From my reading the disagreement is about how often or much chocolate people consume. The thresholds (MADL, EU) are in µg/day and the Consumer Reports numbers are in µg/serving.
Arstechnica somewhat bridges this gap at the end with quotes including "at these intake levels", "A single serving", "from time to time", "indulging during holidays".
The issue with lead is you can have a sub clinical amount from a dozen or even a hundred sources and end up with significant issues. Thus the threshold needs to be set extremely low for any individual source.
Arstechnica is really understating the risks here. While global chocolate consumption is 7.2 million metric tons that isn’t split evenly among 8 billion people resulting in 1.8kg/person per year instead the majority of the global population is 0-0.5kg/person and the rest is increasingly concentrated.
It’s not that uncommon to find someone eating a 1.6oz Hershey chocolate bar per day or the equivalent amount in whatever brand they prefer. If they happen to like an unusually high concentration brand the amount on its own might not seem concerning but it combines with every other source in their life and their lifetime accumulation from other sources.
For someone in the upper 1% of chocolate consumption, lead intake via chocolate is unlikely to be anywhere near the top of their list of health risk factors.
It could easily be the largest risk factor from chocolate.
In Switzerland the average person is consuming 8.8kg/year (22lb), and the country is quite healthy by international standards. They have the lowest obesity rate in Europe and and half that of America which averages significantly lower levels of chocolate consumption.
>Arstechnica is really understating the risks here.
Glad to see my Ars ban in 2015 was ahead of the curve, and sad they are still churning out the same garbage that got them blacklisted in the first place.
Not all chocolate is sweet. I would claim that none of the good stuff is. The bars I used to eat, before stopping for the heavy metals, had 7 grams of sugar.
I used to eat a large bar of very dark, high quality, chocolate per day (having to constantly explain to onlookers that the whole bar had the sam sugar as a half cup of milk). I’m sure I was in the 99th percentile for cocoa. I stopped when I saw this coming a few years ago.
That's me exactly. I used to eat half a bar of 85% - 100% dark daily. The (relatively) recent info on heavy metals has me really bummed. Why is everything always so toxic these days???
My new goal is to figure out how to get all this heavy metal accumulation out of me (I've been eating heavy dark chocolate regularly for years), and find ways I can keep eating chocolate without absorbing more. Some studies I've read mention that tomatoes might help prevent heavy metal absorption when consumed with the source.
Most of the discussion here centers around utility and human benefit vs consumption.
What’s really striking about crypto using 16% of the power usage of data centers is the population served and utility provided.
The internet has roughly 5.2 billion users, all of which utilize the cited datacenters.
Bitcoin, as one example, has an all time high of 568k daily transactions.
US adults on average do 2.3 financial transactions per day.
Bitcoin, in the busiest day on the network ever, powered enough transactions for the economic activity of a small US city.
Anyone can look at a block explorer for [pick a network] to find that, at best, the total number of worldwide crypto users is roughly 0.5% of the internet population.
So 16% of the power for 0.5% of the users - and who knows what value/utility is achieved with whatever those crypto users are doing (not much).
Yikes... digiconomist. Literally zero credibility there. His name is Alex de Vries and he works for the dutch central bank. To my knowledge, very little of his blog posts have made its way to peer review and academic publication. For some reason that doesn't stop his work from being distributed widely as an authoritative source on this topic.
This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
Could also look into the work of Troy Cross, Margot Paez, and Daniel Batten who are climate activists and pro-Bitcoin because of the incentives it provides around building out renewable energy and mitigating methane emissions.
And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
> This paper has it's own problems with conflicts of interest, but it has gained traction recently and is worth a read to see things from another perspective.
Like most defenses of bitcoin’s carbon footprint, the paper you linked makes the case that theoretically maybe bitcoin could be carbon negative in the future if certain things happen. If you look at the actual current source of power for miners weighted by hashrate in the US, it’s mostly coal and natural gas. Among companies that don’t have to report this, such as miners in Russia and Kazakstan, it’s likely as bad or worse.
> And NY Times is notoriously anti-Bitcoin, to the point you have to ask, "do they have an agenda"?
They have also published a lot of things that have been criticized as being too pro-crypto (such as the Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto).
We used WASTE in college. At the time I looked through the code and I'm 99% sure there was an Edgar Allan Poe easter egg related to "quote the raven" in there.
It was 10 years ago but I'm very sure it was "quote the raven", "whip the llama" is too funmy for me to not remember if that has been it. I searched the source and didn't see it but can't find a source control system copy to search over all the history.
