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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

Serious question: what is the actual story or solution here?

Are food manufacturers breaking California law or not?

And given that it's the cacao beans themselves with lead and cadmium (not factory contamination or something), is the solution to test every batch from each farm individually, and then just throw half the beans into the garbage? Or shut down half the cacao farms worldwide because of tainted soil?

Or is this pretty much in line with food safety levels generally, there's nothing to be worried about, and California guidelines are overly strict?

I just find it unfortunate that the article presents all the facts but basically zero analysis or context.

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(disclaimer: I make bean-to-bar chocolate)

As background, food often concentrates whatever is in the soil, and cacao perhaps more so. The shell around the cacao bean is a big filter, and tends to accumulate stuff. This concentration isn't specific to cacao, e.g. see rice and arsenic, etc etc.

Volcanic soil naturally has a lot of cadmium, for example, so you end up with it in the final product for cacao from some regions. The growing areas more popular with large manufacturers (i.e. cheaper cacao) just so happens to be areas with high cadmium levels, so there is a a bit of a correlation between cadmium levels and the size of the operation.

I've been told that pretty much all larger chocolate organizations do test each batch for cadmium, lead, etc. The smaller ones are usually sourcing cacao from higher quality distributors, and those distributors also test everything (and also do transparency reports on labor, handling, and such).

Fundamentally, the guidance on what is an acceptable level is not clear, though I cannot speak for the decision making at the companies listed in the article. CA's particular threshold considered low, and you can get equal amounts of Cd/Pb from a lot of other food sources (generally people don't eat multiple chocolate bars per day, but they might have a cup of rice and get a similar amount of cadmium). Maybe that's also a problem.

Lead though, really should not be in there. It's not from the soil, and it's mostly in the shell, which should be removed in processing.

Thank you -- that's very helpful context!

Great post. I’m dying to know what company you have/work for? Theo by any chance? AFAIK bean to bar is highly unusual, done by only a dozen or so companies. You appear to be living the dream!

https://spinnakerchocolate.com/

Why yes, I'm brimming with envy. Very cool!

I was told a few years ago that bean-to-bar was done by very few companies. But I've since heard that it's had kind of an explosion that somewhat parallels the popularity of beer microbreweries, with a huge boom in sales of chocolate-making equipment.

Based on the turnout at the Northwest Chocolate Festival last month, I can confirm it has exploded :-)

I put about a tablespoon of cacao nibs in my breakfast cereal every morning. They are tasty and high in fiber. I guess I have to do some calculations on cadmium exposure.

I thought the lead was from beans left outdoors to ferment near machinery / vehicles / industrial sites with lead in the emissions.

Yes (usually drying, less so fermenting), which varies a lot country to country. Still, mostly it should end up in the shell that is removed.

> (and also do transparency reports on labor, handling, and such).

Where would one find these reports?

An example: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ab9229aa9e0287fbf927...

Do you know if there's a repository for them?

If someone wants to know, for example, about the sourcing of a chocolate bar they just bought?

Not to my knowledge :/

Ah I was afraid of that.

As far as I can tell, zero consumer chocolate products can be guaranteed to be made from just 'Uncommon Cacao' product, and not intermingled with other less transparent intermediaries, so it's of little interest to the end consumer.

Most tiny makers do single origin from distributors like Uncommon, but you'd have to ask.

Most chocolate you see in a store, though, yes :(

I'm just always blown away by the niche expertise you find on here! Thanks for the info.

This problem is not specific to cocoa.

The seeds of many plants concentrate lead and cadmium whenever they are found in their environment, so with most seeds and nuts there is always a risk of high lead or cadmium content.

In most countries there are legal limits for the lead and cadmium content of seeds and nuts, but the limits are much more lenient than for other products, because there are few sources of seeds and nuts that are not affected, so setting low limits would eliminate most products from the market.

So the only recommendation is like for fish, which should not constitute a too large part of the food due to the risk of high mercury content, also most seeds and nuts should not be a too large part of the food, due to the risk of high lead and cadmium content.

The pollution caused by human stupidity has converted some of the healthiest foods into health risks.

In second to last paragraph, you mean that for these reasons of contamination, fish and chocolate should not constitute too large a part of one’s diet, correct? Just trying to clarify.

Yes.

Consuming them from time to time should not be a problem, but eating a chocolate (or fish) every day presents the risk of excessive intake of contaminants.

Unfortunately, most of us cannot afford to make a chemical analysis of every food we buy, to determine whether it is safe or not for consumption, so it is better to be cautious.

Even the legal limits for the lead and cadmium content of cocoa and of most seeds and nuts are rather high also based on the reasoning that on average they should be only a minor part of the daily intake.

Seeds like grains that make up most of people's diets and the diets of most livestock? That doesn't sound great.

Actually products like white flour or white rice have significantly less contaminants than whole grains.

I do not agree with the propaganda about whole grains being healthy. Whole grains have more contaminants and more anti-nutrients, e.g. phytic acid.

Whole grains would be healthier in comparison with white flour or white rice only for someone who would eat nothing else, and even then they would not be healthy enough.

A healthy diet should include processed grains like white flour or white rice as a source of cheap proteins and of energy and it should also include some sources of healthy fat and many other sources for the nutrients that are necessary only in small quantities, like vitamins, minerals or proteins rich in lysine (which is insufficient in cereals). Whole-grain products have inflated prices, while a combination of e.g. white flour with various vegetables is simultaneously cheaper and healthier.

Relying on whole grains to provide what is missing in white flour or white rice is completely inefficient and it also adds the risk of an excessive intake of contaminants.

How did you come to the idea that processed foods are part of a healthy diet

not all processed foods are healthy, but also not all raw foods are healthy either. most of the issues with processed foods are with the ultra-processed foods, those foods that are manufactured into a food product with minimal or no cooking required. and there's the stuff like iodine or niacin fortification and pasteurization, which we know has had systemic positive effects on nutrition.

there's also where exactly you draw the line for processing. fermentation is like the oldest food preservation method we have (kimchi, cheese): is that processing? the raw diet people even believe cooking of any time is processing.

Nothing is healthy, everything is just varying levels of bad for you. Its all about minimizing.

Any kind of food must be processed by removing the parts that are not edible or are contaminated or contain various harmful substances.

This kind of processing is always good.

The kind of processing that is bad either adds to food substances that are not food, e.g. conservants or colorants, or it destroys useful components of the food, like vitamins or unsaturated fatty acids, by heating or other harsh treatments.

The useful part of the grains, which cannot be obtained from other sources at a similar price, are the proteins and the starch, which are needed by a human in large quantities daily. Everything else that is contained in the whole grains can be found in countless other vegetables that are better sources than the whole grains.

that being said, whole grains do cause less glycemic spiking and are important for diabetics.

What you're missing here is that whole grains (or whole foods in general) are biologically active with phytochemicals such as phenolic acids, flavonoids, lingans, etc, which their processed counterparts generally have less of (or none at all). These compounds get into our body and then work in many ways (many of which that we don't fully understand) to improve important markers of human health.

Plant food is biologically active in ways that animal products are not, and I think people who eat exclusively meat as a source of protein are missing out on a lot of opportunity from the chemical activity of plants that has been shown to be health promoting.

Whole foods do have more antinutrients but in studies I've seen most authors conclude that the benefits greatly outweigh the risks. I agree that I am concerned about the metals in whole foods though; and careful sourcing is important (and even then sometimes insufficient).

There are many other vegetables, from which other parts than the seeds are eaten, and which provide large amounts of biologically active phytochemicals.

Seeds, like those of cereals or of legumes, are a necessary part of food because they are the only part of the plants with high content of proteins.

Because of their disadvantage of also concentrating pollutants, it is preferable to use them mainly as a source of proteins and starch, which does not require the use of whole grains, and to get any desirable phytochemicals from other parts of plants.

In the case of oily seeds, the extracted oils (if they are obtained by cold pressing or supercritical carbon dioxide extraction) contain most of the phytochemicals but much less of the heavy metals. For instance, cold-pressed sunflower oil is a better source of phytochemicals than raw sunflower seeds, because the latter, like cocoa, have frequently high contents of lead and cadmium.

So there are ways of processing that improve the quality of the food ingredients. The kinds of processing that are bad are typically those which add undesirable substances to food, not those which remove undesirable substances from food.

I'd love to see more research on how soaking and sprouting impact contaminants and antinutrients. It's known that they reduce some antinutrients already, but an accurate map of every chemical in seeds(including the proteins we want) at each stage of sprouting would be great.

In addition to some of the other comments here mentioning whole grain benefits, I remember doing some brief research here and seeing that processed grains like white rice or white bread tend to be inflammatory while brown rice and whole grain bread are anti-inflammatory. Not sure if that just makes this a "pick your poison" situation or what.

Fish also have selenium which counters the mercury effect.

https://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/publication/FS437

Eat a lot of fish like the Japanese, you might even become less violent for some reason :)

Odd how the only one that had levels in the teens was Lindt, from Europe. Seems like manufacturers could and should be doing more in the USA.

Not sure if all Lindt products in the USA are made there, but they do have a manufacturing plant in New Hampshire.

You should see how much lead is in the average carrot.

Last I checked, baby carrots can have similar lead/lb as the chocolates they're talking about here.

And people chow down on carrots thinking they're "healthy".

Can you provide some back up on that? I can't seem to find anything.

See table 7 in https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91554-z

Carrot is just one example. 0.027 mg lead / kg carrot.

Or 0.027 micrograms lead / g carrot.

According to the asyousow.org report linked above more than 0.5 micrograms lead per day is bad, which is just 20g (0.7oz) of fresh carrot.

Celery and beetroot are not far off either, around half the lead of carrot by weight.

I don't know that a study conducted in Poland with polish goods actually gives you the lead & cadmium levels in an average carrot. Thank you for providing the study though!

It's hard to find data for commercial vegetables in the US. I did find one study looking at urban gardens (e.g. carrots grown in your backyard if you live in the city) and the levels were like 100x the Polish figures shown above.

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