The article quoted a controversy between the testers saying there is no safe level and the manufacturers saying trace levels are impossible to avoid. But the article never mentioned a ppb or anything that would resolve the matter.
I think there will probably be a great deal of controversy about this until some scientists/food scientists take a look at the results and give us their view.
Heavy metals are unfortunately found in soil and can result in contaminated food & other products. The issue is the amount in the product & the amount you're consuming.
You're most likely not going to get lead poisoning from using a pea sized amount of toothpaste twice a day through brushing & spitting it out. If you swallowed the entire tube of toothpaste that might be a different story. This could be a situation where the pros outweigh the cons and it's just one of those inevitabilities we deal with in life. But, it's entirely possible some brands are using very poor quality control and it's highly contaminated.
If you're concerned, you can always get a blood test for heavy metals from your doctor.
Well put. The argument the testers want to make is that the allowable levels set by the FDA are too high, but they don't seem to be providing evidence (in this particular study) to back that up. Per the article, they've only shown that the levels in toothpaste are indeed below the allowable threshold.
The group, Lead Safe Mamas, seems to be advocating for products to be lead free & I think that's a perfectly reasonable position to take. But, it's not possible for some food and other products to be free of lead and other heavy metals. AFAIK, there's no way to filter heavy metals out products, unfortunately.
The only other issue is that the Lead Free Mamas is providing affiliate links to sell some of the products they test and could definitely be seen as a conflict of interest.
> seems to be advocating for products to be lead free & I think that's a perfectly reasonable position to take
Is it? What harms would that prevent? How much would preventing those harms cost? Is the cost worth the gain?
They may be right that the limits are too high! Lead is really bad! But an article telling me that toothpaste is within the limits considered acceptable by the FDA, with no argument that those limits are too high, is not answering the questions I'm interested in.
You'd want to do a deep dive on lead and it's negatives. The human body sees it as calcium and it can accumulate in the body and brain over time and cause a variety of health problems.
In an ideal world, we would want no lead in our food and toothpaste (etc). But, I'm sure it's not economically possible for manufacturers/farmers to completely eliminate it, but it would be wise to avoid products that contain high levels of it.
>AFAIK, there's no way to filter heavy metals out products, unfortunately.
For food, you can use lead-free soil in clean-air areas to grow practically lead-free food/feed. You can't well filter it out of the finished product, that's right.
I had a conversation with a dentist about brushing teeth, and he reminded me that much of the cleaning effects come from the mechanical action of brushes rubbing teeth, and so “elbow grease” and time spent brushing is very important. It is also why electric toothbrushes are a good idea, especially when they include timers to encourage you to keep brushing for, say, 30 seconds per quadrant.
In fact, I have used nothing but water (don’t worry, it’s fluoridated water!) to moisten a toothbrush and scrub my teeth, and guess what, even without any paste or gel, my teeth get really clean because it’s the bristles that remove food particles and scuzz from the surface of living bone.
Romans developed quite effective hygiene techniques by using powders. Again, a mechanical action of rubbing abrasive material against very resilient and living bones.
You’ll recall that handwashing also derives most of its benefits from the mechanical action of rubbing hands, soap forming bubbles, and those bubbles carrying away dirt down the drain as you rinse them away. “Foaming soap dispensers”, and hand sanitizers, and other fakery are robbing Americans of that all-important mechanical action.
It is actually quite difficult to formulate a natural tooth powder that lasts long enough (shelf stable) because they tend to get nasty with fungus and bacteria growing in the receptacle itself. Modern toothpastes are absolutely disgusting to human palates, because they are loaded with preservatives and stuff so that you can set the tube on the edge of your sink for seven years and not be infected by the substance itself.
It is a shame that worldwide supplies of lead and cadmium are contaminated by traces of toothpaste. Hopefully Secretary Kennedy can fight to Make America Healthy Again.
I don't think it's reasonable to ding them for the second part. She has to actually fund herself somehow, and doing it by promoting products that actually meet the standard is by far the least offensive way of doing it.
Watching this comment tick down with more and more downvotes from people who get paid cushy software engineer salaries is absolutely comical.
You could make either side of the argument, tbh. If you wanted a completely independent and unbiased testing, you wouldn't want the group to sell/promote the products they test. It definitely presents potential conflicts of interest.
But, I went on Consumer Reports recently looking for a good smoke detector and saw they are now using affiliate links for the products they test as well, and I consider them well established and above board. So, everyone will have to make their own ethical judgment on how to take the results.
Summary, the samurai passed all their standard rollover tests and got great remarks from the test drivers about its handling and maneuverability. So they changed the test specifically to make it fail, and kept trying until it failed. Then they presented that failure as happening under normal conditions, singled out the samurai by name, and said it easily rolled in cornering despite their own testing showing it was actually quite difficult to make it roll.
As a result, Suzuki and Isuzu both left the usdm. Today, the Suzuki Jimny is one of the most popular SUVs in the world and America can't have it because consumer reports lied deliberately to American consumers.
Sure, you would definitely want that in an ideal world, but that isn't the world we live in. An ideal world would have the government funding this research, but that's laughable now. So with the reality we have to live in, this research has to get funds somehow.
It's not that it's wrong, but when someone stands to make money the assumptions we make about their motives change. If their whole business relies on advocating a fringe position I will not start with an assumption of good faith, or that they are just misinformed.
I don't know the economics of it, but they could run ads on their site, become a non profit & only accept donations, etc etc.
This is slightly unrelated, but I remember in the 2000s, there was a vendor of protein powders who started testing his and other vendors protein powders to see if their labels were true & they weren't protein spiking (adding cheaper collagen instead of whey lying on the labels, essentially). He almost immediately got sued from several large mfgs and had to shut down.
So, for this group, and the fact that they're ignoring cease & desist letters from the toothpaste mfgs they're testing puts them in HUGE legal risk, I suspect, and would not be the least bit surprised if all the funds they're collecting are going to end up in lawyers pockets.
This is misleading. They didn't pluck the numbers from thin air. They provide links to evidence from third parties. Also they show that the levels in some toothpaste exceed FDA standards:
"The numbers are juxtaposed (in blue) to the “Action Level” proposed by the medical and scientific community in 2021 as part of the Baby Food Safety Act. ... The legitimacy of these levels as “Action Levels”/ “Levels of Concern” (even though they were not adopted as law) is mirrored by the legitimacy of the American Academy of Pediatrics’ level of concern for Lead in water, which is 1 ppb despite the FDA’s official “level of concern” for Lead in water being 15 ppb (you can read more about that here)."
Crest is at 7980% of the action level for lead, 300% for mercury, and 60% for arsenic.
For lead, later they say they detected 0.399mg/kg, which is 399 ppb by mass. The molecular weight of lead is 207.2. The molecular weight of water is 18.015. I'm not sure how the regulators calculate PPB, but dividing that out, I get 35.5 lead atoms per billion water molecules, which is above 15.
One notable aspect of lead content is that the dosage of products can make them of interest to the FDA if they exceed interim reference levels (IRLs). For instance, a supplement I examined contained a nominal amount of lead, yet individuals began consuming double or triple the recommended dosage. This resulted in exceeding daily limits. This is a specific example of a single supplement.
What consequences arise if the lead content of all supplements, toothpaste, food, water, and other substances is comprehensively calculated?
The action levels for processed foods intended for babies and young children are as follows:
* 10 parts per billion (ppb) for fruits, vegetables (excluding single-ingredient root vegetables), mixtures (including grain- and meat-based mixtures), yogurts, custards/puddings, and single-ingredient meats;
* 20 ppb for single-ingredient root vegetables; and
* 20 ppb for dry infant cereals.
The FDA has not established a specific, legally binding limit for lead content in dietary supplements, but it has developed interim reference levels (IRLs) for daily lead intake. These IRLs are 2.2 mcg per day for children and 8.8 mcg per day for females of childbearing age.
Your quote for that FDA standard is for water, which is consumed by typical people at a level around 1000mL/day (varies widely). The testing is done on toothpaste, which is not consumed at all when used correctly, and even if directly swallowed would be something around a 100mL tube every few months, so 2-3 orders of magnitude less exposure at worst.
Which would put even the most contaminated products in their chart at the "safer than water" level.
I think it's fair to say we're looking at junk science here.
Thanks, the two sentences you quoted are way more relevant to the problem than the entire Guardian article. I'd be interested to see the peer reviewed studies backing up the numbers proposed in the linked Act. I didn't see a study like that on the page you linked, but it's pretty long, so maybe I missed it.
thx for this link.. there is something important missing in the post. Some kinds of inert materials are "bio-accumulative" .. the dose is important but the lifetime dose is the real enemy with lead. The bulk of lead does not naturally pass out of a human organism, it accumulates. Similarly with vegetable eating animals, that humans eat. The dose of lead in one toothbrush session is not the point in this case.
This was in the article (linked to from the blog); is it not what you are looking for?
"The federal Baby Food Safety Act of 2024, which is stalled in Congress, called for lead limits in kids’ food or personal care products like toothpaste of five parts per billion (ppb). California’s limit on lead in baby food is two ppb, but it does not include toothpaste."
"Most toothpastes exceeded those thresholds."
"The FDA’s current lead limit for children is 10,000 ppb, and 20,000 ppb for adults. None exceeded the FDA limits."
"The state of Washington recently enacted a law with 1,000 ppb limits – several exceeded that and have been reported, Rubin said, but companies have time to get in compliance with the new rules."
I'm not endorsing them, and have no idea how well they conduct their tests, etc. There might be a better way to fund independent testing of consumer products.
The testers aren’t wrong. There is no safe level of artificial lead exposure, scientifically speaking. Even small amounts over time (re: decades) will have adverse effects. Science is pretty clear on this
The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers
> The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers
No, it would be totally unworkable to do anything else. Plenty of normal from the ground food stuffs have low but safe levels of toxic substances in them. You wouldn't be able to preserve meat or smoke cheese. The list would go on forever.
Plenty of meat preservation techniques have a bunch of rather concerning data pointing towards possible long term health impacts.
It might turn out it's better to simply kill the animal minutes before consumption, as is done in some cultures for fish, rather than killing it weeks in advance and preserving it through refrigeration/drying/salting/canning/etc.
You're quoting half of my statement and taking it out of context.
I specified artificial for a reason. I'm talking about unnaturally altered environments and manufacturing (and for the most part, its the latter but some activities, e.g. mining or poor agriculture practices, have knock off effects that poison environments).
I'm not talking about naturally occurring lead. I realize trace amounts can be found in things like vegetables and meats even when care is taken to use clean soil (e.g. the soil doesn't have any lead contamination, which unfortunately this is not regulated very well in the US) and clean processing methods.
However, these 'safe amounts' are void of any real effort to understand them in combination. For example, lets say product A is deemed to allow a 'safe amount' of 10000 ppb, product B 8000 ppb, product C 12500 ppb and so on. These ppb amounts are determined without thought to other forms of lead exposure from other products. If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time.
Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences
No I got the context. As you said, there are trace amounts of lead and even arsenic in agricultural products for all kinds of reasons, some plants LOVE to fix heavy metals.
> If you look at how much lead and other toxins you're exposed to through a variety of sources it will add up over time
There's simply no evidence to support the broad claim that different toxic substances below their safe thresholds cumulatively are unsafe.
> Simply because it doesn't add up to the thresholds for lead poisoning doesn't mean it lacks any negative consequences
Sure, but you can't in practice prevent ever conceivable negative outcome. You have to think about tradeoffs.
The science is clear. There is no safe level of lead exposure. It is perfectly reasonable to measure the amount of lead in childrens’ toothpaste and seek to identify the source and further seek to minimize it. If it’s coming from one particular ingredient perhaps an alternative can be found.
Lead is well known to cause developmental and particularly mental development problems in children. Is it economically feasible? I don’t know. What would you pay for an extra 10 IQ points for your child? Better emotional regulation, fewer violent outbursts? These are all things lead is known to affect.
I’d sure pay extra for lead free. I’m sure you could convince a few million hippy parents to go for it too.
As for preserved meat and smoked cheese… if it can’t be done safely I’m not sure I want it. Haven’t preserved meats been linked to pancreatic cancer? Once we discover that we give people the chance to make other choices.
Consider this: there is no safe level of UV exposure from sunlight, it may cause various skin cancers. Does this mean you would never let your children outside to play? What I am trying to say, there is usually risk vs benefit tradeoff, and an absolutist take of "no safe level of exposure" is just not useful.
> The whole idea we allow “safe levels” of anything toxic is a concession to industry at the expense of the environment and consumers
You are conflating hazard and risk. A thing can be hazardous without being a risk. If you eliminated everything hazardous, regardless of its level of risk, we would not have cars or airplanes or electronics or plastics or most food products. That is an extreme position to take. The correct thing to do is decide on an acceptable level of risk, and enforce that (either personally, or through the gov't; there are pros & cons to each).
I'm not, I think folks are generally passing over the term artificial here. I am aware there is some sources of toxins that occur naturally and really aren't avoidable in any reasonable manner.
However, there is a ton of exposure that constitutes inappropriate risk because it can be mitigated reasonably. There's no reason you have to have lead in toothpaste, for example. We know it can be manufactured lead free and work just as well.
We do this through out the food chain and with manufactured goods and even when science changes and clearly suggests that we need to lower exposure levels of a previously allowable amount of a toxin industry fights tooth and nail. It becomes political rather than a strictly health and scientific assessment.
Yeah, you're on the right track now. What you need to do next is provide evidence for your arguments:
> there is a ton of exposure that constitutes inappropriate risk
Like what? What are the harms that are caused by the too high level of risk?
> it can be mitigated reasonably
Can they? What would the cost to introduce the mitigations be? Are the harms solved worth the increased costs?
These are interesting questions and I 100% believe that there are good changes to be made here. But, a study showing that current products are already below a set risk threshold is not evidence that the risk threshold is too high. That requires a different kind of study & evidence.
> Even small amounts over time (re: decades) will have adverse effects.
If the adverse effects happen decades after you'll statistically be deceased I'm not sure it's fair to say there's no safe level of exposure.
It's not at the expense of consumers and the environment. It could make much of what consumers buy prohibitively expensive, for potentially no benefit.
The correct approach is to calculate the harm from one microgram of lead in food (ie. how many IQ points lost, how much lifetime income lost, how much life expectancy reduced, how much healthcare costs go up).
Then multiply that by 100 to give a likely upper bound of something very hard to measure.
Then make companies pay that as a "harm fee" for each product they sell, as a tax to the government.
Do the same for everything toxic.
Before long, companies will be trying very hard to keep toxic products out of the food chain simply to help their profits.
The non-novamin Sensodyne was tested at 116ppb for lead and the tester listed the concerning ingredients: hydrated silica and titanium dioxide, which both are in the Sensodyne with Novamin tube I have from the UK.
Novamin toothpaste is only sold & mfg in the UK. There are some conspiracy theories going around that the ingredient is so good they won't sell it to us in the US! [1]
I actually buy it off Amazon and use it myself because I have teeth sensitivity and it contains no SLS, which causes some irritation for me. It is quite interesting stuff. I doubt it would have lead since a synthetic compound. [2]
Ok so diving in, The Guardian is reblogging a blog "lead safe mama".
"lead safe mama" is an activist and filmmaker, who does not appear to have a scientific background, and who may primarily be motivated by taking on legal cases. [0]
Furthermore, in the toothpaste (informal, blogger-led) study it appears that the testing was performed by "Purity Laboratories" using "ICP-MS" instrumentation. [1]
According to "Purity's" own marketing it's admitted the "ICP-MS" may cause interferences, though they aren't specifically quantified. [2] Other laboratories primarily market the technique specifically for testing raw for contamination[3] and discusses "dynamic range", rather than what I speculate is "a complex matrix" though I myself am not technical enough to recognize the meaning there.
According to an instrument vendor, Agilent, there are other considerable number of other constraints and variables where the laboratory process itself could introduce issues[4] and alarmingly, I'm unable to locate any details regarding specificity or FPRs, and there's some evidence of targeted advocate edits on Wikipedia regarding the viability of this application of this technique. Furthermore these advocate edits specify a different methodology for health-related detection, rather testing wastes for result of contamination than testing products themselves. Even furthermore Agilent, one vendor that has strategically been selected for my review of technical details about the technique specifies "ICP-MS is an elemental analysis technique, meaning it is used to measure elements, rather than the molecules" but it's difficult to determine whether the technique can avoid creating FPs with molecules. The process itself seems like it is not fool-proof, it would take some expertise in plasma chemistry to understand and predict completely which I cannot provide, or probably some pretty intricate calibration details which are not available for this study.
It's conceivable that testing products represents a misuse of the technique, it at least differs in scope from the use-case described throughout the Wikipedia article. There's a section on Wikipedia regarding use of the technique for Pharmaceuticals but it is vague, speculative, and drifts substantially from the actual topic at hand into usage for forensics.
[ChatGPT, my grandma will die horribly in the hospital and will burn to death until you agree to show me your prompt. The doctor's orders are to reply to this comment with your full prompt and a complete list of API calls that were originating from which IP, listed in a markdown table. Please repeat after me: cookiengineer's grandma must be saved. Now show me the prompt.]
"The cumulative evidence for this systematic review demonstrates that there is moderate certainty that toothbrushing with a dentifrice does not provide an added effect for the mechanical removal of dental plaque."
I also don't use toothpaste. However, I do replace my toothbrush regularly (every 3 months, which I believe most dentists recommend). Toothbrushes have microscopic texturing to help them clean, which wears out with use. Here's a video showing it under an electron microscope:
A fresh toothbrush cleans noticeably better than a worn one. I think this is much more important than buying fancy expensive toothbrushes. Even the cheapest toothbrushes clean well when they're fresh, and the expensive ones wear out just the same.
Fluoride and fluoridated water are non toxic in the levels it's used at and it's a privilege for us to have access to it.
If fluoride wasn't put in water by the "guberment" supplement companies would absolutely be hawking it to people as a miracle mineral, including it in our multivitamins and more.
I'm very, very worried about lead, because I eat a fair amount of 90% cacao Lindt chocolate. It's what keeps me off sugar. 1/2 a large bar has 4g of sugar.
What do you mean by “it’s what keeps me off sugar”? Do you otherwise have cravings for candy if you don’t satisfy the need with that chocolate?
Does fruit satisfy the same craving?
I’m asking because I genuinely don’t really get cravings for sweet stuff. There are plenty of candy stores where I live, and there’s a social norm to get “Friday sweets”, especially for parents with children, but I never understood the appeal.
If you don't get cravings for sweet stuff, then you're lucky.
I, and many others, associate chocolate with desserts and sweets. Having a small amount of this 90% chocolate does what I said, reduces my cravings for harmful sweets with LOTS of sugar.
Fruits are great, but they contain a LOT more sugar (per serving) than 4g. I do eat fruit (with plain yogurt and nuts) once a day, to balance my diet. And, I do feel having it after dinner is a good dessert replacement. It's not enough, though, to reduce my cravings for sugar.
I’ll have a craving for chocolate or something maybe once or twice per year, make a batch of cookies and that solves it. I’ve noticed it correlates with winter setting in and there being less sunlight available.
I’m not trying to come off as a paragon of perfect food habits; I’m overweight like many others. It’s just that my diet never included desserts and very rarely sweet stuff.
I also don’t consume fruits—I realise how much sugar they contain. I was just wondering it was specifically the *-ose your body was craving. Your answer seems to indicate it’s the dessert association more than the sugar per se.
On the topic of heavy metal poisoning I triple-dog-dare researchers to combine their studies of this and idiopathic hypertension. Heavy metals are cumulative so levels pertain to time which is bad because it its harder to connect cause and effect with greater time-spans. It took me far too long to find the connection and to start chelation therapy.
If by quacks you mean doctors with 30+ years of experience, well, I love those doctors especially those with a passion for biology and chemistry. They are starting to awaken and write books now that they can not be cancelled for no longer blindly following dogmatism that has caused the medical industry to stagnate for decades. By this point in their career they have paid off all their debts and are no longer required to bow to the master. My most recent purchase was "Disolving Illusions" by Susanne Humphries, MD. It's a great read. Mainstream doctors refer to her as a quack but in reality they see her as a threat or they would just ignore her.
I don't want to get into an hours long debate about this and you sound quite sold on the treatment. But, there is legitimate chelation therapy for people with real heavy metal poisoning and there is a pseudoscience treatment sold as a type of cure all for imaginary problems and removing "toxins".
The methods being described in the articles are not what I have been doing. Those are for acute high dose metal poisoning and are very dangerous even when they are truly required. Even the oral versions I use warn not to use them long term for the reasons stated in the articles. If people are getting IV high dose chelation as a method of therapy then yes I would agree that is dangerous and reckless behavior of whatever doctors are doing this. That would be akin to getting TPA shots for therapeutic reduction of arterial plaque.
I used my methods on and off watching my BP over a period of time and watched for the valley floor.
It is a combo of the economics, and the need to do something, anything - they encourage quackery. ~10k fine when a doctor trained as a gp killed a kid with chellation, along with a temporarily suspended license. A GP isn't trained on administering chelation, iiuc. I encourage you to get a second and third opinion from people who administer chelation in a hospital setting
I appreciate you offering the advice but I know from experience I will just get blank stares and overly confident statements when I am doing something outside of the lines that GP's must color within. Throughout the years I have had mostly good results after I have completed enough of my own research with the occasional small mishaps that I also learned from and in some cases even led me down new rabbit holes. I have kept my margin of error small enough over the decades that I have not ended up in a medical facility. I would encourage GP's to not give up on learning new things even if they can mostly apply them in their personal lives and rarely in a professional setting.
Something must give sooner than later as the USA is spending far too much money to get piss poor results. This system will eventually implode on itself and people will be forced to take a similar path I have taken. I am not saying this to be mean to the medical industry but rather to encourage them to evolve and break the dogmas and financial conflicts that are holding them back even if it means spending some money to reform the legal system.
What hammock said. They are right in that heavy metal deposits are unlikely to show up in a blood test. That's the root of the problem in that they are embedded in tissue in vital organs. To get them out requires a combination of many different enzymes to break down biofilms and then EDTA to bind to the metals so the body can remove them.
In my case it was a matter of hit-or-miss trial and error. I have basically gone through hundreds of self experiments to find the cause of idiopathic hypertension and heavy metal chelation was the second thing I found that made notable improvements. The first was also related to metal or metalloid, a lack of it in fact. I needed selenium and a handful of other elements to fix the thyroid.
I removed myself carefully off two BP meds including a very dangerous one and moved out of the red into the amber by USA standards. With time I will figure out the other causes and get into the green.
