So I’m all for substances to be routinely measured for lead concentration. I wouldn’t be surprised if lead and fascism have a link.
But, because of leaded gasoline and widespread use of lead in other products historically we cannot escape 0 lead.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you took a plate of food from a randomized selection of restaurants, you would find lead in every meal.
Lead is dense, and leaded gasoline absolutely fucked our planet. We know the safe level is 0.
We cannot say that any measurement of non-zero is worse than what we can ultimately control for. We need to be measuring these things over decades, to verify the amount continues to decrease with the ultimate hope of 0 (though, that’s unlikely).
I can’t tell from the article if there’s a real problem. None of the levels exceed FDA thresholds, and it sounds bad, but there’s also no definite claim of harm.
The highest levels detected violated the state of Washington’s limits
https://tamararubin.com/about/
Tamara Rubin is an internationally recognized, multiple federal award-winning Lead-poisoning prevention advocate, documentary filmmaker, and mother of four sons (ages 26, 20, 17, and 14). She took on the cause of childhood Lead poisoning and consumer goods safety advocacy after her sons were acutely Lead poisoned by the work of a painting contractor in 2005. Tamara lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two youngest sons (who each have permanent disabilities from Lead exposure as infants).
She does this work specifically because it can cause permanent harm. Her family literally are victims of it.
Also, as the article notes, Washington State has much stricter standards than the Federal government.
More on Rubin:
If her youngest sons with permanent lead exposure injuries were 14 and 17 in 2023, and the lead exposure event took place in 2005, when her older children were young, some of the math isn’t mathing for me.
Yeah, I wish we had a list of stuff that does the most harm to people so we could address those problems from the top down.
I mean, dying seems to do a lot of harm, we should work on that first
Good point. What’re the leading causes of death?
Dying, for one. I always tell people, ‘just don’t die’, but nobody listens to me…
The tooth has spoken
[Facepalm]
I posted this in total ignorance of my name.
lol I’m sorry I just couldn’t resist.
I was tempted to go for
The tooth has spoken the truth.
or even
The tooth has spoken the twooth
The article told you. There is NO safe level of lead. The legal limits are not appropriate for health.
Low level mass lead poisoning makes the world make a lot more sense now.
Per the FDA, there is no known safe amount of lead exposure. If it’s in something you want to minimize your exposure to it.
The max thresholds don’t mean it’s fine if it’s lower, just that at some point it becomes difficult to both detect the presence of things and there’s a limit on how much can be prevented. If we were progressing in time correctly we should be lowering these maximum levels both in the ability of detection and in the beginning sources. Especially in cases like this where either the metals are being added or are part of specific ingredients that would cost more to process and remove the metals.
And wow, they said Washington State was lower than the FDA, but that’s a magnitude less! Good job, Washington!
I don’t dispute her lead findings, but her statement about Hydroxyapatite shows she’s willing to give comment on things she knows nothing about.
Hydroxyapatite is extracted from cow bone and added because it allegedly helps teeth absorb calcium, though Rubin said she doubts it does.
Hydroxyapatite is used as an alternative to flouride, as it’s able to attach to the enamal and act as a barrier similar to how flouride does.
Research has shown it’s less effective than flouride overall (it can’t withstand as low a pH/acidity before dissolving), but it’s not added to increase calcium absorption, like she claims.
Tamara Rubin is a grifter with no expertise who bought an XRF gun to use to scan random objects as fodder for her blog where she gets money from affiliate links. Her wikipedia page talks about a few of her financial crimes. I wouldn’t worry anything she puts out.
Wait…US is still doing research?!
I mean, it depends what you’re willing to call “research”.
The testing, conducted by Lead Safe Mama, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.
I’m not sure I would put this on the same level as a controlled, reproducible double-blind peer-reviewed study by Harvard and MIT published in a prestigious journal, but I’m sure it’s really close. /s
Edit: Ok, so people argue she’s at least a little legitimate, but why the fuck can’t we use actual scientific institutions anymore? We have a scientific method for a reason. Where’s the peer review? Where’s the people reproducing her results?
How do you think we get to the point where a researcher can get funding to do actual peer reviewed research? In the state the USA is in they won’t until something like this gets the publics attention.
Part of the reason the USA has gotten to this state is because we allow unverified sensationalist slop like this to get the public’s attention and be used against them. We’ve already seen 1 bullshit study linking vaccines and autism that is STILL being widely circulated and used to this day to convince people not only that vaccines are bad but that the whole GOVERNMENT is bad. Look at the results.
Now we’re going to convince people toothpaste is bad using the same quality of “independent research”?
The findings have not been peer-reviewed and the author has been convicted of…a lot of crime.
Peer review is for scientific papers, not lab results. If you have reason to question the lab that produced the results, then please share it.
There are many different ways to collect the sample that was sent to the lab…
