Beware of Toxic Chocolate: Heavy Metals Found in Major Brand Names | CLIP | Facts Matter

Good evening, and right before we dive into this study regarding chocolate, I'd like to quickly mention that over on EpicTV, I recently published an awesome episode detailing how, unbeknownst to most people, there's a giant push in America right now to scale up the use of both mRNA technology, as well as gene therapy, on the livestock that winds up on our supermarket store shelves. Meaning that whether it's beef, pork, lamb, chicken, or turkey, the meat that you're buying from the store could very soon contain the remnants of mRNA-based vaccines that the animals were treated with. And that, by the way, is if they don't already contain them. Now, getting back to today's topic, according to this new study right here, which recently came out of Consumer Reports, many of the chocolate brands that Americans buy from the supermarket, well, they contain high levels of toxic metals, including things like cadmium as well as lead. And these, by the way, are not some Chinese-imported, off-brand chocolates. Instead, these researchers were looking into some of the most popular brands throughout the country, the ones that are very likely in your cupboard right now. Things like Hershey's, Dove Chocolate, Trader Joe's, and so on and so forth. Now, to start with, the researchers here were looking specifically at dark chocolate, which if you think about it, is a little bit ironic, since many people choose dark chocolate over alternatives like, for instance, milk chocolate, because of these supposed health benefits, including things like antioxidants, as well as the fact that dark chocolate tends to have less sugar. However, for many years now, the chocolate industry has been grappling with a certain problem. The fact that, for one, heavy metals are difficult to remove during the production process. And secondly, the fact that metals like lead are introduced into the chocolate during the manufacturing process. And even though most consumers are completely unaware of it, this is actually a well-known problem within the chocolate industry. And for years now, all these different brands, they have been grappling with and trying to And so in order to, you can say, test their progress, the researchers over at Consumer Reports, they bought 28 brands of chocolate that are commonly available throughout the country in order to measure the amount of heavy metals. And what you might find surprising is that they detected both cadmium as well as lead in every single one of them. However, the amount of cadmium and lead actually differed from brand to brand. For instance, take the example of a very popular brand like Godiva's Signature Dark Chocolate. You can find it in many supermarket checkout aisles across the nation. And as you can see, the results from the laboratory analysis found that this particular brand had a stunning 146% lead. Now you might be asking yourself, 146% of what? Well, here's how the researchers described it in their paper. To determine the risk posed by the chocolates, we used California's maximum allowable dose for lead, which is 0.5 micrograms, and cadmium, 4.1 micrograms. We use those levels because there are no federal limits for the amount of lead and cadmium most foods can contain, and our scientists believe that California's levels are the most protective available. Shown are the percentages of the maximum allowable dose level supplied in an ounce of each chocolate. And so then, if we go back to that picture of Godiva's chocolate, we see that one ounce of it contained 146% of the maximum allowable dose level for lead in the state of California. Then if we do the math, if we actually crunch the numbers, that means that an ounce of Godiva contains 0.73 micrograms of lead, which is really, you can say, a giant problem for two very distinct reasons. The first is that an ounce of chocolate is not really that much. Up on your screen is what an ounce of chocolate actually looks like. And so an entire chocolate bar can contain anywhere from three to five times that much. And second of all, according to the FDA, as much as you can trust them, the daily safe limit for a child is 2.2 micrograms of lead per day, meaning that eating a bar of chocolate puts the child at their daily limit of lead. That's of course not even considering any other food that they eat or anything else in their environment. Just the chocolate bar alone puts them at that threshold. Now obviously, this does not just affect Godiva. As we mentioned earlier, these researchers tested 28 different national brands. And so in terms of which brands were better than others, let's take a look at the results of their research. And the best way to do so is by grouping the different chocolate brands together into four separate categories. And for your reference, I'll leave each category on screen for a few seconds. That way you can take a screenshot and compare them against the brands that you might have in your home. Now the first category, as you can see up on your screen, are the brands that were found to be the safest. These include things like Mast, Tazza, Girodelli, and Valrhona. But notice something. Despite being quote unquote the safest, all those brands do contain both lead and cadmium. They just happen to be at lower levels than the maximum allowable dose level for the state of California. Then the next group are the brands that were found to be high in cadmium. As you can see up on your screen, this includes brands like Beyond Good, Equal Exchange, Lindt, Scharfenberger, Alter Eco, Pasha, and Dove brand promises deeper dark chocolate. Then the next category are the brands that were found to be high in lead. This includes brands like Tony's, Lily's, Godiva's Signature Dark Chocolate, Chocolove 70% cacao, Lin's 85% cacao, Endangered Species, Trader Joe's, Hue, Chocolove 88% cacao, as well as Hershey's. And then lastly, we have the brands that have the, you can say, unique honor of being high in both lead as well as cadmium. This includes Theo with 70% cacao, Trader Joe's with 85%, Theo with 85% cacao as well, Lily's, as well as a brand called Green and Blacks. Then in terms of their overall conclusion, well here is what the scientists wrote, quote, We tested 28 different dark chocolate bars and found lead and cadmium in all of them. For 23 of those bars, eating a serving of about an ounce a day could potentially expose people to an amount of lead or cadmium that may have a negative health impact over time, particularly for vulnerable populations like children or anyone who is pregnant. Five of the bars we tested exceeded that threshold for both lead and cadmium. Now at this point, you might be saying to yourself, okay Roman, this is good to know, but those are only 28 different brands that were tested. What about the hundreds of other brands that are on supermarket store shelves across the country? Well, fortunately, we're in luck, because last year, a different organization called As You Sow, which is a non-profit, you can say environmental group, they conducted a similar independent study, but they actually tested over 469 chocolate products. Now, because that's too many to go through in one episode, on your screen right now, I will flash through the lab results of all the 469 products that they reviewed. If you'd like to, you can actually pause the video at any moment and take a screenshot of anything that happens to catch your eye. In passing, I will mention that this particular test from last year, it found that over 60% of the chocolate products contained lead and or cadmium levels that were above that safety threshold that we discussed earlier, which is, well, it's pretty shocking to say the least. Now, circling back to that Consumer Reports study, once it was actually published a few months ago, the team over at Consumer Reports, they were able to compile a petition of over 55,000 signatures, and they sent that petition over to several of the chocolate manufacturers who had the worst scores. The petition was urging those companies to remove these heavy metals from their products. However, wouldn't you know it? Only one of the companies actually responded to the request. And their response is, I believe, really worth reading. It came from Trader Joe's, or rather, it came from the law firm representing Trader Joe's, and here's what it said. Quote, Trader Joe's stands by the safety of its products. It considers nothing to be more important than the health and safety of customers. Of course, Trader Joe's takes this matter seriously, and in fact, has been working on it for years. And it's that last sentence, the one where they say they've been working on it for years, that I believe is the most interesting. Because it reveals a truth that many consumers of chocolate are not aware of, which is the, you can say, dark side of cacao. Because you see, the chocolate that we buy from the store is made up from the cacao bean, which has two main components. It has the cacao solids and the cacao butter. Taken together, this is called, generally, cacao. Now, the reason that dark chocolate has a reputation for being relatively healthy stems mostly from the cacao solids, largely because they are packed with antioxidants. However, unfortunately, cacao solids are also where the heavy metals are found. And so, for these chocolate manufacturers, it creates, you can say, a tricky situation where they have to balance dark chocolate's benefits with its inherent risks. Furthermore, while cadmium is found within the plant, lead is a whole different story.