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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

What do you think the regulatory standard should be set to? It is currently set to 10 ppb (parts per billion).

Do you think it should be 0? 0.0000 ppb? No detectable lead whatsoever? What do you do if detection technology improves and the minimum detectable level decreases?

Even if you go live totally off the grid with your child and grow your own vegetables in your backyard with completely natural ingredients, you will still end up with some level of lead - which is a natural ingredient itself, after all.

At some point, you have to set a threshold and say that any lead below this level is not worth the cost of removing it or avoiding it. Would you pay 10x more for baby food at a 1 ppb level instead of 10 ppb? Do you think that would produce a net benefit for society?

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Most of the lead in baby food comes from the industrial processing. So if you grow your own apples and make your own apple sauce and don't put industrial processed spices in it it's likely not going to have any detectable lead in it.

The problem with our standards for baby food isn't necessarily that they are too high. The problem is that there is little enforcement. You have know way of knowing you will be getting 10ppb or be the unlucky one getting the large dosages that eventually got reported to the CDC. For much of the rest of the food supply the standards do allow for too much lead.

I would like it to be "equal or less than a standard reference food of similar ingredients" which would penalize adding lead or heavy metals via the processing itself instead of naturally occuring.

Granite has lead at levels of 30,000ppb, fwiw. Lead is a naturally occurring mineral. the only way to fully eliminate lead would be to live in a fully synthetic environment, everything grown hydroponically, etc. https://www.science.smith.edu/~jbrady/petrology/igrocks-tool...

Not only that. Life accumulated those over the eons, as the rocks eroded, the useful metals got saved by life, and the rest was washed down. So the natural levels are way higher. Life is good at hoarding these "heavy metals".

People in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631251 have been arguing that these people must have been some top class elite, and I totally get it. They are too good looking. But, that's how it was. The typical of the past would be above celebrity looks today. A lot of curent idols look stunted in comparison.

Another poster linked to this study that states [1]

    Existing rates of lead absorption are about 30 times higher than inferred natural rates

[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14334042/

That’s fully consistent with the idea that there has to be some threshold for lead in food because it’s literally naturally occurring in the soil.

In fact, to fully avoid lead, you’d basically have to carefully grow food hydroponically. Certified Organic mineral fertilizers like basalt rock dust (which provide calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, etc) would obviously not be okay if you wanted to eliminate all lead, as basalt contains 7.5ppm lead, comparable to the average in the Earth’s crust.

What method was used to infer the natural rates?

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