A public lab in Germany found 0.13-1.22 mg/kg lead in turmeric in 2020. The legal limit for vegetables is 0.1 mg/kg, 3 mg/kg for nutritional supplements; there is (or was, in 2020) no legal limit for spices. At 1 tsp/day, they don't expect any immediate health impact from turmeric alone, but you should be exposed to as little lead as possible.
India is the world’s bigger producer of turmeric and many other spices after all. Won’t be surprising that these batches originated in India and were made using adulterated rhizomes.
Do you have a link to a detailed explanation of how to perform that test? Do I just put the powder in water? What will it look like if it does or does not have lead?
https://eatrightindia.gov.in/dart/ Is the website by the government of India that shows relatively easy ways to test for a variety of common adulterants
This sounds like a one-off incident that was caught by testing. Given increased awareness of the issue, it seems unlikely that any turmeric you buy in the US today would be contaminated.
Rather a large number of things are contaminated with heavy metals, because the food industry tends not to test for them and there's little regulation:
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/your-herb... ("Your Herbs and Spices Might Contain Arsenic, Cadmium, and Lead: CR tested 126 products from McCormick, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, and other popular brands. Almost a third had heavy metal levels high enough to raise health concerns.")
Just from this month, there's a major recall of children's food in the United States that's contaminated with "extremely high concentrations of lead"—enough to cause acute toxicity. No one had ever tested these food products. This contamination was found after the fact, very late, because multiple children in North Carolina were chronically lead-poisoned, to the degree that state public health did an epidemiological investigation and tracked down the culprits.
> ”Rather a large number of things are contaminated with heavy metals”
Sure, but usually it’s because products are grown in contaminated soil and “naturally” pick up traces from their environment. Pretty much all rice contains arsenic, for example, but the concentration varies significantly depending on where it’s grown and how it’s processed.
The turmeric problem is different because lead has been deliberately added during processing, and it’s been found in relatively huge quantities - as much as 2-10% by weight in some cases!
Except that pretty much no plants bioaccumulate lead. The biggest lead vector for plant-based food is the soil that hitches a ride on the outside. So peeling potatoes, carrots, beets etc and washing your other fruits and veggies is really all that is needed.
It's actually a little unfortunate that no plants we know of will take up lead because this would be a way to clean up soil. Plant a lot of plant X. Pull out the plant and discard. Repeat until the lead has been pulled out of the soil.
Some kinds of mushrooms take up lead And other toxic materials.
I only found this out because edible mushrooms grew in my yard, but they are warned in literature that they may contain heavy metals, as my well water contains 3ppb lead I wasn’t confident to eat them.
The Consumer Reports spice article I linked looks at turmeric too and found products on shelves, in 2021, in the highest category of concern.
I'm not convinced that these (turmeric with lead chromate pigment) are rare, one-off incidents. I think this "this is a South Asian problem" might be an American problem, too, to a lesser degree: we just don't have enough visibility and testing to notice it.
(essentially condensing down milk products that don't have a large % of heavy metals but this gets condensed down and the heavy metals are more likely to stay behind - 200 liters of milk to make 1kg of protein powder).
Because nobody force them to, and they can get away with selling tainted food? Testing means testing costs plus throwing away lots that don't pass. So unless coerced they tend not to (some good companies do anyway but they are rare).
Given the FDA’s funding history over the decades since Reagan I’d hazard a guess that the number of randomized tests of imported turmeric for lead contamination per year is somewhere between zero and NaN.
https://www.ua-bw.de/pub/beitrag.asp?subid=2&Thema_ID=2&ID=3...