%85 of kid's drinks and snacks lead tainted..???!!!
 

From here

Well s***t, it appears that even if you do everything right, go organic, pay a little extra and pick items from an eco-friendly store, you're still screwed.

I guess this means we've finally screwed up the planet enough that there is no safe harbor when it comes to food. I wonder if they tested orange juice people in California and Florida made from oranges in their backyard would they find lead?

You skipped that key phrase "could be" in your thread title.

Of course they would.

That is a concern I have with the urban farming movement. It is very attractive to reclaim city blocks for community gardens but you'd best isolate those gardens from the existing urban soils.

Just go directly to soylent green.

What made you think that that was doing everything right? Marketing!

Edit: Also, make sure your juice has at least 70 hp/liter, or else it's crap.

I'm not quite that cynical. I believe most claims about organic until they are proven to be lying.

It's just harder to isolate anything from pollution.

They've never been proved to be telling the truth.

Actually, here's a fairly balanced view of organic farming vs. climate change:


http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.co...lobal-warming/

The plants don't take up lead into their tissues. The real problem is bringing the lead in on your clothes and shoes and insufficient washing of the vegetables, especially root vegetables.

The easiest way to boost your lead levels is to inhale ultra fine particles especially after vacuuming w/o a HEPA filter.

But it is my suspicion (based on my lead remediation training) that, lethal levels aside, lead in the diet is primarily a low-income poor nutrition problem. There is 0 requirement for lead in the human diet, unlike chromium, selenium etc. which are also toxic in great enough quantities, but nevertheless required at micro levels.

What happens with lead is that it mimics calcium and iron to an extent. If your body is lacking in either of these and lead is present it will substitute the lead. This is a problem in developing kids because the lead will become part of the bones and will later become released when the body becomes stressed. Unlike iron, lead does not carry oxygen through the blood. Lead also causes birth defects and lowers sperm count.

While any exposure is bad for kids, what is really important is to be sure they are getting real nutrition and not potato chips and mountain dew.

Excellent response, sn, but this part confused me:

With all this worry over the minuscule things in food and drink, we are missing the big picture: for most people, drinking juice with teeny amounts of lead is better for them than not drinking juice. Eating meat that has been treated with antibiotics is better for them than not eating meat.

We are all this woman now:

http://cellar.org/2010/smoking-while-pregnant.jpg

My conundrum is that anxiety has been far and away my most major health problem. So, in one sense, if I worry about what is in my food, I will get sick.

Crazy world, innit?

I should have stated: what is really important is to be sure they are getting real nutrition, i.e. Pepsi and Doritos and not potato chips and mountain dew.

my bad.

Oh, dat splain it more gooder.

Aside from the obligatory shouting of that quote (which happens on a regular basis in our house)...

So you're saying that the contaminated fruit in this study couldn't have been originally contaminated right off the tree, it had to have happened somewhere in the picking/canning process?

Yes. Could be lead in the water that was used to reconstitute the juice, or wash the food or in the packaging itself. The list of ordinary household items that are a source of lead is astonishing. If I can find it (I might have pitched it since it included everything) I'll scan and post it.

Especially consider that a lot of printing comes from You Know Where and it is highly probable that lead is in the inks. If you've ever been in a factory you can imagine the dust/ airborne particles x millions of units every hour...

It would be interesting to put an air filter in one of the ventilation ducts or in a machine that replicates breathing and look at what it captured in a day.

Yeah, the lead got in the food after the fact.

Get the lead out!

Maybe it comes from the machinery.

Yeah! overheating babbitt bearings

[quote=HungLikeJesus;662584
Edit: Also, make sure your juice has at least 70 hp/liter, or else it's crap.[/QUOTE]

they could make a car to run on leaded juice!

Got ahold of the actual list of brands that tested positive: http://www.envirolaw.org/documents/P...rLeadFINAL.pdf

Fucking awesome. Minifob's been eating around a can of these a day for probably 2.5 years now.

One sample? One? couldn't one sample of something contain virtually anything?

Tryin to look on the bright side...

These are off-the-shelf products. A sample is a whole can, or a bottle of juice, etc. None of them should contain lead. They would literally be illegal in California. If this shit were from China, we'd be up in arms about it and patting ourselves on the back about how we're so much better than they are. Also, don't forget:

1 can of pears = "about 3.5 servings."
1 bottle of juice = "8 servings"

I wonder how much lead would be in it if you grew and made your own fruit/juice?

I was tryin' Clod. :(

very. :p:

According to SN, the fruit itself doesn't take up the lead into the tissues. So as long as you washed it well in filtered water, and used a stainless steel juicer (wouldn't expect to find lead in any consumer retail machinery anyway, but hey, maybe it was made in China,) and drank it out of a glass that hadn't been decorated with lead paint... then there should be none.

Another cheery fact about lead is that lead is banned in the US as an additive to consumer paint.

Think about how many things you come in contact with that are not painted by consumers...

Why did I become moster?

yes, I read SN, but I wonder because.... seems to me that the theory and the practice of lead-free food production are not necessarily the same thing. Is it actually that "easy", or is there too much lead on and in everything and you'd need to do it in a vaccuum sealed environment with super-duper air filters etc?

I dunno. Somehow 15% of the juice/fruit managed to be under the lead requirements. But maybe they were all just a few molecules under the cutoff, instead of actually being lead-free. Maybe it's too late and we're all fucked.

.5 micrograms per serving seems like a shitload of lead. After looking at the article it seems odd that some manufacturers came up with both pass and fail results depending on product. Very odd.

Well, I'll just grab a sample with this lead pippet...

Yeah. One of the case studies we read about was a kid who had really high levels and they came and tested the whole house, nothing. Turns out the dad worked at a car battery plant and even though he changed out of his clothes at work he brought home enough lead to raise his whole families levels to above an action level.

He changed jobs and everyone's levels dropped.

maybe 85% of the testing was done by a guy who collects lead soldiers as a hobby.

I'm agreeing with the UT on this one.

I guess if your diet is so shitty that fruit juice is your best source of nutrients... by all means, go for it. :rolleyes: I'm not in the business of deciding what's relatively healthy for the rest of the self-destructive, bacon-gorging, raw-cookie-dough-spooning, powdered-cheez-product-inhaling, diabetic soda junkies out there. For my kids, personally, fruit juice is actually the least healthy thing they consume, even ignoring its alleged lead content. We're not all Smoking Pregnant Ladies (TM).

Well, maybe you're not pregnant, but you are smokin'.:blush:

Hey everybody - Clodfobble is dissing bacon!

Snickers Bars are my best source of nutrients.

I admit, I find the general internet bacon meme to be overplayed. Yeah yeah, it's a tasty piece of meat that's bad for you in large quantities, I get it.

Not bad... you'd only have to eat 100 of them to get a full day's allowance of most vitamins and minerals. That's better than I was thinking. But you'd still get no B12, so you'd better add a steak in there for balance.

It's not overplayed round these parts. Even in my educated-about-nutrition household -and the household of my gluten-free, organic-products-only friend. Some/most of us are fortunate enough to be healthy enough to eat crap more than we should and hope that we're getting all the right nutrients without actually tracking them. Fruit Juice is not necessarily our "best source of nutrients", but it's up there in our five servings a lot of days. You seems to have lost sight of the average family diet ...and maybe even how to enjoy food. Maybe there's no way for you to enjoy food and I'm sorry about that -but really... this food nazi suit does your general awesomeness no justice. And I do think you're awesome. Except when you diss bacon.

The actual eating of real bacon is fine. It's the meme I'm tired of. People making sculptures out of it, or wrapping a cigarette in bacon while they smoke it, and putting photos of it online thinking they're all anti-establishment or something. Sorry, I'm just grumpy. It's been a crappy week. I should probably just go eat some bacon.

ok, sorry, I missed that angle of your gripe. I get that -why waste perfectly good bacon, I say....

make sure you chocolate-coat yours first, though -I've heard dark chocolate has all sorts of good nutrients ;)

Just think, in chocolate covered raisins, it's the raisins that are bad for your teeth.

Everything we know is wrong.

I read a study the other day that said whole milk drinkers have less heart disease than skim milk drinkers. It turns out the fat in milk includes one of the important omega-3 fats.

Because for every study - there are 3 more that find the opposite results.

Hey Clod, Ever consider getting a juicer. The best apple juice I've ever tasted was frash from a juicer. If you buy fresh fruit and clean it well, you might eliminate all the lead.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...500_AA280_.jpg

Coffee is bad for you!

No, coffee is good for you!

On the other hand...

Chocolate covered raisins are an excellent source of shellac in your diet!

Meh, it's one more thing I don't have the time or money for (not the cost of the juicer--it takes a lot of fruit to make one cup of juice.) Like I said, juice consumption is actually pretty low in our house anyway, it's the canned fruit that gets us (assuming this study isn't fundamentally flawed in its testing methods, which it could be.) It would help if I could get his absorption levels up so he wasn't eating literally three times as much food as a normal child. It's a lot easier to open a can than to cut and core 3-4 pears every lunchtime.

Yes, that's what makes them so expensive. Shellac is a resin exuded by the female lac bug. That's got to be good for you.

I love the little lac bugs and their resinous secretions.

You will dream of them tonight while you sleep the electric sleep. Make sure, while you're dreaming, that you look at your hands.

You've been Dicked.