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May 9, 2023 - Epoch Times
14:51
Beware of Toxic Chocolate: Heavy Metals Found in Major Brand Names
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Good evening, and right before we dive into this study regarding chocolate, I'd like to quickly mention that over on Epic TV, I recently published an awesome episode detailing how, unbeknownst to most people, there's a giant push in America right now to scale up the use of both mRNA technology as well as gene therapy on the livestock that winds up on our supermarket store shelves.
Meaning that whether it's beef, pork, lamb, chicken, or turkey, the meat that you're buying from the store Now, getting back to today's topic...
According to this new study right here, which recently came out of Consumer Reports, many of the chocolate brands that Americans buy from the supermarket, well, they contain high levels of toxic metals, including things like cadmium as well as lead.
And these, by the way, are not some Chinese-imported off-brand chocolates.
Instead, these researchers were looking into some of the most popular brands throughout the country, the ones that are very likely in your cupboard right now, things like Hershey's, Dove Chocolate, Trader Joe's, and so on and so forth.
Now, to start with, the researchers here were looking specifically at dark chocolate, which, if you think about it, is a little bit ironic, since many people choose dark chocolate over alternatives like, for instance, milk chocolate because of these supposed health benefits, including things like antioxidants, as well as the fact that dark chocolate tends to have less sugar.
However, for many years now, the chocolate industry has been grappling with a certain problem.
The fact that, for one, heavy metals are difficult to remove during the production process, and secondly, the fact that metals like lead are introduced into the chocolate during the manufacturing process.
And even though most consumers are completely unaware of it, This is actually a well-known problem within the chocolate industry.
And for years now, all these different brands they've been grappling with and trying to lower these toxic heavy metal levels.
And so in order to, you can say, test their progress, the researchers over at Consumer Reports, they bought 28 brands of chocolate that are commonly available throughout the country in order to measure the amount of heavy metals.
And what you might find surprising is that they detected both cadmium as well as lead in every single one of them.
However, the amount of cadmium and lead actually differed from brand to brand.
For instance, take the example of a very popular brand like Godiva's Signature Dark Chocolate.
You can find it in many supermarket checkout aisles across the nation.
And as you can see, the results from the laboratory analysis found that this particular brand had a stunning 146% lead.
Now you might be asking yourself, 146% of what?
Well, here's how the researchers described it in their paper.
To determine the risk posed by the chocolates, we used California's maximum allowable dose for lead, which is 0.5 micrograms, and cadmium, 4.1 micrograms.
We use those levels because there are no federal limits for the amount of lead and cadmium most foods can contain.
And our scientists believe that California's levels are the most protective available.
Shown are the percentages of the maximum allowable dose level supplied in an ounce of each chocolate.
And so then, if we go back to that picture of Godiva's chocolate, we see that one ounce of it contained 146% of the maximum allowable dose level for lead in the state of California.
Then if we do the math, if we actually crunch the numbers, that means that an ounce of Godiva contains 0.73 micrograms of lead, which is really, you can say, a giant problem for two very distinct reasons.
The first is that an ounce of chocolate is not really that much.
Up on your screen is what an ounce of chocolate actually looks like.
And so an entire chocolate bar can contain anywhere from three to five times that much.
And second of all, according to the FDA, as much as you can trust them, the daily safe limit for a child is 2.2 micrograms of lead per day, meaning that eating a bar of chocolate puts the child at their daily limit of lead.
That's of course not even considering any other food that they eat or anything else in their environment.
Just the chocolate bar alone puts them at that threshold.
Now, obviously, this does not just affect Godiva.
As we mentioned earlier, these researchers tested 28 different national brands.
And so, in terms of which brands were better than others, let's take a look at the results of their research.
And the best way to do so is by grouping the different chocolate brands together into four separate categories.
And for your reference, I'll leave each category on screen for a few seconds.
That way, you can take a screenshot and compare them against the brands that you might have in your home.
Now, the first category, as you can see up on your screen, are the brands that were found to be the safest.
These include things like Mast, Tazza, Girardelli, and Verona.
But notice something.
Despite being quote-unquote the safest, all those brands do contain both lead and cadmium.
They just happen to be at lower levels than the maximum allowable dose level for the state of California.
Then the next group are the brands that were found to be high in cadmium.
As you can see up on your screen, this includes brands like Beyond Good, Equal Exchange, Lind, Scharfenberger, Alter Eco, Pasha, and Dove brand Promises Deeper Dark Chocolate.
Then the next category are the brands that were found to be high in lead.
This includes brands like Tony's, Lily's, Godiva's Signature Dark Chocolate, Chocolove 70% Cacao, Lind's 85% Cacao, And then lastly, we have the brands that have the, you can say, unique honor of being high in both lead as well as cadmium.
This includes Theo with 70% cacao, Trader Joe's with 85%, Theo with 85% cacao as well, Lily's, as well as a brand called Green and Blacks.
Then, in terms of their overall conclusion, well, here is what these scientists wrote.
Quote, Now at this point,
you might be saying to yourself, okay Roman, this is good to know, but those are only 28 different brands that were tested.
What about the hundreds of other brands that are on supermarket store shelves across the country?
Well, fortunately, we're in luck.
Because last year, a different organization called As You Sow, which is a non-profit, you can say environmental group, they conducted a similar independent study, but they actually tested over 469 chocolate products.
Now, because that's too many to go through in one episode, on your screen right now, I will flash through the lab results of all the 469 products that they reviewed.
If you'd like to, you can actually pause the video at any moment and take a screenshot of anything that happens to catch your eye.
In passing, I will mention that this particular test, from last year, it found that over 60% of the chocolate products contained lead and or cadmium levels that were above that safety threshold that we discussed earlier.
Which is, well, it's pretty shocking to say the least.
However, the story gets a lot deeper than that, which we'll get into right after I introduce the sponsor of today's episode, which is the company that sold me this beautiful coin.
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Now Roman in the studio.
Back to you.
If you'd like to dig through the results of either one of those two studies for yourself, I'll throw the links to both of them.
They'll be down in the description box below this video so you can peruse them at your own leisure.
And all I ask in return is that you take a quick moment to smash those like and subscribe buttons, which quite literally forces the YouTube algorithm to share this information out to ever more people.
Now, circling back to that Consumer Reports study.
Once it was actually published a few months ago, the team over at Consumer Reports, they were able to compile a petition of over 55,000 signatures, and they sent that petition over to several of the chocolate manufacturers who had the worst scores.
The petition was urging those companies to remove these heavy metals from their products.
However, wouldn't you know it, only one of the companies actually responded to the request, and their response is, I believe, really worth reading.
It came from Trader Joe's, or rather, it came from the law firm representing Trader Joe's, and here's what it said, quote, Trader Joe's stands by the safety of its products.
It considers nothing to be more important than the health and safety of customers.
Of course, Trader Joe's takes this matter seriously, and in fact, has been working on it for years.
And it's that last sentence, the one way they say they've been working on it for years, that I believe is the most interesting.
Because it reveals a truth that many consumers of chocolate are not aware of, which is the, you can say, dark side of cacao.
Because you see, the chocolate that we buy from the store is made up from the cacao bean, which has two main components.
It has the cacao solids and the cacao butter.
Taken together, this is called, generally, cacao.
Now, the reason that dark chocolate has a reputation for being relatively healthy stems mostly from the cacao solids, largely because they are packed with antioxidants.
However, unfortunately, cacao solids are also where the heavy metals are found.
And so, for these chocolate manufacturers, It creates, you can say, a tricky situation where they have to balance dark chocolate's benefits with its inherent risks.
Furthermore, while cadmium is found within the plant, lead is a whole different story.
To explain why that is, let me read to you an excerpt from this report from Consumer Reports.
It cites Dr.
Michael DeBartolomew, who is a toxicologist as well as a former official with the California Department of Public Health, and he has actually specifically researched heavy metals in chocolate.
And here's what it says, quoting him again.
Quote, Dr.
D. Bartolome and other researchers studied how metals might contaminate cacao.
The researchers found that cacao plants take up cadmium from the soil, with the metal accumulating in cacao beans as the tree grows.
That's similar to how heavy metals contaminate some other foods.
But lead seems to get into cacao after the beans are harvested.
The researchers found that the metal was typically on the outer shell of the cacao bean, not in the bean itself.
Moreover, lead levels were low soon after the beans were picked and removed from pods, but increased as beans dried in the sun for days.
During that time, lead-filled dust and dirt accumulated on the beans.
Meaning, in plain English, that while cadmium comes from the soil and goes into the plant during the growing process, lead is actually introduced to the plant after it's been picked, during the, you can say, manufacturing process.
And so, as you can see, because of the different ways that cadmium and lead get into the final product, the chocolate, fixing the problem requires different solutions.
For cadmium, the processors would have to go upstream in the production chain and either pick soil conditions that use less heavy metals and/or find a way to replace older cacao trees with younger ones, because cadmium levels tend to increase as the plant gets older.
However, on the flip side, for lead… Well, it will require a change to the harvesting and manufacturing process, basically to things after the plant is picked.
Here's how the president of As You Sow, which is that nonprofit environmental group that tested over 400 chocolate products, here's how he described it.
Because of the different ways that cadmium and lead get into chocolate, addressing the contamination requires different solutions.
For lead, that will mean changes in harvesting and manufacturing practices.
Such practices could include minimizing soil contact with beans as they lie in the sun and drying beans on tables or clean tarps away from roads or with protective covers so lead-contaminated dust won't land on them.
Another option is finding ways to remove metal contaminants when beans are cleaned at factories.
And so, here's the thing.
Even though there are technically solutions to this problem, the reality is that at this very moment, there's no real push at the federal level to get these companies to address the issue.
And as we saw with that petition from Consumer Reports, the one that they sent out to many different chocolate manufacturers, and only one of them got back with a statement from their lawyer saying that their products are safe and effective and that they're looking into it, well, it does not seem to really be a topic of concern.
Therefore, as a consumer, you are basically on your own, although now you are equipped with some actual concrete information.
As I mentioned earlier in the episode, down in the description box below, I will throw the links to these two different studies that looked into the heavy metal contents of the different chocolate brands.
If you'd like, you can go through those studies for yourself and compare the results to what you have at home.
And perhaps you can also consider using these studies to guide the chocolate that you actually purchased for your family moving forward.
I know, I definitely will.
Again, all those links will be down there in the description box below this video.
You just have to click on those links and it'll take you over to the pages where you can go through it brand by brand.
And then lastly, as I mentioned at the very top of the episode, besides lead and cadmium, there is something else on the horizon that we have to begin looking out for, which is mRNA vaccines in our meat.
Over on Epic TV, which is our no-censorship video platform, I recently published an episode detailing how, unbeknownst to most people here in America, because, well, the media refuses to cover it, there's a giant push right now to scale up the use of both mRNA technology as well as gene therapy on the livestock that winds up on our supermarket store shelves.
Meaning that whether you're buying beef, pork, lamb, chicken, or turkey, the meat on the store shelves could very soon contain the remnants of mRNA-based vaccines that the animals were treated with.
And that is, by the way, if they don't already contain them.
If you'd like to check out that awesome episode, you can find it over on EpicTV, our no-censorship video platform, because again, unfortunately, a platform like YouTube is not a great place to host an episode like that, because even though everything is fact-based, well, there's just certain algorithms that pick up certain words, and if you talk about them...
Well, the algorithm will shut you down and perhaps even give a strike to your channel, even though everything you're saying is true.
And so, that's why we publish it over on Epic TV, our no-censorship video platform.
The link to that episode will be right there at the top, top, top of the description box.
All you have to do is click on that link, and you can watch the episode about these mRNA-based vaccines in our livestock right away.
Again, that link is at the very top of the description box.
I hope you check it out.
And until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epic Times.
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