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.

Pictured: Yum. Photo by Mae Mu on Unsplash

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…