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.
https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/
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.