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Comment by gregwebs | Hacker News Reader

I am glad you are finding the time to avoid contaminated industrial processed food.

In the apple sauce contaminations the apple sauce is always cinnamon flavored. When tested for various heavy metals, cinnamon usually has unsafe levels of heavy metal contamination, and lead is usually one of the metals: https://tamararubin.com/2024/12/six-cinnamon-products-chart/

There is widespread contamination in spices because the machinery that processes most spices is made of metal with lead. Some of the lead may be unintentional contamination, but lead is also used intentionally because it is cheap and useful. I believe it is useful for grinding, etc because when used in an alloy the metal doesn't wear down as easily.

So if you want to replicate those apple sauce products without heavy metal you would need to buy cinnamon sticks and grate them yourself.

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I am a metal worker, and a foodie, living on a farm, and have experience and contacts in varios parts of the food industry, and have never come across lead, in any food relate items. As to alloying with lead, it has been used historicaly to make steal easier to machine "free machining steel" , but has no part in high strength or tool steels, and the steels used in grinding machines are going to be food grade..... even the grease in the bearings is food grade silcone grease....got some in the shop.... Good stainless wears for ever, so it is always used, at least here in Canada. So back to the lead and heavy metals, and how they are intentionaly added as "flavor enhansers" and coulorants, and basicaly how crazy people are and will do anything to steal a buck, but of course, not before passing it.right! personaly I eat only food, I make from individual single ingredients, prepared at home. The most complex food I buy is cheese, and very rarely icecream, thats it.And even then, there are things that just seem WRONG, like some grapes, that had an impossible "floral" aftertaste that lingered for hours......and now wont rot, sitting on top of the fridge. I could go on at some length, about all of the fraud in food, but Food is cheap, and there is no way to impliment a system with continious checks and investigations, that would guarantee quality and purity, without quardrupling the price, and perversly, increasing the incentive, to cheat.

So the lead in food comes from color and flavor additives. How did it get into those ingredients?

It's a deep dive, but an example or two might help, a great deal of food is processed and handled under purely industrial conditions, with all of it strored for some time, and shipped long distances, this causes oxidation and reduction of the most volitile and flavorfull/coulorfull components, which then must be protected or added back in when it is packaged for sale. Hence a vast industry devoted to flavorings, and coulorants, where many of these substances that were used are now banned, at least in a patch work fashion. Lead and other heavy metals are added to alter flavor and coulor, they are cheap and readily availible and also I suspect work as preservatives, allowing unscrupulous middlemen to by up large quantities of substandard product, and alter it enough to make it appear good enough for retailers to sell. Then there are agricultural areas that have been poluted by industry, mining, war, or naturaly, or even by past agricultural "mistakes", and again unscrupulous people can make large proffits by concealing the origin of what they are selling. So I buy spices as whole unground items, and choose carefully from small ethnic groceries, that cater to people keeping culinary traditions alive, and know by sight and smell the quality of what they are buying, and are often very hapoy to share there way of determining the good from the bad, and precisely, what to look for.

Most of the cinnamon production is in "less developed" countries where the rules, standards, and available equipment for processing foodstuffs aren't the same level as in your Canada...

Sounds like those places aren't actually cheaper, and we're just "getting what we are paying for" in terms of lower quality for lower prices.

I wonder if RFK Jr. could improve food safety checks, especially when it seems something isn't right with a food that you bought.

There's a discount store that I will no longer feel comfortable buying cheese or produce from.

they're wildly thrashing about in the FDA https://apnews.com/article/fda-layoffs-trump-doge-rehired-me...

> So back to the lead and heavy metals, and how they are intentionaly added as "flavor enhansers"

Any source on this? Lead as flavor enhancer? That would be crazy if true.

are there lead-free spice sources

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