With the holiday season approaching, many of us will be indulging in a favorite treat: chocolate. Yet despite dark chocolate’s reputation as a healthier sweet, it can also be contaminated with lead and cadmium, two heavy metals linked to serious health problems, as many people learned from Consumer Reports’ testing last year.
Now CR has the results of our new tests on heavy metal levels in other kinds of chocolates and foods made with it.
In chocolate products, the lead and cadmium are concentrated in the cocoa (or cacao), the ingredient that gives chocolate its distinctive flavor. Dark chocolate tends to have higher levels of cacao. But other chocolate products contain cacao, too, in varying quantities—from cocoa powder, which is essentially pure cocoa, to milk chocolate, which can have very little.
CR’s experts wanted to see whether other cacao-containing foods posed a risk, so we tested 48 different products in seven categories—cocoa powder, chocolate chips, milk chocolate bars, and mixes for brownies, chocolate cake, and hot chocolate. We also added a few more dark chocolate bars to our test. Products came from big name brands such as Hershey’s, Ghirardelli, and Nestlé; national retailers like Costco, Target, Trader Joe’s, Walmart, and Whole Foods; and specialty makers such as Droste and Navitas.
Hellbound and Down 