%85 of kid's drinks and snacks lead tainted..???!!!
 

From here

Well s***t, it appears that even if you do everything right, go organic, pay a little extra and pick items from an eco-friendly store, you're still screwed.

I guess this means we've finally screwed up the planet enough that there is no safe harbor when it comes to food. I wonder if they tested orange juice people in California and Florida made from oranges in their backyard would they find lead?

You skipped that key phrase "could be" in your thread title.

Of course they would.

That is a concern I have with the urban farming movement. It is very attractive to reclaim city blocks for community gardens but you'd best isolate those gardens from the existing urban soils.

Just go directly to soylent green.

What made you think that that was doing everything right? Marketing!

Edit: Also, make sure your juice has at least 70 hp/liter, or else it's crap.

I'm not quite that cynical. I believe most claims about organic until they are proven to be lying.

It's just harder to isolate anything from pollution.

They've never been proved to be telling the truth.

Actually, here's a fairly balanced view of organic farming vs. climate change:


http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.co...lobal-warming/

The plants don't take up lead into their tissues. The real problem is bringing the lead in on your clothes and shoes and insufficient washing of the vegetables, especially root vegetables.

The easiest way to boost your lead levels is to inhale ultra fine particles especially after vacuuming w/o a HEPA filter.

But it is my suspicion (based on my lead remediation training) that, lethal levels aside, lead in the diet is primarily a low-income poor nutrition problem. There is 0 requirement for lead in the human diet, unlike chromium, selenium etc. which are also toxic in great enough quantities, but nevertheless required at micro levels.

What happens with lead is that it mimics calcium and iron to an extent. If your body is lacking in either of these and lead is present it will substitute the lead. This is a problem in developing kids because the lead will become part of the bones and will later become released when the body becomes stressed. Unlike iron, lead does not carry oxygen through the blood. Lead also causes birth defects and lowers sperm count.

While any exposure is bad for kids, what is really important is to be sure they are getting real nutrition and not potato chips and mountain dew.

Excellent response, sn, but this part confused me:

With all this worry over the minuscule things in food and drink, we are missing the big picture: for most people, drinking juice with teeny amounts of lead is better for them than not drinking juice. Eating meat that has been treated with antibiotics is better for them than not eating meat.

We are all this woman now:

http://cellar.org/2010/smoking-while-pregnant.jpg

My conundrum is that anxiety has been far and away my most major health problem. So, in one sense, if I worry about what is in my food, I will get sick.

Crazy world, innit?

I should have stated: what is really important is to be sure they are getting real nutrition, i.e. Pepsi and Doritos and not potato chips and mountain dew.

my bad.

Oh, dat splain it more gooder.

Aside from the obligatory shouting of that quote (which happens on a regular basis in our house)...

So you're saying that the contaminated fruit in this study couldn't have been originally contaminated right off the tree, it had to have happened somewhere in the picking/canning process?

Yes. Could be lead in the water that was used to reconstitute the juice, or wash the food or in the packaging itself. The list of ordinary household items that are a source of lead is astonishing. If I can find it (I might have pitched it since it included everything) I'll scan and post it.

Especially consider that a lot of printing comes from You Know Where and it is highly probable that lead is in the inks. If you've ever been in a factory you can imagine the dust/ airborne particles x millions of units every hour...

It would be interesting to put an air filter in one of the ventilation ducts or in a machine that replicates breathing and look at what it captured in a day.

Yeah, the lead got in the food after the fact.