so today i want to talk about a very interesting topic the lead in nutritional supplements now
there's a california regulation called prop 65. it's known as the safe drinking water in toxic
enforcement act of 1986. so it was probably a really good idea when they started it 25 years ago
but now it's kind of gotten out of hand because now it involves over 900 different chemicals and
so this bypasses the fda and they have their own guidelines or thresholds that you can't go over
in certain chemicals and heavy metals etc and so certain companies are forced to put warning labels
on their products so the labels say something like ingestion of this product is known to
californians to cause potential cancers or reproductive harm now what's really
fascinating to me about this prop 65 is that let's just take lead for example the fda allows
12 micrograms of lead to be consumed per day if you're an adult if you're a child it's
three micrograms but if you're in california because of this prop 65 the threshold is 0.5
as far as creating some reproductive toxicity so the fda allows 12 micrograms per day and prop
65 allows 0.5 micrograms per day as far as their limit now it's almost impossible to differentiate
the naturally occurring lead that comes from the soil versus lead that comes from pollution
so anything grown in the soil is bound to have a certain amount of lead in it just because we
live on the earth and the earth is made up of elements and lead is one of the elements now
there's a couple very interesting things on how these numbers were set number one they used animal
studies okay i mean animals are similar to humans but they're not identical so that's one variable
right there that it's very difficult to equate what's happening to an animal to humans all right
number two they measured the quantity of exposure of a given element like lead that will result in
an observational effect now first of all what is an observational effect this is what they use as
statistically significant increase in risk of either cancer or reproductive harm but this next
point is quite mind-blowing to me check this out they then take this number whatever it is certain
amount of lead that creates this observational effect and they set the threshold at 1 1000th
of that number so for example if they found some effect that was created at 49
milligrams of lead they would set the threshold at 49 micrograms a thousand times less so to me
these numbers don't necessarily mean they're unsafe at all in fact what is said on the
warning labels is what's called misleading speech and this is a legal term that means
speech that is actually or inherently deceptive such that an ordinary consumer would be misled by
the statement why because it reports a false fact now what's false about this we're using numbers
that are a thousand times less than the actual number that they found some observational effect
so if someone sells a product that is food based or a whole food type product they're bound to be
over this limit in fact if you actually just look up the lead in certain vegetables actually it's
quite interesting potatoes have over 30 milligrams of lead per kilogram radishes have just under 50
milligrams per kilogram and spinach leaves have just under 60 milligrams
per kilogram of lead cauliflower is just under 70 milligrams per kilogram of lead
so it's fascinating how much lead is in our food supply already that may be naturally occurring
we don't know it's impossible to differentiate the pollution from naturally occurring in the
soil so anyway i just wanted to bring up this very interesting topic on lead and let you know
uh how these numbers were really created because apparently it doesn't necessarily mean it's unsafe
simply because the threshold is set up to be a thousand times less than what they found so if
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