Consumer Reports tested 28 dark chocolate bars and found cadmium and lead in all of them. Here's how to limit your heavy metal exposure.

For all the chocolate lovers out there, careful because effectively all dark chocolates have lead and cadmium in them. Lead is especially dangerous and some brands have alarmingly high amounts.

  • Bilb!
    23•1 year ago

    And they are sooooo tasty! I like to sprinkle microplastics on top

    • Deconceptualist
      4•1 year ago

      I’m not sure that first article is the best source. It’s really just a blog post and boils down to “other plants we eat (healthy vegetables) contain heavy metals too and you’ll always consume more of those than cacao”.

      That’s not a very strong argument IMO, especially considering lead toxicity is cumulative over time. Lowering its levels here seems to mostly be a matter of washing the cacao or keeping manufacturing dust off of it in the first place, which doesn’t sound super arduous or expensive.

      The second article seems like good coverage of a legit study though 👍

  • livus
    13•1 year ago

    Like you say, it all has it.

    I don’t think you can tell going forward based on brand. This testing is really like a snapshot of the particular cacao harvests being used by each brand for that particular batch.

    Cacao is sourced from multiple plantations/regions.

    Even the Rainforest Alliance brands seem to have these metals, so it looks like quality control won’t save it either.

    • @bittabet
      7•1 year ago

      Yeah pretty much every batch is going to have wildly different numbers but given that they think lead content is from dust I think the lower lead manufacturer may just be the ones washing their beans more aggressively

      • livus
        4•1 year ago

        That’s a good point. And lead would be good to avoid!

  • RiikkaTheIcePrincess
    3•1 year ago

    Ugh, what a crap article. I don’t want the history of chocolate and children and blah blah blah; where’s the info?

    Comments here seem to suggest it’s just all lead and cadmium everywhere. Cool. Unfortunate, considering I love dark chocolate. Just another reason to say FML I guess. Presumably this won’t actually change anything, either. That’s great; we can’t have any corporate profits affected by having to provide even remotely clean and safe snacks/foods/candies/whatever.

    I hate this world so much.

    • Deconceptualist
      6•1 year ago

      I have to disagree, this was decent journalism. There was almost nothing on the history of chocolate so I don’t understand your complaint there. And they have to briefly explain the dangers of heavy metal exposure at the beginning before discussing the levels; skipping that would be irresponsible.

      But as a reader I already know most of that info, and it was easy to scroll right past to the actual product list. They show the measured levels with graphs and percentages, which to me was very clear and not just “lead and cadmium everywhere”. They even highlight the products with safer levels and wrap up by covering ways the industry can solve the issue. I don’t know what else you could ask for.

      • RiikkaTheIcePrincess
        3•1 year ago

        sigh I’m having a shitty, rough time lately. Turns out it was all neatly hidden behind some scripts that hadn’t loaded and I didn’t notice some reasonably subtle signs of “we can’t display images or text without scripts” so I assumed it was all buried somewhere or just wasn’t actually presented (in favour of “trust us, we found lots of DANGER in all dark chocolate”).

  • Kerrigor
    2•1 year ago

    So I just have to alternate between the ones high in lead, and the ones high in cadmium, to balance it out!

  • @breadsmasher
    0•1 year ago

    First they take away the lead paint, now they want to get rid of lead chocolate.

    Where else can I eat dangerous metals?

    Guess ill move into mercury filled tuna