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You Don’t Need To Worry About Heavy Metals In Dark Chocolate
Why you probably don’t need to stress about tiny quantities of lead and cadmium in your chocolatey treat.
Another week, another spate of scary headlines implying that you are going to be poisoned by the food you eat. There’s no more reliable story for media to tell about your health than the one that says that you’re unknowingly getting deadly chemicals in everyday products. I even wrote about this general trend last week.
This time, the story is about lead and cadmium infesting your dark chocolate. There’s no shortage of fearmongering stories implying that these sweet treats are contaminated with heavy metals, based on a new study that’s just been published.
Fortunately for all of us, the real risks here are incredibly low. As ever when it comes to stories about household products killing you, the devil is in the details, and the details show very little to worry about when it comes to eating dark chocolate.
Let’s look at the science.
The Study
The study in question was a fairly minimalistic effort by a group of scientists. The authors took 72 different chocolate bars purchased between 2014 and 2022, and sampled the levels of lead, cadmium, and arsenic in each of them. They classified risk according to the Californian Prop 65 limits which require labelling of products that have more than a certain amount of various substances in them — in this case, more than the Maximum Allowable Dose Level (MADL) for lead, cadmium, and arsenic.
Of the products tested, the average levels of lead and cadmium exceeded the MADL set by the Californian OEHHA, with 43% and 35% of products tested exceeding the MADL for lead and cadmium, respectively. Arsenic levels were universally lower than the MADL. The authors also found that the levels of heavy metals didn’t differ based on certifications, but that organic chocolate bars had significantly higher levels of cadmium when compared to non-organic.
