Lead Safe Mama - Environmental Activist, Filmmaker, & Mother of Four Sons (tamararubin.com)
I have decided 1. This site probably has a valid point 2. But it probably also stokes way too much paranoia and tries to get people to buy expensive affiliate products when that’s not necessary.
Fiesta dishes, novelty dishes, lots of cheaply-made goods with untraceable supply chains, etc. probably do have dangerous levels of lead and other heavy metals, and this problem didn’t magically go away as soon as they started being more tightly regulated.
When she writes about lead in salt, her only alternative is to tell people to buy some super bougie Canadian salt that’s like $50 for an ounce or Icelandic salt. Despite listing things like “Bali pyramid salt,” no more details are given at all. Repeated requests for brands of Hawai’ian salt and things for people whose tastes are not as White or as bougie as hers have been completely ignored.
Telling people to engage in natural whole-foods based chelation etc. is probably pretty decent advice.
Her advice not to take supplements seems really insane. Sure, most supplements are probably tainted and that’s Sturgeon’s law. I’ve seen supplements with Prop 65 warnings on them, which isn’t the standard warning for pregnant women to not take it or be careful, it means there are heavy metals and you shouldn’t buy that since not every supplement has enough heavy metals to require that warning. However, how is she going to get enough vitamin B12? Industrially farmed animals other than ruminants are all given lots of B12 supplements and industrially farmed ruminants are often given B12 supplements as well as cobalt supplements, since only ruminants produce B12 that they absorb in their digestive tract due to how the bacteria in their digestive tract are aligned and the fact ruminants digest their own feces. Eating a steak will not give you B12 with a lower risk of contamination than reputable supplements unless you’re on a sustenance farm fertilizing the ground with lots of manure and worm compost (also technically manure) which basically no one is. Don’t get me started on the level of heavy metals in commercial fish and seafood. You’re not getting sufficient nutrients without supplements unless you want to dedicate your entire life to farming, and I don’t see the harm in taking a ginseng or HMB or whatever kind of supplement either on that note as long as it’s reputable.
Telling people to be OK with plainer dishes and not eat off all the novelty dishes is fine. Dishes have historically been a huge source of heavy metals and even rarely some with plainer colors (though these usually have more elaborate designs) also have problems.
Despite the fact she says most plain glass dishes (and probably also plain white) you get at Wal-Mart and Target are generally fine, she only sells gigantic packs of $100+ dishes in her store. She doesn’t let you just buy a dish or set of a single plate, bowl, etc. based on how many people you would need to serve. If you aren’t a lead safe mama yourself most of her options are not remotely economical, and some of her other options (such as the salt) are not economical even if you are and she’s just raking in money from affiliating with the companies.
On the one hand, it’s probably fairly terrible to subscribe to some sort of Whig version of history that says that heavy metal poisoning isn’t a thing anymore, though my observations is heavy metal poisoning seems almost like a form of karma and if you’re buying cheap Chinese goods, chocolate that destroys the environment, etc. you probably are just getting your comeuppance when you get lead, cadmium, cobalt, arsenic, etc. poisoning. Even if you’re a kid you should probably be asking about these things proactively, and kids’ brains are more likely to recover anyway which also seems to mitigate blame reasonably.
However, she really does seem to stoke way too much paranoia and get too much money from affiliates, especially the expensive salt that’s from the area she lives. It has been pointed out even if it was pointed out on Reddit that her instruments are probably overly-sensitive and aren’t the official way to measure heavy metals in labs, and someone measured a piece of plain wood as being high in heavy metals which is unlikely even if wood can have some pollutants. On the other hand if you’re buying a cobalt blue dish this is probably made with the element cobalt, that is literally how cobalt blue got its name, so probably just don’t. This is a real concern. Himalayan salt is mined out of the Earth and doesn’t have an appreciable amount of nutrients despite being almost certain to have various heavy metals. This is a real concern. I think it’s probably just good to take what she wrote and use it to remind you to exercise more reflection with what you buy, eat, and eat off of, but not use her as the final authority since she seems to have some fairly harmful biases and her bias to not take supplements seems particularly pernicious and like it will basically undo all the positive effects of eliminating heavy metals if you follow it.
I’m a lifetime fan of supplements and I’ve taken them for decades. Recently I encountered some information which has me rethinking taking them. Beef definitely has to come from organic grass fed cows to receive the full nutritional benefits.
I’ll find the well curated articles about supplements and post it here!
Here’s his article on Vitamin D. Check him out when you have a chance. https://open.substack.com/pub/chemtrails/p/vitamin-d-is-rat-poison-the-fraudulent?r=127z9b&utm_medium=ios&utm_campaign=post
beef liver is hands down one of the highest food sources of vitamin B12.