simple.

How do we know that? I'd ask both us and NYT to be scientific about it.

Cargo culting science: "We tested dark chocolate and it was bad" => avoid dark chocolate and no further conclusions. (Media is full of this pattern.)

More rational investigation: "We tested dark chocolate and it was bad" => Find the problematic ingredient => What are the other places we use this ingredient?

Read reports and don't expect media to throw numbers and mathematical proofs. They are a business and have to cater to general public who don't really understand or care.

Great media stories bring the reports to a scientist in the field and have them contextualise it. In fact neither the journalist or the laypeople (us here) can do better than that by themselves, in general.

But yes, stories are mass produced and nobody has the time for that.

The metals come from the cacao, and milk chocolate has much less cacao by volume, because it is diluted by lots of milk solids and sugar. Unless there are also surprising amounts of metal in milk/sugar, why would they need to be more rigorous about investigating milk chocolate?

One could speculate around cocoa butter, which is replaced by cheaper fats in cheaper and milk chocolate. But that's just me wondering, trying to make sense of why dark chocolate in particular.

It’s because the contamination is in the cacao beans. Dark chocolate is 70 or more percent cacao, while milk chocolate is much, much less.

Read the article

Article is painful to read thanks to sentences like "0.8 micrograms in ounce". Ouch.

tl;dr: concentrations of cadmium and lead in dark chocolate, so no you don't need to avoid dark chocolate. Eat it in moderation.

Another manifestation of Betteridge's law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

No, this is not an article. This is from the “ask column” and is a genuine question from someone eating dark chocolate every day including when she was pregnant and then breastfeeding.

The answer given is actually yes, probably, you should if you are pregnant or breastfeeding and limiting consumption the rest of the time would be wise.

I am pretty sure that if you were to follow all these kinds of headlines, you wouldn't be able to eat anything while being pregnant. Like even organic vegetables are often contamined or not sold for what they really are.

Not sure why it's downvoted, but that's written in the article:

> A general rule of thumb is to consume no more than an ounce per day, Dr. Melough said. Eating more than that raises concerns not only about heavy metals, but also about high levels of saturated fat, she added.

Regardless of the (too high amount of cadmium and lead), one shall not eat more than 1 ounce (30 grams) a day.

An ounce a day would be 10 kg per year, that's an awful lot of dark chocolate!

According to Statista the average per capita consumption of chocolate confectionery in the US is about 9 kg so most people are well below the danger levels.

The main issue here is how we pretend to recycle batteries and electronic components while what we really do is dumping them to African countries such as Ivory Coast, Ghana which are the very same countries that produce the highest amount of Cacao.

Stop buying new electronic stuff / computer / gadgets / appliances every other years guys. This whole scheme of growth and making and buying new things while we still have no decent way to recycle or stop contaminating is out of hands.

> Stop buying new electronic stuff / computer / gadgets / appliances every other years guys

And when you do, buy it second hand. backmarket.com is really good for this.

How is backmarket.com better or different from eBay?

There is a huge banner on backmarket's home page that explains exactly that.

Which tells me you have made the level zero of effort to get an answer to your question, and instead expected me to provide said effort.

all ive heard about backmarket.com is that it has a big stupid banner

i think im going to avoid it

Sorry if you feel my response was a _request to you personally_. Just a friendly question in an open forum. As such, you can choose how to respond—with opinion, anecdotes, rumor, or, insults—doesn’t hurt my feelings one way or other.

It's considerably more expensive.

I don’t see anything in the linked article to suggest that the heavy metals in chocolate come from industrial use. Isn’t the cadmium simply naturally occurring in the soil? If you have any links to share, I’d appreciate it.

A lot of us are buying this stuff because we never had it.

Most people buy new telephones not because they want fancy gadgets, but because either A: The battery has deteriorated too much or B: Crucial apps demands the phone to be updated. Uber is for example awful in this regard.

Legislate user replaceable batteries

The article suggests the pollution is from batteries. So replaceable batteries would help how?

Paying for parking at Stanford requires a phone.

Pretend? The recycling rate for vehicle lead acid batteries is over 99% in the US.

So I don't buy new electronic stuff every other year. Is the problem fixed yet?

Yes! Now you, and only you, are allowed chocolate again.

Oh thank goodness. The system works!

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