Lead toxicity

Toxic metals - Mercury - Lead - Aluminum - Arsenic - Cadmium

Lead is everywhere, due to its former widespread use in gasoline (until 1995 in the U.S.), and as a paint component (until 1978). Since it is not bio-degradable, it remains present in the environment, contaminating the soil, air, waters and food supply. Estimates are that the present levels of lead are greater up to 10,000, 200, 10 and 100 times in the air, soil, water and food, respectively, than before industrial contamination3 (the figures for air and soil are for inhabited areas).

Lead toxicity can cause anemia, brain damage, kidney disease, impaired growth and reproductive function, lower I.Q. or mental retardation in children (with millions of U.S. children having high enough level of lead to be affected), and so on. Even low levels of exposure are associated with hyperactivity, short attention span, learning problems and emotional disturbances.

This illustrates well how unreliable are the government and WHO (World Health Organization) safety standards when it comes to toxic substances. Most researches agree that there is no safe blood level of lead, especially for children. Since lead absorption rate for children is about five times greater than for adults, their official "safe" exposure level should be at least as much lower: 2 μg/dl "safe" and 5mg/dl "tolerable".

Obviously, since the "tolerable" limit for adults is not tolerable, we may look for still lower levels as truly safe or tolerable. And that doesn't even factor in that children also have

significantly slower rate of toxin elimination,

in general, due to their less efficient detox system. That brings us closer to understanding why it is good to assume no safe level of lead exposure, at least for children.

    So, never mind the official "safe" levels. Considering that individual susceptibility can vary greatly, the lower your child's exposure to lead, the safer.

And keep in mind that the official "safe" level for any particular toxin assume that you are

exposed to that single toxin alone.

In reality, there is literally hundreds of other toxins present in your body. No one knows what are the actual safe levels with that many toxins affecting you at the same time, but they are certainly much lower. Most often, the combined effect of different toxins produces disproportionately greater harm to health, requiring significantly lower safe levels for each particular toxin in the mix.

Among foods with the highest levels of lead is chocolate. The source of contamination is still obscured. It is  not in the cocoa beans themselves, but somewhere in the production process. The degree of contamination can vary significantly, and it is not carefully monitored. The highest measured lead concentrations in chocolate range from 0.23μg/g in the U.S. to over 8μg/g (2μg/g average) in India.

With the tolerable weekly lead intake for children set by the WHO at 25μg/kg of body weight, it is possible that the "tolerable" lead quota could be topped by a

regular consumption of chocolate alone.

But the official safe limit for lead, just as for most other toxic contaminants, is likely to be still too high. Many researchers believe that there is no safe intake level of lead, especially for children.

This is in line with a recent study conducted by the Cornell University (New England Journal of Medicine, 2003), which has found that as little as 1/4 of the level of lead considered safe by the WHO and the US Centers for Disease Control already causes growth retardation and lowered IQ in children.