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Comment by Reason077 | Hacker News Reader

> ”Rather a large number of things are contaminated with heavy metals”

Sure, but usually it’s because products are grown in contaminated soil and “naturally” pick up traces from their environment. Pretty much all rice contains arsenic, for example, but the concentration varies significantly depending on where it’s grown and how it’s processed.

The turmeric problem is different because lead has been deliberately added during processing, and it’s been found in relatively huge quantities - as much as 2-10% by weight in some cases!

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Except that pretty much no plants bioaccumulate lead. The biggest lead vector for plant-based food is the soil that hitches a ride on the outside. So peeling potatoes, carrots, beets etc and washing your other fruits and veggies is really all that is needed.

It's actually a little unfortunate that no plants we know of will take up lead because this would be a way to clean up soil. Plant a lot of plant X. Pull out the plant and discard. Repeat until the lead has been pulled out of the soil.

Some kinds of mushrooms take up lead And other toxic materials.

I only found this out because edible mushrooms grew in my yard, but they are warned in literature that they may contain heavy metals, as my well water contains 3ppb lead I wasn’t confident to eat them.

I also found this article for you, https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2019/03/05/mushrooms...

I grow my own turmeric and ginger with reverse osmosis filtered water indoors, perfectly lead free, and it tastes amazing when it’s fresh

That's going to take a while; when you discard the plant, the lead will go back into the soil. You'd need to store the leady plant somewhere.

Sunflowers and Indian mustard do bioaccumulate lead (especially with a chelating agent).

The Consumer Reports spice article I linked looks at turmeric too and found products on shelves, in 2021, in the highest category of concern.

I'm not convinced that these (turmeric with lead chromate pigment) are rare, one-off incidents. I think this "this is a South Asian problem" might be an American problem, too, to a lesser degree: we just don't have enough visibility and testing to notice it.

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