[valarauko]

I'm a little surprised at the initial confusion about the source of lead, or perhaps it's the way the article has been written. As someone who grew up in India, our school textbooks in the 90s had a list of common food adulterants, and turmeric adulteration with lead chromate was common knowledge to middle schoolers. I recall the curriculum included how to detect adulteration with simple at home tests. After turmeric, the next suspect probably would be yellow lentils.

EDIT: actually the next suspect should be red chillis, adulterated with lead oxide.

On an aside, food adulteration used to be such a common social menace in India in the 70s & 80s, such that it was a common theme in the backdrop of Bollywood films, with the hero taking on local mafia bosses who also dabble in food adulteration. India did a mediocre job controlling the rampant food adulteration, with the last major case I recall being an outbreak of Epidemic Dropsy in 1998 due to contamination of mustard oil. There's been cases every once in a while, though I suspect in those cases it is inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields.

[hammock]

How can I test for lead in my tumeric?

Edit: found this page which is amazing https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

[TheJoeMan]

This page is fascinating! I love the iodized-vs-non salt test by rubbing on potato and then sprinkling lemon juice to see if blue (iodized).

At the same time, it feels so sad this page is necessary.

[hackerlight]

It doesn't list a test for lead in turmeric powder, unfortunately.

[SaintGhurka]

Also, the test for lead looks suspicious to me. The shape of the turmeric laying in the bottom of the glass looks absolutely identical between the two glasses. Like they used the same sample, but added some color to the water for the "adulterated" picture.

Edit: Which I guess is ok, since they're just showing what to look for and they aren't falsifying an actual test.

[YetAnotherNick]

It's below the turmeric whole test, and is more or less the same test.

[hackerlight]

That's described as a test for "artificial colour"

[Inhibit]

The lead is used to adulterate the product for color if I'm recalling correctly.

[jaggederest]

Lead chromate is an incredibly vivid yellow. Good color, bad health effects, as we learned from years of lead paint.

[akavi]

As an ABCD, likewise. My mom told me to specifically buy turmeric at western grocery stores (as opposed to other spices, which could be had for better prices at Indian grocery stores) because of concerns around lead.

[chucksta]

You would hope, its common to find heavy metals in those seasonings too; https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... IE Oregano is flagged across the board on the report.

[valarauko]

tbf lead testing is pretty standard in Indian spice brands for a long time now, though for some reason the brands don't really advertise it. Reputable brands like MDH and Everest would be pretty safe.

[sidewndr46]

What is an ABCD?

[sbierwagen]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-Born_Confused_Desi

[princevegeta89]

Lol, I never knew there was a Wikipedia article for this slang acronym that we use all the time.

[sbierwagen]

Wikipedia has been backfilling slang terms lately, in competition with urbandictionary and knowyourmeme. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheugy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK_boomer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%2BRatio etc

[smcin]

Hopefully only the legit subset of urbandictionary.

[brianpan]

See also ABC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American-born_Chinese

[sidewndr46]

Oh wow, I've seen this without knowing it had a name.

[sidewndr46]

This reminds me of how scurvy was apparently well known in the age of sail but sort of forgotten with the industrial revolution. It showed back up again in Arctic expeditions from what I understand.

[hinkley]

I don't recall where the the Arctic expeditions slot into this saga, but for ages we understood the lemon link but we hadn't identified Vitamin C yet.

So there was a moment in time where the British Royal Navy was carrying around concentrated lime juice to fight scurvy (hence, Limey). Only the vendor that made the lime juice processed it in copper vessels, destroying most of the vitamin C.

It doesn't take much vitamin C to prevent scurvy. But it does take some.

[durkie]

There was a competing theory that scurvy was prevented by eating fresh meat, and that's easier to get in the arctic: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm

[somenameforme]

If it's not clear (as the article also mentions this), fresh meat does prevent scurvy! Many, if not most animals, internally produce their own vitamin C and so fresh meat is often loaded with vitamin C. Here's a table listing vitamin C content for various meats. That site separates fish from meat, so you need to change the combobox to also see those data.

[1] - https://tools.myfooddata.com/nutrient-ranking-tool/Vitamin-C...

[hinkley]

> Vitamin C can be destroyed by heat and light. High-heat cooking temperatures or prolonged cook times can break down the vitamin. Because it is water-soluble, the vitamin can also seep into cooking liquid and be lost if the liquids are not eaten.

In "The Terror" (A supernatural horror story by Dan Simmons, set in the lost Franklin expedition) it is raw meat that saves the indigenous people from scurvy. Which is probably not too inaccurate.

[bsder]

I seem to remember that it was also a switch to a different citrus fruit which had way less vitamin C in it so the processing was much mroe important.

However, since the switch corresponded to the rise of steam power (ship trips were much faster), nobody noticed that that they weren't protected from scurvy anymore.

It wasn't until the artic expeditions that scurvy protection got tested again.

[xaedes]

They believed the scurvy protection came from the sourness of lemons, so they switched to lime which is even more sour than lemon, but contains less vitamin C.

[yndoendo]

"The Accidental Scientist: The Role of Chance and Luck in Scientific Discovery" talks all about the different substances tried to prevent and cure scurvy. British sailors turned to have a daily ration of rum mixed with the lime juice.

[mjan22640]

IIRC the arctic expeditions found it to be 10mg a day

[flyinghamster]

Or, the link between white rice and beriberi: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/rice-disease-mystery-e...

[zajio1am]

> actually the next suspect should be red chillis, adulterated with lead oxide.

Why would anyone adulterated red chillis with lead oxide instead of perfectly safe iron oxide, common food colorant?

[bastawhiz]

I don't know for sure, but I'd suspect it's the flavor: iron oxide tastes metallic, lead oxide tastes somewhat sweet. That's partially why you hear about kids eating lead paint chips and not bits of rust.

[Natsu]

What sort of test would you do for this? Did you have to buy a test kit?

[rikelmens]

1. The Water Test: Take a glass of warm water and add a teaspoon of your turmeric powder to it. Let it sit for 10-15 minutes. If the turmeric powder settles down, it is pure. If it doesn’t settle to the bottom and leaves a dark yellow colour, it is adulterated.

2. The Palm Test: Take a pinch of your turmeric powder and rub it into the palm of your hand for a few seconds, then turn your palm over. Pure turmeric will stick to your palm and leave a yellow stain, whereas adulterated turmeric will mostly fall off.

[hackerlight]

Where can I find a source for your first point? This site[1] mentions this test as a way to detect adulteration by artificial coloring in turmeric powder, not adulteration by lead.

[sowbug]

I think the point (at least the one I gathered from the article) is that turmeric is sometimes artificially colored to make it the right shade of yellow, and that lead is in the chemical often used for that coloring. Thus, evidence of artificial coloring is a heuristic for presence of lead.

I suppose your turmeric could fail the test, and you could decide that the failure is not a sufficient proof of lead presence, because it might be a different lead-free artificial coloring that caused the test failure. That is absolutely your right to decide.

[ed25519FUUU]

Wouldn’t lead contamination cause the turmeric to sink?

[SideburnsOfDoom]

Lead Chromate, not Lead.

But apparently it's also not very soluble in water, so the question about sinking stands.

Possibly, a chemical powder is much finer than a ground-up plant matter, and takes longer to settle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_chromate#Safety_hazar...

[literalAardvark]

I've actually had a successful test with the water method. The lead coloring shows immediately and remains dissolved or in suspension or whatever for days, possibly forever. Turmeric doesn't usually color water at all.

[Tozen]

There are youtube videos showing how to do the turmeric test with water. Definitely, everyone that uses it, should know this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXWPf0HQd5U

(Testing Turmeric Powder adulteration with Artificial Color)

[valarauko]

I recall we did simple tests like this in school - we had to bring in samples of foodstuffs from home to do the tests, and the school would provide a positive control. This must have been the seventh grade or so?

https://www.vasantmasala.com/blog/how-to-check-adulteration-...

[japanuspus]

Another comment has this link to an Indian government website with simple tests for various food adulteration: https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/

[HarryHirsch]

inadvertent contamination with Argemone plants growing in mustard fields

You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free". To think that some people in the US voluntarily drink yellowroot tea because apparently it helps with diabetes is scary - the chemical similiarity between sanguinarine in argemone and berberine in yellowroot is just too great for it to be a good idea.

[interroboink]

I don't know anything about the tea you refer to, but "the chemical is similar" is not a great signal, IMO. You can even have the exact same chemical with different chirality having dramatically different effects on the body (eg: l- and d- methamphetamine, and plenty of others).

Not saying it has 0 relevance, but I wouldn't take it to mean much on its own. It's like people being scared of mercury dental fillings because "it has mercury in it, which is poisonous." That doesn't follow.

[civilitty]

Knee-jerk reactions like that aren't helpful with biological compounds. In this case they're both benzophenanchridine/isoquinoline alkaloids with the same functional groups: a methylenedioxy bridge and at least one methoxy group.

L- and D-methamphetamine are a rather unique case because their enantiomeric forms have different effects on the central and peripheral nervous systems. They're much more different from each other structurally than berberine is from sanguinarine.

[valarauko]

> You sometimes still see mustard advertised as "argemone-free"

This was a response to the 1998 outbreak. I remember in the early days it was suggested the culprit was argemone poisoning, and honestly that's what I thought it was all this time. Wikipedia suggests it was adulteration with white petroleum.

[kazinator]

It's not real knowledge until some white person from a prestigious foreign university visits and works it into their Ph. D. thesis.

[brabel]

One would think that they could've solved the mystery easily without such white woman if everyone knew about that, but apparently one would be wrong. Generations of people poisoned by this practice and everyone was just fine with it?

[concordDance]

Don't take an article like this at face value, they will omit any complicating or narrative disruptive facts and will often mislead with regards to cause and effect or timing (via omission or phrase juxtaposition).