Tamara Rubin

> All US citizens participate in a free market, as long as foreign labor is cheaper then American businesses have no incentive to participate in the economy. You just said it right there, a great argument to make the tariffs match what is required to allow US Citizens to compete with global slave labor prices - OR block all products built with slave labor. Also have eating out of lead-lined everything in the meantime: https://tamararubin.com/

There can be lead in almost any man-made good or processed food. And even unprocessed food grown in contaminated soils. Lead is such a ubiquitous contamination that it is worth educating yourself about and getting baseline blood tests. This site has lots of useful information: https://tamararubin.com/ The author tests products with an XRF gun and her reports have initiated recalls. It's a commentary on our lack of enforcement and oversight that one individual could be the primary source of information about lead contamination for many. Unfortunately if a company can claim their product is not for use by children than it can't really get recalled and many of us are using dishware with lead in them and have unnecessary lead exposures.

The brand we settled on was Pillivuyt (better quality). You can get Corelware for cheaper that seems to be tested safe, but if you're looking for stuff that's going to last, you want actual porcelain dishware. The other brand that we found was sold by Sur La Table, made in Turkey. We chose porcelain over some other materials (like glass) because it's more durable, and Pillivuyt has been making the stuff for a long time (simple, high quality). You can read up on lead glazing issues on Lead Safe Mama ( https://tamararubin.com/ ). You will not find this brand among her recommendations, but my wife went to the trouble to research stated lead levels in glazing processes from a number of manufacturers. There are differences in their lines, as well. The ones you get direct from France, or through Nordstrom are the "good" lines and the William Sonoma lines are cheaper (for Pillivuyt).

If you wish to do some of your own tests, vs using a service, swab test kits have a reputation for being very poor quality and unreliable. This led this gal to start a kind of one-woman crusade on the topic: https://tamararubin.com/2023/01/dont-panic-these-lead-test-kits-do-not… She recommends the american brand Scitus for swab test kits.

Wow! This is a great website. And it looks fine. And she replies in the comments. Sad quote: > If you look above in this article there is a list of 49 things we have tested so far (49/245 published articles, and that is going to bump to 55 this week) that have all tested safe by the strictest standards – that’s about 20%. https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/daves-killer-bread-thin-sliced-21-whol…

Watch out for dishes, especially older ones. The older Lenox dishes my family used for 40 years turned out to have heavily leaded glaze on the surface. By the time I was using them for my own kids, the glaze could turn a lead-check swab bright red, which means we were eating that lead. After I discovered this I replaced all of our dishes with plain white Corelle. Corelle currently uses lead-free glaze; the plain white is just me being an absolutist. Note that vintage Corelle and almost all other vintage cookware contains some amount of lead in the decorative glaze. Here's a good resource for lead content in the household items your kids are likely to encounter: https://tamararubin.com/

Even more widespread and arguably of greater risk is the widespread use of lead. I'd assumed that anything produced in the last twenty years or so would be lead-free and it turns out I'd assumed wrong. Garden hose fixtures often contain lead [1], and there are recalls of popular toys with red or yellow paint [2]. And this is just going through what's still in my browser history. [1] https://ideas.time.com/2012/08/02/is-your-garden-hose-toxic/ [2] https://tamararubin.com/2018/09/reminder-june-2007-thomas-the-tank-eng…

Here are the full test results from the person/group who tested the toothpastes: https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/ I think there will probably be a great deal of controversy about this until some scientists/food scientists take a look at the results and give us their view. Heavy metals are unfortunately found in soil and can result in contaminated food & other products. The issue is the amount in the product & the amount you're consuming. You're most likely not going to get lead poisoning from using a pea sized amount of toothpaste twice a day through brushing & spitting it out. If you swallowed the entire tube of toothpaste that might be a different story. This could be a situation where the pros outweigh the cons and it's just one of those inevitabilities we deal with in life. But, it's entirely possible some brands are using very poor quality control and it's highly contaminated. If you're concerned, you can always get a blood test for heavy metals from your doctor.

The first link in the article contains PPM, and if you click through it lists % actionable levels for the individual brands / contaminants: https://tamararubin.com/2025/01/toothpaste-chart/ Maybe HN should just link to this? Incidentally, apparently, they test based on donations from their reader base. Most of their readers are interested in weird fluoride-free stuff. If you want them to test more mainstream brands, you can send them money: https://tamararubin.com/2025/02/lead-safe-mama-llc-fundraisers-for-too… I'm not endorsing them, and have no idea how well they conduct their tests, etc. There might be a better way to fund independent testing of consumer products.

> By now she very child should have no need anymore to buy Lego bricks so many should be in circulation. It might not be so much of an issue for legos, but but I've read you should not give vintage toys to kids, because past manufacturing process do not meet modern standards. For instance: vintage yellow megablocks have high levels of heavy metals (https://tamararubin.com/2020/12/how-old-are-your-childs-toys-mega-blok… I threw away some of those my wife got at a consignment sale, because I could not tell when they were made. > I just fear they are being thrown away. They are being thrown away.

Also look out for lead and cadmium in Le Creuset pans. https://tamararubin.com/2022/04/le-creuset-overview/

Ok sure, but that's far from the primary concern here. I'm thinking of things like this: https://tamararubin.com/2021/09/yellow-vintage-fiesta-plate-made-in-us… ..which is mad of approximately 50% lead, and certainly no accident of nature. And even if it were to occur naturally, that wouldn't make it any less hazardous.

I was recently horrified to learn that the baby glass bottle I had been using with my baby had lead paint on it. https://tamararubin.com/2021/12/sailor-themed-glass-nuk-baby-bottle-20… Apparently, it's considered to be acceptable by current standards. Despite the fact that babies will obviously touch the bottle (and the paint) and then put their hands in their mouth. I bought glass bottles because I wanted to avoid plastic thinking it'd be safer and I was reassured by seeing that they were manufactured in Germany :( I think we still have very far to go in terms of toxic substance exposure.

https://tamararubin.com/2018/10/tamara-can-you-come-to-my-home-and-mak… Lead-testing as a Service :) That site also has quite a lot of tips on equipment and such. (No affiliation, just saw it from some other hn comment somewhere)

I have a theory that a lot of kids in India have been slow poisoned due to lead in 'traditional pressure cooker safety valves', leading to more pronounced ADHD and hyperactivity symptoms. I am not able to find any studies supporting this. Anecdotal evidences had pointed in the same direction (like this one here https://tamararubin.com/2017/01/butterfly-pressure-cooker-india-valves…

Almost all do. Most don't leach, or leach amounts too small to pose a significant danger. For more info, check out this blog [0]. The design is a little much, but it's quite informative. The author is a mother whose kids got lead poisoning, so she bought a XRF spectral analyzer and now posts lead test results for tons of items. I've found it a useful resource. [0] https://tamararubin.com/2019/12/which-ceramic-coffee-mugs-are-lead-fre…

Quite an alarming claim! Looks like regarding to Cadmium, "vintage" means up to mid-to-late 1980s [0] > Apparently The [Lego] has been aware of this concern for at least three decades (hence the switch to Cadmium free plastic colorants sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s) [0] https://tamararubin.com/2019/05/vintage-1970s-legos-test-positive-for-…

> I wonder how much one buys from AliExpress is made of toxic chemicals? All that clone lego and other cheap goods. I really am curious. Probably a lot, since lead has even shown up in recent(ish) toys from US companies (Mattel) that should know better: https://tamararubin.com/2020/12/how-old-are-your-childs-toys-mega-blok…

Ok so diving in, The Guardian is reblogging a blog "lead safe mama". "lead safe mama" is an activist and filmmaker, who does not appear to have a scientific background, and who may primarily be motivated by taking on legal cases. [0] Furthermore, in the toothpaste (informal, blogger-led) study it appears that the testing was performed by "Purity Laboratories" using "ICP-MS" instrumentation. [1] According to "Purity's" own marketing it's admitted the "ICP-MS" may cause interferences, though they aren't specifically quantified. [2] Other laboratories primarily market the technique specifically for testing raw for contamination[3] and discusses "dynamic range", rather than what I speculate is "a complex matrix" though I myself am not technical enough to recognize the meaning there. According to an instrument vendor, Agilent, there are other considerable number of other constraints and variables where the laboratory process itself could introduce issues[4] and alarmingly, I'm unable to locate any details regarding specificity or FPRs, and there's some evidence of targeted advocate edits on Wikipedia regarding the viability of this application of this technique. Furthermore these advocate edits specify a different methodology for health-related detection, rather testing wastes for result of contamination than testing products themselves. Even furthermore Agilent, one vendor that has strategically been selected for my review of technical details about the technique specifies…