Some nutritional supplements contain lead. Check this out!
Timestamps
0:00 Introduction: Lead in nutritional supplements
0:05 What is prop 65?
1:40 How are these numbers set?
3:27 Lead in vegetables
4:30 Share your success story!
In this video, we’re going to talk about lead in nutritional supplements.
There’s something called “prop 65” out of California, which was formerly called “safe drinking water and toxic enforcement act of 1986”.
This started as a very good thing to help protect people against chemicals. However, it has gotten completely out of control.
25 years later, it now involves over 900 different chemicals. Essentially, they have bypassed the FDA and now make their own guidelines or thresholds for certain chemicals.
So, now certain companies are forced to put warning labels on their products that say something like, “ingestion of this product is known to Californians to cause potential cancers or reproductive harm.”
For lead, their threshold is 0.5mcg per day. The FDA’s threshold is 12mcg for adults per day and 3mcg for children per day.
The problem is that it’s almost impossible to differentiate between toxic lead that comes from pollution and naturally occurring lead in the soil. Anything grown in the soil is bound to have a certain amount of lead in it.
How these numbers are set:
1. They used animal studies
2. They measured the quantity of exposure of a given element (like lead) that will result in an “observational effect”
3. They then take this number and set the threshold at 1/1000 of that number (for example, if they found an effect that occurred with 49mg of lead, they would set the threshold at 49mcg)
To me, these numbers don’t necessarily mean the product is unsafe. I believe the warning labels contain “misleading speech.” This legal term means “speech that is actually or inherently deceptive such that an ordinary consumer will be misled by the statement.” It reports a false fact. They’re using numbers that are 1000 times less than the actual number that they found some observational effect.
If someone sells a product that is food-based, they’re bound to be over this limit.
Lead in vegetables: • Potatoes - over 30mg of lead per kilogram
• Radishes - just under 50mg of lead per kilogram
• Spinach leaves - just under 60mg of lead per kilogram
• Cauliflower - just under 70mg of lead per kilogram
Dr. Eric Berg
08/31/2023
