35 Chocolate Companies Tested Positive for High Amounts of Lead and Cadmium

By Brandon Turbeville

As Easter approaches, one of the days for chocolate sales of the year, new concerns are emerging regarding levels of dangerous heavy metals and their presence in name brand chocolates.

The news was brought out to the public as a result of a report released by As You Sow, and Oakland-based health watchdog group that tested a number of chocolates for the presence of heavy metals. What the group found was that many of these brands contained up to triple the legal limit in California of lead and cadmium. After testing 50 types of chocolate, the groups says that 35 tested positive for the illegal and high levels of lead or cadmium or both.

There’s no safe limit of lead set for children. The metal has been known to cause a variety of types of neurological damage and lower IQ. Cadmium has been linked to bone damage as well as kidney and liver damage. Both of these metals can remain in the human body for years.

“We assumed that companies were testing their products before they put them on the market, but they’re not.” Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow said.

The watchdog organization says that it approached all of the companies named in their report but only two asked to work with them in order to fix the problem. The other companies simply denied any wrongdoing.

The National Confectioner Association released a statement that said:

Consumers can rest assured that our products are safe and that our industry adheres to all government regulations.

You can access the As You Sow report here as well as the list of 35 companies that include Hershey, Godiva, Kraft, Mars, Cadbury, Nestle, Starbucks, Whitman’s and even Wholefoods and Trader Joe’s.

Photo credit: Waponi via VisualHunt.com / CC BY

This article (35 Chocolate Companies Tested Positive for High Amounts of Lead and Cadmium) can be republished under a Creative Commons license with  attribution to Brandon Turbeville and Natural Blaze.com.

Brandon Turbeville – article archive here – is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies,Five Sense SolutionsandDispatches From a Dissident, volume 1and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, and The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President. Turbeville has published over 600 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com.