Lead in Your Kitchen?
It's true and it is allowed by law.
Lead is a known neurotoxin. It causes debilitating conditions and can be the mysterious missing link in many chronic conditions including fibromyalgia and chronic pain. When it contaminates a body that is unlucky enough to be harboring other toxin or heavy metals, the troubles are exponentially explosive. If you were thinking, “Whatever, it hasn’t hurt me yet,” you might want to understand that your body will store lead and other metals until the burden becomes to high. You might be 30 or 40 or 50 years of age when that happens, but when it does the vitality of your body will diminish, leaving you lethargic, weak and sickly.
When it comes to what we commonly call crock pots or slow cookers, the problem is intensified. The purposeful slow, constant heat allows a contaminated pot to leach lead more effectively into food. When tainted foods are eaten, the body will attempt to detox the poison. It will process what it can and store the rest in fat tissue, organs and bones. The longer the cooking period, the higher the risk of exposure to lead.
The FDA permits these products to be sold without warning. These are allowable levels of lead that are deemed safe by the US government. Your body, however, disagrees. There is no safe level of lead for the body.
When buying a crock or slow cooking pot you can, with some investigation, purchase a lead-free model that will keep you safe from exposure. These are not usually sold with any claims of being lead-free or packaging that identifies it as lead-free. You might have to contact each manufacturer to ask if their product is lead-free.
If you hear a lot of language about the product meeting FDA standards, you are in trouble. This means the product can and does have lead. FDA standards are just not good enough.
When you hear instead that the product exceeds FDA standards and is lead-free you have a clean product. Always ask to see the claim in writing.
I have researched only as far as my own purchase. Cuisinart claims the product is lead-free but I am still waiting to see that in print.