Comment by FalseNutrition | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FalseNutrition | Hacker News Reader

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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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