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Exactly, so as an abnormally avid chocolate consumer, I'm still scared (and even more than before reading Arstechnica's take).

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I used to eat a large bar of very dark, high quality, chocolate per day (having to constantly explain to onlookers that the whole bar had the sam sugar as a half cup of milk). I’m sure I was in the 99th percentile for cocoa. I stopped when I saw this coming a few years ago.

That's me exactly. I used to eat half a bar of 85% - 100% dark daily. The (relatively) recent info on heavy metals has me really bummed. Why is everything always so toxic these days???

My new goal is to figure out how to get all this heavy metal accumulation out of me (I've been eating heavy dark chocolate regularly for years), and find ways I can keep eating chocolate without absorbing more. Some studies I've read mention that tomatoes might help prevent heavy metal absorption when consumed with the source.

It isn’t always a modern affliction. Some food plants just do this, pulling heavy metals from the soil. You’ve heard of arsenic in brown rice.

So about that... a portion of the arsenic in the Southern US is from old pesticides used on cotton!

The only good news about that is levels are constantly dropped as it gets "used up".

However this is only a portion, in many places arsenic is just there in the ground.

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