United States: New tests show that almost half of the dark chocolate products have heavy metals like lead and cadmium. Some of the worst products were even organic ones. Researchers are figuring out how serious this problem is and what chocolate is safe to eat.
Contamination Linked to Soil, Water, and Cacao Processing
Heavy metals can get into food through dirty soil and water. These metals come from things like factories, mining, or some farming practices that use special fertilizers and pesticides.
Also, in the case of cacao a main ingredient in dark chocolate and there are some reports of the metal polluting the industries that are basically situated next to the cacao plants.
Cacao then becomes contaminated during a certain stage of its creation and its dying process and that makes its way into the bar from there that particular study first author Jacob Hands who is a medical student at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Science.
As reported by Very well, if you’re constantly consuming the heavy metals contamination over the period of time where the experts analysed 72 consumer dark chocolate and the cocoa-containing products for the contamination with lead and cadmium and arsenic sourced from the four different years.
Some Chocolates Exceed Safety Limits
There are 43 percent of the products which crossed the maximum allowable dose levels for lead set by California’s proposition 65. however, 35 percent of the products exceeded the maximum allowable doses for Cadmium and in the end its 0 percent of the products set the dose levels for arsenic.
Experts Caution Against Frequent Consumption
However, across all chocolates tested, the median concentration (middle value of all detected values) of each metal was lower than even the strictest Proposition 65 limits, indicating some of the chocolates tested are outliers with especially strong metal concentrations.
The authors of this study note that risk of heavy metals exposure from just one serving of dark chocolate is low.
But eating more than one serving per day or combining these products with the other food and sources of the heavy metals and could lead to higher overall exposure.