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…
