Turmeric’s unexpected link to lead poisoning in Bangladesh | Hacker News Reader

Turmeric’s unexpected link to lead poisoning in Bangladesh

stanmed.stanford.edu

408 pointscoopernewby202 comments

I'm a little surprised at the initial confusion about the source of lead, or perhaps it's the way the article has been written. As someone who grew up in India, our school textbooks in the 90s had a list of common food adulterants, and turmeric adulteration with lead chromate was common knowledge to middle schoolers. I recall the curriculum included how to detect adulteration with simple at home tests. After turmeric, the next suspect probably would be yellow lentils.

EDIT: actually the next suspect should be red chillis, adulterated with lead oxide.

On an aside, food adulteration used to be such a common social menace in India in the 70s & 80s, such that it was a common theme in the backdrop of Bollywood films, with the hero taking on local mafia bosses who also dabble in food adulteration. India did a mediocre job controlling the rampant food adulteration, with the last major case I recall being an outbreak of Epidemic Dropsy in 1998 due to contamination of mustard oil. There's been cases every once in a while, though I suspect in those cases it is inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields.

What sort of test would you do for this? Did you have to buy a test kit?

1. The Water Test: Take a glass of warm water and add a teaspoon of your turmeric powder to it. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes. If the turmeric powder settles down, it is pure. If it doesn’t settle to the bottom and leaves a dark yellow colour, it is adulterated.

2. The Palm Test: Take a pinch of your turmeric powder and rub it into the palm of your hand for a few seconds, then turn your palm over. Pure turmeric will stick to your palm and leave a yellow stain, whereas adulterated turmeric will mostly fall off.

Wouldn’t lead contamination cause the turmeric to sink?

Lead Chromate, not Lead.

But apparently it's also not very soluble in water, so the question about sinking stands.

Possibly, a chemical powder is much finer than a ground-up plant matter, and takes longer to settle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_chromate#Safety_hazar...

I've actually had a successful test with the water method. The lead coloring shows immediately and remains dissolved or in suspension or whatever for days, possibly forever. Turmeric doesn't usually color water at all.

There are youtube videos showing how to do the turmeric test with water. Definitely, everyone that uses it, should know this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXWPf0HQd5U

(Testing Turmeric Powder adulteration with Artificial Color)

I just tried this test with some turmeric powder I had at home and it failed according to what is shown in the video. I happened to have a lead testing kit, and it doesn't have lead though. The powder does have some ginger and other herbs in it, so apparently harmless adulterants other than lead can cause it to fail this visual test.

Have you checked that test with known lead chromate to rule out test error?

Good idea...

Where can I find a source for your first point? This site[1] mentions this test as a way to detect adulteration by artificial coloring in turmeric powder, not adulteration by lead.

I think the point (at least the one I gathered from the article) is that turmeric is sometimes artificially colored to make it the right shade of yellow, and that lead is in the chemical often used for that coloring. Thus, evidence of artificial coloring is a heuristic for presence of lead.

I suppose your turmeric could fail the test, and you could decide that the failure is not a sufficient proof of lead presence, because it might be a different lead-free artificial coloring that caused the test failure. That is absolutely your right to decide.

I recall we did simple tests like this in school - we had to bring in samples of foodstuffs from home to do the tests, and the school would provide a positive control. This must have been the seventh grade or so?

https://www.vasantmasala.com/blog/how-to-check-adulteration-...

Another comment has this link to an Indian government website with simple tests for various food adulteration: https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

As an ABCD, likewise. My mom told me to specifically buy turmeric at western grocery stores (as opposed to other spices, which could be had for better prices at Indian grocery stores) because of concerns around lead.

What is an ABCD?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-Born_Confused_Desi

Oh wow, I've seen this without knowing it had a name.

Lol, I never knew there was a Wikipedia article for this slang acronym that we use all the time.

Wikipedia has been backfilling slang terms lately, in competition with urbandictionary and knowyourmeme. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheugy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%2BRatio etc

Hopefully only the legit subset of urbandictionary.

tbf lead testing is pretty standard in Indian spice brands for a long time now, though for some reason the brands don't really advertise it. Reputable brands like MDH and Everest would be pretty safe.

You would hope, its common to find heavy metals in those seasonings too; https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... IE Oregano is flagged across the board on the report.

This reminds me of how scurvy was apparently well known in the age of sail but sort of forgotten with the industrial revolution. It showed back up again in Arctic expeditions from what I understand.

I don't recall where the the Arctic expeditions slot into this saga, but for ages we understood the lemon link but we hadn't identified Vitamin C yet.

So there was a moment in time where the British Royal Navy was carrying around concentrated lime juice to fight scurvy (hence, Limey). Only the vendor that made the lime juice processed it in copper vessels, destroying most of the vitamin C.

It doesn't take much vitamin C to prevent scurvy. But it does take some.

There was a competing theory that scurvy was prevented by eating fresh meat, and that's easier to get in the arctic: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

> Vitamin C can be destroyed by heat and light. High-heat cooking temperatures or prolonged cook times can break down the vitamin. Because it is water-soluble, the vitamin can also seep into cooking liquid and be lost if the liquids are not eaten.

In "The Terror" (A supernatural horror story by Dan Simmons, set in the lost Franklin expedition) it is raw meat that saves the indigenous people from scurvy. Which is probably not too inaccurate.

If it's not clear (as the article also mentions this), fresh meat does prevent scurvy! Many, if not most animals, internally produce their own vitamin C and so fresh meat is often loaded with vitamin C. Here's a table listing vitamin C content for various meats. That site separates fish from meat, so you need to change the combobox to also see those data.

[1] - https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrient-ranking-tool/Vitamin-C...

"The Accidental Scientist: The Role of Chance and Luck in Scientific Discovery" talks all about the different substances tried to prevent and cure scurvy. British sailors turned to have a daily ration of rum mixed with the lime juice.

I seem to remember that it was also a switch to a different citrus fruit which had way less vitamin C in it so the processing was much mroe important.

However, since the switch corresponded to the rise of steam power (ship trips were much faster), nobody noticed that that they weren't protected from scurvy anymore.

It wasn't until the artic expeditions that scurvy protection got tested again.

They believed the scurvy protection came from the sourness of lemons, so they switched to lime which is even more sour than lemon, but contains less vitamin C.

IIRC the arctic expeditions found it to be 10mg a day

Or, the link between white rice and beriberi: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields

You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free". To think that some people in the US voluntarily drink yellowroot tea because apparently it helps with diabetes is scary - the chemical similiarity between sanguinarine in argemone and berberine in yellowroot is just too great for it to be a good idea.

I don't know anything about the tea you refer to, but "the chemical is similar" is not a great signal, IMO. You can even have the exact same chemical with different chirality having dramatically different effects on the body (eg: l- and d- methamphetamine, and plenty of others).

Not saying it has 0 relevance, but I wouldn't take it to mean much on its own. It's like people being scared of mercury dental fillings because "it has mercury in it, which is poisonous." That doesn't follow.

Knee-jerk reactions like that aren't helpful with biological compounds. In this case they're both benzophenanchridine/isoquinoline alkaloids with the same functional groups: a methylenedioxy bridge and at least one methoxy group.

L- and D-methamphetamine are a rather unique case because their enantiomeric forms have different effects on the central and peripheral nervous systems. They're much more different from each other structurally than berberine is from sanguinarine.

> You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free"

This was a response to the 1998 outbreak. I remember in the early days it was suggested the culprit was argemone poisoning, and honestly that's what I thought it was all this time. Wikipedia suggests it was adulteration with white petroleum.

How can I test for lead in my tumeric?

Edit: found this page which is amazing https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

This page is fascinating! I love the iodized-vs-non salt test by rubbing on potato and then sprinkling lemon juice to see if blue (iodized).

At the same time, it feels so sad this page is necessary.

It doesn't list a test for lead in turmeric powder, unfortunately.

It's below the turmeric whole test, and is more or less the same test.

That's described as a test for "artificial colour"

The lead is used to adulterate the product for color if I'm recalling correctly.

Lead chromate is an incredibly vivid yellow. Good color, bad health effects, as we learned from years of lead paint.

Also, the test for lead looks suspicious to me. The shape of the turmeric laying in the bottom of the glass looks absolutely identical between the two glasses. Like they used the same sample, but added some color to the water for the "adulterated" picture.

Edit: Which I guess is ok, since they're just showing what to look for and they aren't falsifying an actual test.

> actually the next suspect should be red chillis, adulterated with lead oxide.

Why would anyone adulterated red chillis with lead oxide instead of perfectly safe iron oxide, common food colorant?

I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect it's the flavor: iron oxide tastes metallic, lead oxide tastes somewhat sweet. That's partially why you hear about kids eating lead paint chips and not bits of rust.

It's not real knowledge until some white person from a prestigious foreign university visits and works it into their Ph. D. thesis.

One would think that they could've solved the mystery easily without such white woman if everyone knew about that, but apparently one would be wrong. Generations of people poisoned by this practice and everyone was just fine with it?

Don't take an article like this at face value, they will omit any complicating or narrative disruptive facts and will often mislead with regards to cause and effect or timing (via omission or phrase juxtaposition).

See also "Ground Turmeric as a Source of Lead Exposure in the United States": https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5415259/

The problem with lead in tumeric seems to extend beyond Bangladesh.

Yikes.

Are their any trustworthy, mainstream sources of spices in the U.S.?

E.g., if I buy turmeric from Walmart or Whole Foods, can I safely assume that they're monitoring the product streams for lead?

EDIT: I just saw a sibling comment about a company named "American Turmeric". I'm curious about more mainstream sellers, who might possibly monitor other spices as well. I'd prefer to not play whack-a-mole on a spice-by-spice basis.

Yeah I've also been wondering this. Would love it if anyone has similar knowledge, especially about other spices beyond Tumeric.

I posted this above. ConsumerLab does this testing on all sorts of products and foods. They are a non-profit. The annual fee you pay supports the research and testing directly.

They tested many brands of both spice and supplement for lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, and published the amounts they found in each brand:

https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/turmeric-curcumin-supple...

Of great importance lately was their discovery of benzene in many common sunscreens which forced many product recalls. I used their findings to change brands for my entire family.

Thanks for the ConsumerLab pointer.

The link you provided doesn't work for me. Is [0] the right article?

[0] https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/turmeric-curcumin-supple...

Sorry:

https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/turmeric-curcumin-supple...

If you're consuming it as a supplement it's a lot cheaper (and safer) to just make it yourself. The process is basically: cut it up into thin slices, dry it out in the oven, grind it up.

If you're not taking it in supplement quantities, then I'm not sure I'd be tremendously worried about any other contamination...

Doesn't help at all if the roots themselves are dusted, as per the article. Right?

Good question. Most turmeric roots I've bought aren't nearly as bright orange as the powered stuff. I _assume_ that means they're not applying the same chromate brightening agent but it's not impossible.

I guess I'll have to start growing it myself...

After reading that article I personally won't trust any I buy from anywhere unless it's from a reputable source and actually states that it's tested/lead-free. Yikes.

"Lead free" may be impossible, there is natural levels of lead in the soil that is taken up by plants.

However there's orders of magnitude difference between those natural levels, and adulterated spices with lead deliberately added for coloring.

Try googling the lead content of an average carrot, for example.

I buy from thespicehouse.com - they seem to be careful, but I haven't inquired about turmeric. I should send them an email. (I prefer them over Penzey's, which is the same family, because they have dried fenugreek leaves.)

seconded - high quality and friendly service. Hard to ask for more.

Unless you maybe want to ask for proof that they test their products for lead. That seems pretty easy.

I buy from there too.

Here's their answer and it's disappointing. tl;dr: they import the whole spice and have it ground in the US.

https://www.thespicehouse.com/pages/ingredients-and-allergy-...

forget trusted suppliers; they should be running lab tests on random samples

If you don't have or provide any insight into their testing processes, I don't think a recommendation is relevant here.

I emailed Bill Penzey a few years ago, asking if they did testing for lead in their turmeric, got no response.

Burlap and Barrel I believe has a good reputation with their spice sourcing.

https://www.burlapandbarrel.com/products/turmeric

Some supplement companies/nootropic companies purport to do 3rd party certificate of analysis with microbe, and heavy metal testing. You can find them on Reddit. Can you believe the companies? I kinda do.

- "E.g., if I buy turmeric from Walmart or Whole Foods, can I safely assume that they're monitoring the product streams for lead?"

You can safely assume absolutely nothing.

https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29375003 ("Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead (consumerreports.org)") (2021)

- "The lack of regulation leaves much of the monitoring of heavy metal levels to companies. [Consumer Reports] contacted all the ones with products in our tests to see how they limited heavy metals."

- "Of the companies that replied to our questions—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Costco, Bolner’s Fiesta, Gebhardt, Litehouse, McCormick, Roland Foods, Spice Islands, Target, and Whole Foods—a few said they require their suppliers to have a program for controlling or testing for heavy metals. But only three—Al Wadi Al Akhdar, Bolner’s Fiesta, and McCormick—specifically said they test products in their manufacturing plants for heavy metals."

ConsumerLab tested many brands of both spice and supplement for lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury, and published the amounts they found in each brand:

https://www.consumerlab.com/reviews/turmeric-curcumin-supple...

Paywall

What an article to put behind a paywall

If you want food safety inspection results to be paywall-free, make your government do them.

I don’t understand. If someone gets lead poisoning from regularly using a spiked batch of theirs, can’t they sue the everlasting piss out of these companies?

It'd be impossible to prove that the poisoning was from the lead in any one manufacturers food. Lead contaminates everything around us. Americans have been spoon feeding lead and other heavy metals directly into the mouths of their infant children for ages (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/baby-food-toxins-government-rep...). Only recently has the FDA even come up with non-binding guidelines on how much poison companies can put into baby food.

The harm is cumulative, and so singling out any single company or product as the one who put you over the "tipping point" to some set of symptoms is next to impossible and any corporation you tried to take to court would likely have a team of high paid lawyers so good luck convincing a carefully selected jury.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be able to sue companies into the ground for mass poisonings, but even when we can prove a company poisoned us, AND can prove that they knew they were doing it, AND even when we can prove they tried to cover that fact up so they could make more money by doing it, companies haven't ever faced meaningful consequences. Not the tobacco industry, not DuPont, certainly not spice manufacturers.

I've always wondered to what extent I've been doing myself a disservice by buying McCormick- surely the cheap powdered stuff isn't able to compete on flavor- but seeing this makes me glad my budget sense beats my foodie sense.

It's hard to go wrong with Penzey's : https://www.penzeys.com/pages/consumer-reports

Only for half of the company, according to their CEO

Spicewalla (out of Asheville) should be reputable

If they don't publish them, email and ask for a COA (certificate of analysis) with heavy metal data. If you know your lot #, include that too. It's not perfect, you're trusting not only the company but wherever they sourced their spices from, but they DO have the info, and it's better than nothing. p.s. "random" testing is a joke. Also will second the burlap and barrel rec for turmeric specifically. Source: worked in spices for a bit.

Yeah! I read this maybe a couple years ago and now lead test anything w/ turmeric in it (tea, actual turmeric, etc.) Haven't come up positive yet though, thank goodness.

Can recommend just lead testing things. Test kits are cheap, it's very easy to do, you really want to know if you're eating/drinking lead (especially if you have kids). Also can recommend getting a water filter. It doesn't really fix dishwashing but for drinking or making things w/ water it's very easy -- you can get pretty big tanks where you could conceivably even make a pot of spaghetti and such.

Where can I find those test kits?

Amazon. There are even strips. Now can we trust the manufacturer of the tests themselves given amazons sometimes shitty vendor quality? Who knows.

I have a gas engineer test my appliances every year. Last year he also fitted a CO alarm and he said he would test it every year. I asked if he had a CO aerosol to test the alarm. No, he said, I just press the button. Who knows if the alarm actually detects CO? Anyway, if you want to test your lead test, introduce it to some lead.

A few more:

"Lead in Spices, Herbal Remedies, and Ceremonial Powders Sampled from Home Investigations for Children with Elevated Blood Lead Levels — North Carolina, 2011–2018": https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/67/wr/mm6746a2.htm

"Analysis of Lead in Spices Obtained from Bulk Food Stores" (PDF): http://libjournals.unca.edu/ncur/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/...

"Heavy Metals in Cultural Products": https://www.epa.gov/children/heavy-metals-cultural-products

People and companies knowingly contaminating food products with poisons like lead, should be put in jail. Companies knowingly selling such products, should be at least heavily fined, possibly prosecuted as well. Bottom line, this is clearly poisoning (and killing people) to make a few extra bucks. There should be no leniency whatsoever for this clear evil.

>There should be no leniency whatsoever for this clear evil.

Normally I'd call this sort of language hyperbolic, but in this case I'm not sure it is.

You know people are consuming this product. Literally poisoning people to save a few dollars? It's inexplicable.

Jail is too lenient, this is the sort of offence where I want to see heads on spikes

This sounds extreme, but someone is destroying the health of and potentially killing thousands of people to safe a small amount of money. It's hard to think of a worse crime. I wonder if this is similar to the old adage that one death is a tragedy and a thousand are a statistic. If someone violently kills a single person and we learn all the details, in some places they'll face capital punishment. You low-key poison thousands of people and jail is suddenly controversial.

A corporation of any size caught doing this with any amount of knowing about it (i.e. not sabotage by a troubled lone wolf) should be seized, sold for parts, and the proceeds from the fire sale going to the victims and if anything is left over afterwards, the state.

There is no fine value appropriate that isn't "considerably more than the company is worth" for that kind of blatant violation.

You should not get to continue to exist after poisoning people for profit margin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

54,000 hospitalized and 6 dead from intentional milk contamination

> A number of trials were conducted by the Chinese government resulting in two executions, three sentences of life imprisonment, two 15-year prison sentences, and the firing or forced resignation of seven local government officials and the Director of the Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). The former chairwoman of China's Sanlu dairy was sentenced to life in prison.

China does a lot of things wrong, but they're closer to right than the US on this stuff!

I don't understand how lead pigments are still legal in some parts of the world at all. What kind of things need a bright yellow color that will slowly poison you if you touch it?

Also, those handheld XRF spectrometers are amazing tech. I wish they were more affordable.

> "Why? For the same reason our reactors do not have containment buildings around them, like those in the West. For the same reason we don't use properly enriched fuel in our cores. For the same reason we are the only nation that builds water-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors with a positive void coefficient. It's cheaper." ~ Valery Legasov, Chernobyl

USSR could have really been something if only they adopted the US model of just not saving money

A lot of oil paint for fine art contains heavy metals.

And a layer of varnish over the top so that you can’t even touch the paint, even if you are rude enough to try.

Lead pigments are still legal in the United States[1], and were only banned in the EU a few years ago[2].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4434842/

[2] https://speciation.net/News/EU-court-rules-Commission-author...

In Europe, many countries banned lead paints for household use already in the 1920'ies or even earlier. In 2003 there was an EU wide harmonization outlawing lead paints. The article you linked to is apparently about some lawsuit where the EU commission had allowed an exception to this.

Ah, it appears I was mistaken then thanks for the clarification.

The broad outline of these facts has been known for decades (that spice processors intentionally adulterate turmeric with the yellow pigment, lead chromate). These are sold in the First World as well, and are culpable e.g. for acute lead poisoning in children in the USA:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2017/high-levels-of-lea... (2017)

- "The study, in Public Health Reports, the official journal of the US Public Health Service and the US Surgeon General, also describes several cases of child lead poisoning in the US that have been linked to consumption of spices, including turmeric."

> To mask flawed turmeric, some processors began dusting the roots with lead chromate — an orange-yellow industrial pigment used to color plastics and furniture.

I don't really want lead in my plastic or my furniture either...

In fact, I think there would be a good case for simply banning all mining of lead. Nearly all remaining uses of it (bullets, roof flashing, counterweights, car batteries) seem to still have a pretty high risk of contamination of either the environment or the workers who make or recycle products.

It's used medically, for example for nurses and doctors who work with radioactive tracers; they wear big aprons with lead in it which absorb any radiation that would be ok once in a while but that you don't want exposed to every single day at work.

True - but lead doesn't actually perform much better than say steel, per unit weight.

I wonder if this turmeric spread and was sold in the West. My mother recently started taking "golden turmeric" and insists that it's a cure for a lot of ills. Maybe that's true I don't know, she sent me some articles a couple years ago. It was clear that she was influenced by Facebook groups.

Hopefully the turmeric she takes is safe :(

If you want to be extra safe, you can buy some for her from a safer supplier like: https://www.americanturmeric.com/lead-free-turmeric

They expect us to be swayed by a stock photo of a laboratory?

https://www.americanturmeric.com/how-we-test-our-turmeric ("Laboratory Results - Buy With Confidence")

https://www.dreamstime.com/stock-image-laboratory-image24729... ("Royalty-Free Stock Photo: Laboratory with many operated science instrument [sic] and computer")

It's a stock photo used on a website, did you expect them to go to the actual laboratory they worked with and take one?

I have no affiliation here, but they even listed the company they used for testing so presumably you could call/email them if you want further confirmation. None of this seems unreasonable to me, and I don't think a stock photo is a gotcha for product quality.

There's a lack of forthrightness in publishing a stock photo without a disclaimer. "Lack of forthrightness" is an anti-signal. Stock photography on a commercial website is an anti-signal.

> Stock photography on a commercial website is an anti-signal

Where do you expect stock photography to be used? Only in mock-ups and design pitches?

> Where do you expect stock photography to be used? Only in mock-ups and design pitches?

As if something's existence alone justifies its (mis)use...

I'm reminded of the Invader Zim Hamstergeddon episode when the tanks arrive and one of the soldiers shouts "We've gotta use this stuff on something!"

Many online sellers post a photo of their factories and workers as a way to demonstrate quality - ie. "look, we make out products with big expensive modern machines, not children doing it by hand". Some aliexpress sellers even post 20-30 pictures of different parts of the production process.

Posting a stock photo is trying to defraud buyers who expect to see the factory it is made in.

>They expect us to be swayed by a stock photo of a laboratory?

I don't think any picture of a lab would have any meaning to me, whatsoever. Is the product legit tested? That's all that matters. I don't care what the lab looks like.

Just convince her that it’s more magical (er, healthy) if she buys it fresh and grinds it herself.

It actually tastes better that way, richer and more earthy.

It does leave your fingers stained, but that is actually a benefit since it is a conversation starter.

I suggest asking your Indian friends where they buy their spices from, and check out your local Indian grocery store - the spices are from major Indian brands and undergo a lot of testing, with additional certification for export to the US.

>check out your local Indian grocery store - the spices are from major Indian brands and undergo a lot of testing, with additional certification for export to the US.

Well, uh, I'm no expert, having just read about this here, today. But what you are saying flies in the face of half of the comments here, doesn't it? What makes you sure that the "local Indian grocery store" is getting high-quality, tested spices?

Let's take one of the source studies linked in other comments and investigate:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5415259/

The product recalls mentioned are all American brands, and their origin is unspecified - other than South Asia, turmeric is also exported from China, SE Asia, the Caribbean and South America. In the absence of FDA guidelines on lead levels in spices, this study has used the lead levels in candy as the threshold (0.1 ppm) The study also highlights a previous case study in Boston where 4 pediatric cases had lead exposure - of the 4, only one had detectable lead in the family's turmeric - at a level of 1.4 ppm. This was a 12-month-old baby, so wasn't consuming the turmeric, and the case study doesn't suggest he was.

The Indian food safety standards restrict lead in spices to below 2.5 ppm, with turmeric especially tested for lead chromate (FSSAI standards allow lead upto 10 ppm (!!!) in turmeric, while AGMARK allows only upto 2.5 ppm). Turmeric being exported from India to the USA has several additional mandatory certifications required, for other dyes like Sudan I - IV, aflatoxins, pesticides, etc. Since the FDA has no limits published on lead, the Indian limits of 2.5 ppm probably apply. Is that an acceptable level? Probably not great, and there is no safe level of lead. However, lead will show up in any agricultural product, so we need a reasonable 'acceptable' range. For me and most other Indians who consume turmeric on a daily basis, we defer to the Indian certifications.

I use Indian grocery stores here in the US. I have not seen any brands with AGMARK. Do you have any recommendation for brands that I can trust?

Sorry for the delay - just noticed this comment.

Looking at my own pantry of Indian branded spices I purchased from Indian grocery stores, I see they are packaged in the UAE and not India, and don't carry the AGMARK. I couldn't find any details on the certifications required for spices in the Emirates.

Fwiw a study done in Germany in 2022 found no traces of lead in 19 turmeric products of all price ranges.

https://www.oekotest.de/essen-trinken/Kurkuma-Labor-findet-M...

Please ask her to stop taking turmeric often. I couldn't find the source, but I remember a liver specialist on twitter, calling out on such practice. He explained how he had patients with liver failure specifically due to regular turmeric intake, sold as natural medicine.

Please inform this to her.

Doctors aren't necessarily scientists. Anecdotal evidence isn't as strong as randomized controlled trials to establish causation. It could have been the high fat content of many recipes that call for turmeric.

The integrity of health and wellness products is always suspect. The MMS people are especially wingnuts.

It makes me think small-scale sales of spices, compounds, and ingredients on Amazon are at risk for adulteration.

Perhaps what we need is a simplified bluetooth mass spectrometer device with an app setup for testing purity of powdered substances from foods to medications. This seems like a ready-made Kickstarter project an Ivy/Pac-12 engineering bio+ee team could handle. MEMS devices using cheap IR photonics are in the pipe (no pun intended). Gas chrom is like listening to music on vinyl.

They could have just asked.... Most who grew up in the subcontinent know this.

Yeah, but then they couldn't have wrote a multi-page flowery article about how smart they were interspersed with social justice. What fun would that be?

So they leveraged the Stanford name and got the government to pay attention and take actions. That's great for the people in Bangladesh but still, it's not groundbreaking research that they made it out to be.

I have a friend who strongly gravitates towards non-traditional solutions for every health & medical problem.

Upon hearing that I had developed cancer, she whipped up a batch of turmeric-infused notions and potions for me, which I appreciate. I haven't touched them yet. Maybe I'll get them tested first; the last thing I need right now is lead poisoning!

Oh! I'm sad to hear this... I hope you get well.

thx. me too!

Interesting article. One thing I'm left wondering though is: for the offending vendors, how aware were they of the potential harm they were causing?

IMHO the punishment should, in some sense, scale with that detail.

As a parent, if I found out that someone was knowingly poisoning my children for profit, I'd have some very uncharitable urges.

I do wonder if some of the dirt poor street-vendors were "in on it" or just the fall-guys.

It's bought wholesale at Mandis/Markets. Any kind of lead adulteration probably happened with the Spice Distributor (either the spice distributor or the wholesaler). If you are a street food vendor, your margins are low so you would probably go for the cheaper alternative.

The price of turmeric across SAARC also skyrocketed due to higher than average rainfall in MH+TG along with skyrocketing "Western Hipster Superfood" demand, which has a carryover effect to the Bangladesh and Nepal markets.

Farms -> Trader -> Wholesale Mandi/Market -> Spice Distributor -> Restaurant/Street Food Vendor

Maybe to some extent it should scale with that detail. However, to some extent everyone in the food processing chain has a responsibility to be diligent and competent, right? If we let people off the hook for not knowing the quality of their suppliers, and finding out is expensive, then we’re applying a filter in favor of incompetence.

This behavior is pervasive across all industry. If profit is the sole motivator, public opinion or insubstantial fines are not enough of a deterrent.

Powdered turmeric can be bright yellow, if the roots are boiled before drying and grinding, or dark/dirty yellow if not boiled since natural color of turmeric is dirty yellow.

Costco/Kirkland powered turmeric[0] is one of the rare ones that is dirty yellow, so we generally get that in the hope that it is lead free.

[0] https://www.costco.com/kirkland-signature-ground-turmeric,-1...

Forsyth's work was submitted here on HN four years ago, if you want to read the study.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393511...

They found no elevated lead in Indian samples in their study, but they note Indian tumeric have been subject to lead recalls in the past. And of course, proper and transparent sourcing from manufacturers, is an issue.

I like high quality spices so I buy from places that I have faith can trace their supply chains (all the better if they have testing) but even if you don’t care about quality, you should buy high quality turmeric. Lead poisoning is so bad the amount of money you should be willing to pay to not have it is high.

American rice, grown in Texas has lots of arsenic in it. There is a reason why "Rice from Brownswille" was advertised in the stores.

I mean, an ICP instrument can be found in a lot of the better municipal water quality labs these days, this isn’t like a particle accelerator.

"no safe level of exposure" is facially absurd. One atom of lead (or any element) is going to poison you? Come on.

There might not be a practical way to keep exposure to a substance low enough to be safe but that sort of nuance is not dramatic enough to sell an article!

Those who do not learn from history will be exploited by those who do?

There's too much padding in the article.

TL;DR Lead is bad for you; shoppers don't like turmeric that isn't yellow; processors dust off-colour turmeric with lead chromate to make it look yellow.

tl:dr they use a lead based pigment to keep it a vibrant color apparently not knowing that the pigment was lead based.

tl;dr:

  Color matters to turmeric purchasers, and turmeric that is more vibrantly yellow typically sells for higher prices. The Stanford University team learned that this color-linked perception of quality may have started in the 1980s, when a flood interrupted the drying process, turning rhizomes brown and moldy.

  To mask flawed turmeric, some processors began dusting the roots with lead chromate — an orange-yellow industrial pigment used to color plastics and furniture. From the interviews, Forsyth learned that this coloration step continued for four decades after the flood and that most processors weren’t aware that the pigments were toxic

Even tl;dr-er: they color low quality tumeric with lead-based pigments to make it look like high quality tumeric. Like how China spray paints dead grass green. But with more lead.

China? Grass paint is booming business in SoCal. All because they don't realize they live in a desert. People bash on Arizona for spending water when it's super dry but take a look at Southern AZ lawns vs SoCal lawns. The Southern AZ ones are much more adept to the desert.

Not at the same scale, but sure, I'm perfectly happy to call out SoCal too. Except SoCal sure as hell won't be using lead paint.

Grass lawns are way more common in Phoenix than Tucson, for whatever reason.

Fascinating downvotes for a perfectly accurate tl;dr. Not everyone is interested in wading through 1000 words of scene-setting before actually getting to the point.

This article screams "white american saviour"

WHO in 2023 writes like this??

> Food Safety authority representatives, flanked by soldiers in camouflage uniforms, magenta berets and guns slung over their shoulders, strode down the center of a busy street market in Dhaka, the capital city. The crowds parted.

> Men riding three-wheeled rickshaws pulled over. Street vendors stopped stirring their aromatic curries. The spice sellers wearing parti-colored lungi skirts fell silent. Some curious merchants, sitting atop stacks of potatoes, ginger, onions and garlic, jumped down to follow the entourage.

Did you even read the context around that? Everyone involved in the scene described was Bangladeshi. And the point of writing it like a dramatic scene in a movie is made clear in the giant quote and paragraph that follow: it was law enforcement theater. They didn't have the capacity to enforce food safety at the scale necessary, so they used this tactic to instill fear in people who were still using the outlawed lead-based pigment.

So I wasn't the only one that was unimpressed with the flowery anecdotes either?

>WHO in 2023 writes like this??

All websites do, as their staff is entirely comprised of 23 year old English majors who equate this style with "good writing". The entire internet reads like a C+ sophomore term paper now.

oh my, I feel sheltered from bad blog posts-as-news, you have ruined the allegory I had of modern articles

I was also uncomfortable reading the article. It presents the Western scientist as the only one who knows that lead is dangerous, instead of grappling with the material economic issues at play.

The story makes it sound like the American scientists never asked local officials or scientists about lead exposure and where it might be coming from. Was fingerprinting isotopes used instead of cooperating and learning from the people being affected?

yes exactly. "Asking for help" vs "no clue you would need help".

Some countries are disadvantaged. To say they are stupid and naive is another thing.

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