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Our Pollution Is Ruining Chocolate
But there might be a silver lining…
Like many of you, I love chocolate. I grew up down the road from the Cadbury factory, and it shows! Crunchie bars, Lindt sea salt chocolate, or just straight-up dark chocolate are my go-to treats. So, my heart sank when I read a recent study which found dangerous levels of toxic heavy metals in an alarming amount of dark chocolate. These levels are so bad that the authors even recommend limiting their intake to one ounce per day! What’s worse, it seems we are to blame for this toxicity. However, there is one tiny silver lining here.
This study came from George Washington University. The researchers analysed 72 consumer cocoa products, including dark chocolate, every other year for contamination with lead, cadmium, and arsenic over an eight-year period. These are all toxic heavy metals that can cause horrific health problems, from birth defects to cancer and straight-up poisoning, if we digest too much. They also have an annoying habit of building up in an ecosystem and sneakily finding their way into our food unnoticed.
As such, there are guidelines on how much of these metals our food can contain before they are deemed unsafe. Sadly, this study found that a whopping 43% of the products tested exceeded the maximum allowable dose level for lead, and 35% exceeded the maximum allowable dose level for cadmium! Even worse, organic products showed higher levels of lead and cadmium than non-organic products.
Now, our bodies can cope with a certain amount of lead and cadmium, which is why the authors suggested that chocoholics like myself cut down, as this will take our daily intake of these metals down to safe levels.
But that is only a bandage on the problem. The question that has to be asked is, what is causing this, and can we solve it?
Cacao, the plant whose beans are used to make chocolate, is predominantly grown in developing topical countries. These are also countries that have significant and poorly regulated mining industries. For example, Côte d’Ivoire, the world’s largest cacao producer, has over 200 active semi-industrialised mines. Such mines leach minerals into the local water table, spreading these previously locked-away heavy metals into the environment.
