A Vision of Chocolate's Future in an Amsterdam Brownie

I’ve stopped all consumption of chocolate after reading about the amount of lead in it.

This is the main reason I don't frequently eat chocolate anymore. Dark chocolate is both the tastiest and lowest-sugar chocolate, but its cacao-intensity increases your intake of metals.

If I recall correctly, however, the origin of the cacao makes some difference. Cacao from West Africa and Asia has a lot less lead and cadmium than from South America. Still, I think little chocolate, wherever it's from, is metal-free.

Related: I completely avoid any broth or stock made from chicken bones because it has way too much lead for me.

I claim to be able to feel the effects of the lead in the hours after I eat a meal containing chicken stock. I don't doubt your report about lead in chocolate, but I didn't feel the characteristic signs of my getting too much lead the last time I ate chocolate.

Lead and cadmium can stay in the body for decades, so it is a cumulative rather than an acute problem, I think.

It seems that eating one serving a day is fine. Everything has trace levels of metals. Rice has high arsenic but it doesn’t seem to affect the longevity of the Japanese. Here is a summary from one paper that tested lots of chocolate.

> This indicates that heavy metal contamination—in more than half of products tested—may not pose any appreciable risk for the average person when consumed as a single serving; however, consuming some of the products tested, or more than one serving per day in combination with non-cocoa derived sources heavy metals, may add up to exposure that would exceed the Prop 65 MADLs. Notably, “organic” products were significantly more likely to demonstrate higher levels of both Cd and Pb.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11321977/

The organic part is interesting and something most people probably don’t realize. I used to grow medical marijuana for a living and the people that failed their heavy metals testing were always growers that grew organic. The metals bioaccumulate and when you use manure or fish meal or whatever you are increasing the heavy metal content of your crop compared to using pure synthetic fertilizer, which has much lower trace metal contamination.

Cocoa flavanols are some of the most powerful compounds for heart and brain health. If you look around, you’ll find brands that actually test their cocoa for heavy metals. To get the most benefits, go for natural (undutched) cocoa, as, like the article mentions, the dutching process can strip away up to 80% of the good stuff.