Unfortunately on the exposure side research wasn’t done and it propagates the myth that lead exposure is only an issue for those with lead pipes or lead paint. It’s true that these are the main sources of severe lead exposure. However the article points out that there is no safe level of exposure to lead and these aren’t the main ways we are exposed to lead in the US anymore.
Today we are mostly exposed by low level contamination and thankfully this usually results in only mildly elevated lead levels. In a toddler sticking things in the mouth this could be almost any object. For adults it is food and drinks and the objects we use to make them.
I know this because my toddler had elevated lead levels even though our neighborhood never had lead paint and our water does not have lead (I tested the water coming out of our faucets).
The US has few laws against lead contamination and they aren’t very stringent and there is little proactive enforcement. This non profit has ended up creating several recalls after reporting their own testing: https://tamararubin.com/category/recall/ Most of the recalls were products marketed for children such as baby bottles. But if a child eats off an adult plate there aren’t any laws against that being contaminated.
Some actions you can take are:
* test children’s lead levels and your own
* make sure toddlers aren't playing with old toys (pre 1978 really risky, after 2010 is best)
* stop buying things that have a prop 65 warning (I know prop 65 isn’t perfect, but it’s often a lead warning).
* Remove risky objects like the above from your children’s classrooms.
* For cooking and food and drinks use clear glass, stainless steel, and cast iron
* avoid processed foods. There are a lot of particulars here about what is most likely to be high in lead. Chocolate, spices, salt, and cassava products are particularly high in heavy metals.That would seem to mean to stop buying an enormous number of things. Extended to locations, it would mean not parking in any enclosed parking lot, or entering a number of different stores. It's not clear to me it's even possible to avoid everything with a prop 65 warning. Unfortunately, the bad incentives involved (private actions mean there is a risk for not putting a warning if some law firm can try to argue to a court in a civil action that you might be exposing people to something, while at the same time there is no penalty or cost at all to putting a completely unnecessary and bogus warning when you don't actually know of any risk) make it so that the safest option is just to put a warning.
Yes, there are a lot of problems with Prop 65, but the podcast also highlights the benefits. Slapping a Prop 65 warning on foodstuffs in particular significantly decreases sales, so it's not something you just do merely to avoid extortionate lawsuits. It incentives testing beforehand, and if you find contaminants to then reformulate. Notwithstanding the seeming ubiquity of Prop 65 warning labels in California, the salient effects are significant and largely hidden--you don't notice all the products that don't have the label, and don't because they were reformulated to avoid the label. Prop 65 was one of the most significant drivers in the US of the removal of lead and other contaminants in products. The author of the bill admits the unintended consequences have been significant, especially harassment lawsuits, but he also argues there aren't really good alternatives that could have achieved what Prop 65 has with a better cost/benefit ratio.
Having an army of private lawyers vigorously prowling for contaminants in products is a pillar of Prop 65's success. You couldn't achieve what Prop 65 has with centralized regulation, not without creating tremendous (i.e. costly in time if not money) bureaucratic hurdles to creating and selling products in the market. Prop 65 is a kind of "ask for forgiveness" model, rather than "ask for permission". The former is generally more preferable if you want to preserve market dynamism and profitability, while also minimizing the risk of regulatory capture, and lax, haphazard enforcement. Moreover, you get the escape hatch of just adding a warning label, without having to take your product off the market.
There is a centralized regulatory aspect to Prop 65--the State of California's list of contaminants--subject to typical bureaucratic and lobbying externalities. But on balance Prop 65 seems defensible, however imperfect. After listening to the podcast, which if anything leaned into Prop 65 criticism, I softened my views on Prop 65.
What makes cancer and reproductive risks unique such that labelling for them cannot be enforced by the government, and needs to be done by private enforcers motivated by profit? Why could the same type of law not simply be enforced, in a largely similar way, by a government agency?
I would generally agree that Prop 65 has had benefits, and that such labelling, in principle, could be a good thing (even if I'd really prefer if there were some requirement to actually give at least some explanation when putting a label). But the private enforcement has never made sense to me, unless one takes the view that the state actually opposes labelling and can't be trusted to enforce it.
I realize this is the first-half of a compound question, but those jump out to me as cases where there can be years between harmful exposure and someone noticing the damage.
It's not unique. The ADA and the NVRA are two other big laws that include private rights of action, eg
> you don't notice all the products that don't have the label
...because there are too many with it, so people stopped caring. As a consumer, I would prefer a label that identified the major risks.
One thing I wonder about with various regs is whether the optics are ever fully factored into the analysis. This seems to be a blind spot in a lot of regulatory behavior that affects consumers, GDPR being another obvious example. To consumers, these laws are examples of regulatory cluelessness, being so broadly applied as to be meaningless, and ultimately undermining the moral authority of the act of regulation. Who doesn't look at a Prop 65 warning and ultimately conclude 'well I guess everything causes cancer'?
Based on your description, Prop 65 did some nice jiu jitsu to navigate real-world constraints and create incentives to get some positive change in, and I imagine the author is proud of having figured out that kind of complex move. But man did it whiff on the optics.
With all things, be strategic- the importance of avoiding prop 65 is relative to the likelihood of it ending up in the body- so items in your kitchen, your garden, that young children would touch.
Second, information is not meant to be executed on directly... you are supposed to process information with critical thinking. Yes, enclosed parking lots give you cancer. Guess what, you can still park in it... In the same way that tuna contains a lot of mercury but I still eat tuna.... just less of it. I rather know and make an informed decision than not know anything at all.
I'm far from crunchy, but this led me to start making my kids pouches. They're more expensive per pouch, which was a bit surprising, but it has the side benefits that we make the pouches together (quality time) and I can control what goes in (e.g., spinach, carrots, broccoli).
In the apple sauce contaminations the apple sauce is always cinnamon flavored. When tested for various heavy metals, cinnamon usually has unsafe levels of heavy metal contamination, and lead is usually one of the metals: https://tamararubin.com/2024/12/six-cinnamon-products-chart/
There is widespread contamination in spices because the machinery that processes most spices is made of metal with lead. Some of the lead may be unintentional contamination, but lead is also used intentionally because it is cheap and useful. I believe it is useful for grinding, etc because when used in an alloy the metal doesn't wear down as easily.
So if you want to replicate those apple sauce products without heavy metal you would need to buy cinnamon sticks and grate them yourself.
Any source on this? Lead as flavor enhancer? That would be crazy if true.
There's a discount store that I will no longer feel comfortable buying cheese or produce from.
I ask because there is no source that guarantees 100% that it won't have harmful lead levels. Lead is often introduced through the soil, so unless your organic farm where you buy produce either tested the soil ahead of time (pretty rare unless someone though it might be a concern) or regularly tests the produce they make, you're just assuming it won't have harmful lead levels.
I'm surprised to see salt on the list. Where does most table salt come from? And where in the processing does lead come in? Off the top of my head I think of it as a simple process. There aren't any special additives for flavor, color, or shelf life, as it's not attacked by bacteria. I believe the only thing added is iodine. And speaking as a non-chemist, it would seem straightforward to separate salt from lead if the salt was contaminated.
If somebody who actually knew what they're talking about could chime in, I'd be interested.
Natural salt is therefore not particularly pure. I believe it is typically on the order of 95-98% pure. The majority of contaminants are harmless things like potassium, magnesium, calcium, etc but there will also be traces of heavy metals, arsenic, etc.
Salt is literally one of the very cheapest bulk materials on Earth. Any non-trivial processing is going to be really expensive compared to the raw materials so people don’t do it unless they can’t avoid it (e.g. anti-caking agent for some food salt applications). As a consequence, I would expect most bulk food salt to have limited opportunity for industrial contamination.
The solution here seems simple enough: Don’t dry the pods in the open air. But the farmers don’t have a lot of extra money lying around that they can use to address this, and the market is (currently at least) still buying.
Note that:
* since 2018, the warning must include at least one specific chemical (but not all of them)
* unlike initially, manufacturers nowadays often only label products sent to California, so the benefit for residents of other states has largely disappeared
Here's a tip for your peace of mind: if you suspect that some food you're consuming is high in lead, get tested first before removing that food from your diet. I was consuming a fair amount of dark chocolate when I first learned that it could contain high levels of lead, so I got tested before I cut it out of my diet. My levels were below the detection limit so I can be reasonably sure that any damage caused by lead consumption was minimal.
To me, this says that we still put lead in too many things. Lead is still used for flashing in roofs. It's still used as a mould release when making plastics. It's still used in making dishware. It's still used in bullets.
It's still used for all kinds of things which will one day end up in the environment and someone's drinking water.
As for lead in plastic manufacturing or dishware, that's mostly a matter of buying wisely. As it tends to be used in less developed markets.
Where do you live? I have never shot a gun indoors. Every range I have been to is open air. Multiple states, including California.
It’s hard to have an outdoor gun range in an urban environment!
Lead batteries contain not just lead, but the H2SO4 needed to dissolve large amounts of it and transport it through watercourses when the plastic case inevitably cracks.
Too bad they use lead, because it would be too good to be true otherwise. You have to treat lithium batteries like a spoiled child in comparison.
You can overcome most of these issues, but it comes at a significant cost. I think it could be worth it, especially when you factor in that the lithium ion battery could theoretically pay for itself in longer lifespan, but most buyers would prefer the cheap, familiar, reliable option.
Why? I would posit that lithium batteries do way more damage to the environment than lead-acid batteries. Recycling of lead-acid batteries is very prevalent because it is economically worth it.
> Despite the smaller supply of lithium, a study earlier this year in the Journal of the Indian Institute of Science found that less than 1 percent of Lithium-ion batteries get recycled in the US and EU compared to 99 percent of lead-acid batteries, which are most often used in gas vehicles and power grids.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/04/lithium-costs-a-lot-...
Whenever I buy a lead-acid battery, I always have a core charge and it is a non-trivial percentage of the total cost of the battery. I get that core charge back when I return the old battery.
Lithium batteries have nothing comparable.
AFAIK soldering is not hot enough to vaporize lead.
The problem isn't vaporizing, or the first consumers direct exposure. The problem is taking a pound of lead and distrubuting it all over the environment in the form of spatter, shavings, assembled pcbs, connections, etc. Probably less than half of the solder winds up in a product or project, and that is just a short delay on it's trip to the envirnment when the project is discarded. 100% of it ends there, and not in a nice solid lump but practically aresolized.
It's the same as just taking that same pound of lead and directly grinding it into a fine powder and just sprinkling it everywhere, where it becomes part of the soil more or less and leeches into everything and can't be removed.
And 100,000 or a million or many millions of other people all doing the same thing, every day, for generations. Yess millions. There are 300million just in the US alone, and there are more than one person in every 300 that solders at least some times.
If your iron can hold it's temperature worth a darn, the lead-free solder is fine. If it can't, you're going to struggle no matter what you use.
Pure tin (or Sn99.3Cu0.7 alloy) is garbage, the silver helps a bunch.
For demanding applications there's apparently some even more performant alloys available today, eg. Innolot [1].
Because if that, many people consider the ban of industrial lead solder to be over-zealous. But that ban is in place to stop consumers being contaminated if they somehow touch the board. Also to minimise lead entering the water table once it is discarded.
This aged wildly poorly.
TL;DR: RFK has cut health programs including the division that deals with lead poisoning.
The first link is about that choice's fallout on school children exposed to lead.
Yay blanket federal cuts.
I don't know if this was something he pushed for, but let's assume it was. Could there still be a reasonable cause to cut that department?
A lot of people assume if you oppose the Do Good Things act, that you must be a bad person. Was this department getting results? It was spending roughly 750k per full time employee per year (based on the 150M for 200 full timers from the article). Was it working? It could have been, it also could not have been.
Maybe this was an actually bad decision made by an actually bad man. But previous coverage of him has taught me to take anything reported about him with a very large grain of salt.
Especially with hard water (of which the water in Rome is VERY hard[1] today, and if similar sources are used, it stands to reason it was very hard way back when) it forms a scale that drastically reduces the amount that leeches into the water.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Map-of-water-hardness-of...
He is being dishonest.
> It is now universally accepted that utilization of lead for domestic purposes and water distribution presents a major health hazard. The ancient Roman world was unaware of these risks. How far the gigantic network of lead pipes used in ancient Rome compromised public health in the city is unknown...[Lead isotopes in sediments from the harbor of Imperial Rome] demonstrate that the lead pipes of the water distribution system increased [lead] contents in drinking water of the capital city by up to two orders of magnitude over the natural background. The [lead] isotope record shows that the discontinuities in the pollution of the Tiber by lead are intimately entwined with the major issues affecting Late Antique Rome and its water distribution system.
There's a weird trend on here of karma chasers playing "gotcha" by posting rebuttals to things that literally nobody is claiming and hoping that we don't notice. It's fucking pathetic man. What would it take for you to reevaluate your life.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160617070827/https://news.ycom...
The ancient romans added lead acetate Pb(CH3COO)2 to their foods and wine. I can't understate just how much 'lead sugar' was being consumed.
By the way, in my later years, I did make a voluntary choice to taste it, and then rinse my mouth out. And yes, it was the closest we have to table sugar Ive ever tasted. Before anyone naysays me, I did this knowing full well the risks.
Also fast forward 1700 years,and we see the same reaction. In the 1950s USA, you could buy lead-rimmed coffee cups. The interaction between the coffee, the lead, and your mouth created the sensation of sweetness, likely also lead acetate.
All the new parts are designed based on a lead free process anyways, so you might as well get used to working with lead-free solder to begin with.
How do I do that?
https://tamararubin.com/2023/01/dont-panic-these-lead-test-k...
She recommends the american brand Scitus for swab test kits.
So, I don't even know if it's expensive or not.
Also if you do any construction that disturbs old paint (demolition, window replacement) be careful to seal off the area using plastic, then clean it carefully with disposable wipes.
You also want to do this if you're going to be growing anything edible in your front or back yard.
Isn't the risk of lead paint only relevant if it's exposed? So you should test any visible layer and any layer that later becomes visible, but deeply nested layers don't matter so much.
You can ask your doctor, it was just a blood test
It was free but I’m Australian
Came back zero
To test your children's exposure, you can have their blood tested. They may very well be exposed from sources other than your house
Now the people manufacturing the bullets for those competition shooters... they need lead tests.
If you ever shoot, just remember it is a really good idea to wash your hands afterwards (using the dlead soap if possible). It is not a bad idea to have a change of clothes and to wash your clothes right away as well.
I’m surprised by this. Modern cars (EVs, at least) have started replacing their 12V lead batteries with Li-ion, which are more durable, store much more energy, and of course are less toxic.
But in any case, isn’t the one advantage of lead-acid batteries their recyclability? Don’t 99%+ of lead batteries get recycled into new lead batteries?
Surely there can’t be all that much new lead being mined for batteries?
This does mean you might actually need a “jump start” for an EV if the 12V battery is drained, eg from leaving a light on or a fault in the 12V charging system.
That raises an interesting question: is the power requirement low enough that you could make a hand cranked EV jump starter?
It needs enough to open the contactors which allows the high voltage battery to send power via the inverter to charge the 12V
My Lithium Ion jump pack is tiny, about the size of two iphones stacked on top of each other, and a single jump uses only a few %.
As a sibling said, that doesn't require that you use a lead battery. The only requirement is that it's insulated from the main one.
So data centres and edge compute UPS devices. Something has to keep the lights on when the power goes out while the generator kicks in. While the lead is recyclable, the power demand keeps going up. So my guess is AI…
Sucks that there's so much use for something so dangerous. Amazing the perils we have both dug up and invented in the pursuit of progress which is ultimately just making money.
This is because food cannot be heavily processed without some heavy metals leeching in, according to a food safety guy who is a long time friend.
It is completely mind boggling we let that happen.
The “action levels” of lead in food (fruits and vegetables, etc) are 10 parts per BILLION, and stuff less than that is considered acceptable, because otherwise freaking everything would test positive because food grows in dirt which contains minerals from rocks.
Lead has higher allowable levels in things like nuts, again because they are grown in the dirt and have a lot of minerals. I think peanuts and stuff have 100-900ppb lead. https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s12011-024-044...
Existing rates of lead absorption are about 30 times higher than inferred natural rates
We certainly know it is the case that food produced by one producer varies dramatically in lead levels from another due to testing. Some of that may be attributed back to the soil, but it still goes to show that we could be testing soil levels and avoiding growing in lead contaminated soil.
Thank you for those links. For the nut study, they are studying finished products bought in the supermarket, so it is possible that some of the contamination may come from the processing (removing shells, etc) which is pointed out in the study itself.
[1] https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14334042/
I wasn’t claiming heightened lead exposure is good, just responding to those who seem shocked that we tolerate some low level of lead in foods. Obviously leaded paint is dumb and we STILL, for some reason (well, I know the reason, but it’s not a good one imo), allow leaded aviation fuel. In fact, fully unleaded fuel was not allowed in a very large fraction of general aviation aircraft until recently because the FAA dragged their feet in approving lead free fuel mixtures for heritage general aviation aircraft (which is a large fraction of the general aviation fleet since lawsuits and the FAA have made newer aircraft just obscenely expensive), which is still very rare in small airports.
It is, ironically, the downstream effect of improper and over-regulation of general aviation.
Do you think it should be 0? 0.0000 ppb? No detectable lead whatsoever? What do you do if detection technology improves and the minimum detectable level decreases?
Even if you go live totally off the grid with your child and grow your own vegetables in your backyard with completely natural ingredients, you will still end up with some level of lead - which is a natural ingredient itself, after all.
At some point, you have to set a threshold and say that any lead below this level is not worth the cost of removing it or avoiding it. Would you pay 10x more for baby food at a 1 ppb level instead of 10 ppb? Do you think that would produce a net benefit for society?
The problem with our standards for baby food isn't necessarily that they are too high. The problem is that there is little enforcement. You have know way of knowing you will be getting 10ppb or be the unlucky one getting the large dosages that eventually got reported to the CDC. For much of the rest of the food supply the standards do allow for too much lead.
People in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43631251 have been arguing that these people must have been some top class elite, and I totally get it. They are too good looking. But, that's how it was. The typical of the past would be above celebrity looks today. A lot of curent idols look stunted in comparison.
Existing rates of lead absorption are about 30 times higher than inferred natural rates
In fact, to fully avoid lead, you’d basically have to carefully grow food hydroponically. Certified Organic mineral fertilizers like basalt rock dust (which provide calcium, phosphorus, and potassium, etc) would obviously not be okay if you wanted to eliminate all lead, as basalt contains 7.5ppm lead, comparable to the average in the Earth’s crust.
Our ability to detect lead only gets better and better with new technologies. Whereas a few decades ago we could detect 1 part in 1 million (ppm) we can now routinely detect down to 1 part per 1 trillion (ppt), that's 1 million more sensitive analysis.
To give a sense that's a 1 microgram in 1,000 tons of material.
As a result, you can't set the level at "no lead" because that's an impossible level to achieve.
Right now the US sets it at 10 parts per billion. So in a normal jar of baby food - approximately 100 grams - that's less than 0.1 microgram of lead.
Lead naturally occurs in soil at levels 15-40 parts per million or 1,000 times higher. Growing your own veggies in soil untouched by man is going to risk higher levels than allowed in baby food.
Programs that to have it removed? I think.
Also what would it be like to go through life knowing you had lead disrupting your brain.
That's pretty much anyone born before 1980 or so. We breathed it every day and it coated every outdoor surface in every city.
> the half-life of lead in the blood (meaning the amount of time needed for the concentration to drop to half) is relatively short, at only 28 days, that’s not the same as the half-life in the body. Some of the lead in the blood will not be eliminated, but it will actually go into the soft tissue, i.e. kidneys, liver, brain, where the half-life is a few months, and more annoyingly, into the bones, where the half-life is between 10 to 30 years. What’s more, from here, lead can leach back into the bloodstream, from where it can once again get into the soft tissue and cause more damage
Are there any pragmatic steps I can take to reduce/reverse any effect?
Tell that to anglers. Chomping down on lead is how to put weights on the line.
That’s what makes the rest of your post — and especially your comment history — so fluxomely paradoxical: clarity on one hand, derailment on the other.
You start off by unjustly accusing us of not being rational, neurotically accusing us of suppressing you in bold black un-downvoted text, then abruptly pivot to strongly endorsing "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man" — a paper that genuinely deserves more public attention. So why bother first tumbling down the same slippery slope of self-pitying paranoia, selective skepticism, and gratuitous goalpost-shifting that has earned you a negative karma and well documented pattern of rebuttals you never address? That’s not curiosity — that’s performance. And it shortchanges everyone on HN reading in good faith.
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=FalseNutrition
You clearly recognize credible science when you see it, as your support for "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man" shows. But paradoxically you lead with your pattern of paranoid rhetorical cheap shots, ignoring corrections, and doubling down on shaky claims. That pattern doesn't just erode your argument — it derails the conversation. HN deserves better.
Your instincts are right when it comes to the science, but your posting history tells a different story. Over and over, you’ve parachuted into threads with confidently wrong claims, ignored direct corrections, and doubled down with vague appeals to "common sense" instead of evidence. You raise objections that have already been addressed — not just by commenters, but by the actual data — and when shown to be wrong, you either ghost or pivot.
This isn’t about disagreement. This is about a pattern: skepticism as performance. A posture. The goalposts always move, the sources are always “dubious,” and somehow the real experts — the ones who've dedicated entire careers to this — are always just missing something obvious that only you can see. The fact that the people currently running this country do that so often because it's their brand, doesn't give you license to. Your persecution complex is not vindicated simply because Trump is critically endangering public health by appointing professional conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary and head of the Department of Health and Human Services.
You’re emulating the exact pattern that’s made RFK Jr. one of the most destructive figures in public health, a man who’s spent his career poisoning trust in medicine and science while cashing in on the same conspiratorial legacy that has made JFK folklore into a market, cherry-picking science when it flatters his instincts, discarding it when it challenges them, and spinning conspiracy from the gaps. That’s not skepticism. It’s sabotage. And it kills people.
Your and RFK Jr.'s performative playing the victim and baseless conspiracy theories cause real-world damage, and you're culpable for the harm your words cause:
RFK Jr.’s Conspiracy Theories: Here’s What Trump’s Pick For Health Secretary Has Promoted:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2024/11/15/rfk-jrs-con...
Claim: Vaccines cause autism due to thimerosal. Fact: Multiple large studies show no link. Thimerosal was removed and autism rates still rose. Harm: Fueled anti-vaccine panic, increased disease outbreaks.
Claim: COVID vaccines were part of a plot; ivermectin was suppressed. Fact: Vaccines work, ivermectin doesn’t. Claims are baseless. Harm: Undermined trust in science, cost lives.
Claim: COVID was engineered to target ethnic groups. Fact: No evidence. Pure pseudoscience. Harm: Reinforces racist and antisemitic tropes.
Claim: 5G and Wi-Fi cause cancer and control behavior. Fact: Non-ionizing radiation does not damage DNA. Harm: Distracts from real health risks, spreads paranoia.
Claim: HIV may not cause AIDS. Fact: HIV causes AIDS. Proven beyond doubt. Harm: AIDS denial has killed millions.
Claim: Fluoride causes cancer, IQ loss, and disease. Fact: Fluoride is safe and reduces tooth decay. Harm: Undermines public health and clean water programs.
Claim: Mass shootings are caused by antidepressants. Fact: No causal link has been shown. Harm: Stigmatizes mental health treatment, shifts blame from guns.
Claim: The FDA suppresses unpatentable cures. Fact: FDA evaluates safety and effectiveness. Harm: Promotes snake oil over science.
Claim: The CIA killed JFK. Fact: No credible evidence; Oswald acted alone. Harm: Fuels distrust in government without proof.
Claim: Sirhan Sirhan was hypnotized to kill RFK. Fact: Sirhan admitted guilt and was convicted with evidence. Harm: Deflects responsibility, erodes justice system trust.
This isn’t healthy skepticism. It’s misinformation that spreads confusion, undermines institutions, and gets people hurt.
You invoke science when it flatters your instincts — like posting that excellent lead exposure paper — but abandon it the moment it challenges them. That’s not intellectual curiosity. That’s rhetorical cosplay. You’re not hunting truth — you’re hunting affirmation.
So let me offer a counter-example. Not a theory. Not a feeling. Not a vibe. Just the kind of real-world, measurable work that good science actually does.
I’ve spent decades building and supporting the software infrastructure behind public health tools developed by the Block family — UC Berkeley professors emeritus Gladys and Clifford Block and their son Torin Block — including the Block Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) analysis system and the Alive! personalized intervention program, which educates, motivates, and measurably improves nutrition, physical activity, and diabetes prevention behaviors.
These are not abstract thought experiments. They’re rigorously validated interventions used in research studies, hospitals, clinics, and federal programs to evaluate diet, improve behavior, and reduce risk factors for chronic disease. Alive! is a computer-tailored email-based lifestyle intervention that’s been tested in randomized controlled trials and shown to significantly increase physical activity and improve diet — even among people starting from poor baseline habits.
This wasn’t just theory. NIH, CDC, and Kaiser Permanente funded this work — and in doing so, they paid my and the Blocks’ modest salaries for decades. They believed in the value of preventive health tools that could reach underserved populations and actually work. That public investment enabled the quiet infrastructure of health equity: software, research, behavior change, all rigorously validated and scaled with care.
Kaiser is one of the most respected health care providers in the U.S. — a stark contrast to the for-profit behemoths that have made a killing (literally) off denying care. You might have noticed what happened to the CEO of one of those companies: gunned down in the street and instantly lionized online as a folk villain finally facing consequences. That’s not justice, but it is a measure of the pain people feel after decades of systemic cruelty for profit.
Now imagine what happens when the agencies that actually try to prevent suffering — NIH, CDC, FDA — are systematically defunded, discredited, or taken over by conspiracy theorists like RFK Jr., whose job in the Trump administration is explicitly to dismantle those safeguards. You don’t just lose data or funding. You lose lives.
That’s what real evidence looks like: measurable outcomes in diverse populations, reproducible results, peer review, and follow-up. Not vibes. Not self-pitying claims of censorship. Not pretending that you're the only rational one in the room while repeating conspiracy theories about fluoride, antidepressants, and the CIA.
I’ve worked with NutritionQuest for decades because they’re relentlessly focused on tools that work — quietly, rigorously, and at scale. I help keep the systems running: secure, adaptable, and solid under pressure. No hype. No posturing. Just outcomes.
So yes, let’s absolutely question power. Let’s hold institutions accountable. But let’s also recognize when something actually works — and hold ourselves to the same standard we demand from everyone else.
Otherwise, we’re just chewing on paint.
American Journal of Preventive Medicine: Improving Diet and Physical Activity with ALIVE: A Worksite Randomized Trial:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937970...
This randomized controlled trial demonstrated that a 16-week email-delivered intervention significantly increased moderate physical activity by 28 minutes/week (p=0.0002), vigorous activity by 12.5 minutes/week (p=0.03), and fruit and vegetable intake (p=0.03), while reducing saturated fat (–0.95 g/day, p=0.01), trans fat (–0.29 g/day, p=0.02), and sedentary time. Effects were sustained 4 months post-intervention.
American Journal of Public Health: A Computer-Based, Minimal-Contact Intervention to Promote Fruit and Vegetable Consumption:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2005...
This randomized controlled trial tested a low-cost, computer-tailored intervention delivered via print or web, targeting increased fruit and vegetable intake over four months. Participants receiving tailored feedback increased intake by 0.85 servings/day versus control (p<0.001). The effect was strongest in those with the lowest baseline intake, and the intervention was effective across both print and web formats, demonstrating broad scalability with minimal in-person contact.
TIME Magazine: Too Fat? Read Your E-Mail:
https://web.archive.org/web/20100628164049/https://time.com/...
A popular summary of the ALIVE! study reporting that brief, tailored weekly emails prompted meaningful improvements in physical activity and diet among employees. Participants increased exercise by 1 hour/week and decreased daily intake of harmful fats by over 1 gram, with measurable public health implications.
You're the paranoid one who believes irrational people are out to silence you, and who calls people you don't even know irrational madmen, when so far nothing like that has happened, therefore the burden of proof for wild unsubstantiated claims is on you.
You asked me to explain it to you. I did. Don't complain you got what you asked for. Now the ball is in your court, to explain what you mean, provide evidence to support it, and prove irrational madmen are out to silence you.
I may be an irrational madman, but I upvoted you, and so far you have not been flagged, and the text of your message is still dark black, which means you have not been downvoted (unless a lot of other people upvoted you to cancel it out, like I did). It looks to me like the moderation system is working as intended.
I already replied to you and your question, and now I'm asking you to TALK, just the opposite of silencing you. Are you accusing me of being one of the irrational madmen out to silence you?
Or are you going to ghost me like you did in those other discussions when you could not provide any evidence for your incorrect claims? Irrational people are not silencing you when you run away with your tail between your legs the first time somebody asks you a question. That's social self-deportation for which you have no one to blame but yourself.
So what exactly are you saying, and what exactly are your beliefs and evidence about lead, nutritional research, questionnaires, analysis, and health care, government funding, and about people being out to silence you?
My position is that lead toxicity seems to be a conspiracy theory, rather than a real thing, the evidence for it is bizarre, and doesn't make any sense, and lead in fact seems to belong where it goes. That is, it's essential, and people are increasingly weak, dumb, and even have deformities because it has been removed.
This comment was instantly downvoted.
Is that it? Are we on the same page? Can you please from now on say what you actually mean instead of being coy and sarcastic and intellectually dishonest, then running away and ghosting me at the first sign of trouble?
So have you read that paper, or not? What does it say that supports or contradicts you point?
Edit 1:
>I didn't ghost you, BTW, my previous account got downvoted so heavily that my posts stopped being visible.
Then the moderation system is working perfectly as designed. In this and other threads of this discussion, and also your comment history, when you're not ghosting, you're sealioning:
>how do you know that lead doesn't belong in the same category as thimerosal, fluoride, or 5G and Wi-Fi?
>What method was used to infer the natural rates?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning
Don't attempt to sealion me or anyone else again until you've clearly and honestly states your beliefs, and provided evidence for them, as you've been repeatedly asked for, but so far have failed to do.
>It wasn't sarcastic, I tried to make people read it, and see that it's nonsense.
Ok then, if it wasn't sarcastic, it was simply a lie to manipulate people into believing what you do. Well that seems to have had the opposite effect as you intended. So why haven't you replied with any evidence supporting your conspiracy theory yet?
Don't you think that would be easier than trying to dishonestly manipulate people by saying you endorse a paper you don't believe, and calling them names like "irrational madmen"? You need to work on that Trump / RFK Jr. Emulation Game you're playing, you suck at it.
Before "trying to make people read it", when obviously you haven't bothered to read a word I've written, why don't you summarize it and say what you disagree with, to save people time. It's a big paper, and obviously you are quite opinionated and obsessed with it, so I want to hear your opinion, with quotes and citations, please.
Edit 2:
Now that you've discovered how to edit your comments, why don't you finally provide me with some proof of your beliefs? What scientific peer reviewed empirical research papers or random conspiracy theory youtube channel did you get your beliefs from? Links to citations, please. The fact that you quote one paragraph that you can't understand doesn't mean that it's wrong, it means something else, which extremely obvious to everyone, and it's all your own fault.
Here is what the paragraph you quoted means, like you're five:
>Imagine your stomach is like a sponge that soaks up different kinds of ingredients from your food.
>Some ingredients get soaked up a lot, like calcium (from milk), which gets soaked up about half the time.
>Others, like strontium, get soaked up only a little, maybe a quarter of the time.
>Then there's barium, which the sponge barely soaks up — only about 5%.
>Now Mister Scientist is saying:
>“We don’t know exactly how much lead gets soaked up... but if it acts like barium, then people probably only soak up a tiny bit of it too.”
>The scientists are making an estimate based on similar ingredients (calcium, strontium, barium), because they’re in the same “family” on the periodic table (called alkaline earth metals). Lead isn’t exactly the same, but it behaves a bit like them, so he’s using them to guess how much lead the body might absorb from food.
So enough bullshit. If you don't finally provide some solid proof after I've asked you so many times, and you can easily edit your comment for an hour or so, then you'd better give me some evidence right now, or I've proven you're totally full of shit, and you may now ghost me to fulfill my prediction.
Edit 3:
Ok, even after I explained the paragraph you didn't understand to you like you're five, you have just proven that you didn't even bother to read my words, and that you have again totally failed to provide any proof.
Take a step back and look at yourself. Have some self-awareness. The reason you can't provide any proof is because you are wrong, and you know it, and the reason you don't bother to read anything I write is because I am right and I provided you with lots of evidence of that, but you don't want to see it.
Why are you so afraid of admitting that you are wrong, and that you don't have any evidence because there IS no evidence, and your own self-imposed performative ignorance, paranoia, and strategically self serving misunderstanding is proof that you're wrong and you know it. Nobody else believes you. Why do you even pretend to believe yourself, because you don't, otherwise you would have proven what you said long ago.
edit: I don't know why you reply by editing your comment like this. I'm not proposing any conspiracy theory, I'm claiming that lead toxicity is a conspiracy theory. Its proponents kicked out the original experts, forced lead removal, and people are now sick as the result, because the experts were right, and the normal levels were in fact normal.
There is nothing much to agree or disagree with in the paper, because it's entirely nonsensical. He pulls out random numbers, and makes an illogical conclusion supposedly based on them.
>The approximate fractions of alkaline earths absorbed by the intestine upon ingestion are: calcium 50%; strontium 25%; and barium 5%. If the alimentary absorption factor for lead in food is similar to that for barium, the amount of lead naturally absorbed by man is...
And it's the entire paper like this.
Edit2: No, it isn't because I don't uderstand it. I can read scientific papers, and this doesn't even look or read as one. It's nonsense written by a geochemist who went crazy.
Edit3: No, you can't randomly assume something, and base your conclusions on that. How did you get that idea?
I took what he said at face value, gave him the best possible interpretation and benefit of the doubt, that he was sincerely endorsing a well respected credible research paper. What more do you ask? It's not on me that he was lying and manipulating and insincere. Maybe you should be criticizing him for not upholding the spirit of HN.
I've even upvoted him, have you?
So why don't you try to get some evidence out of him with some of your famously extreme politeness? Have a go at it. But it looks like he's ghosted us, as I predicted.
Or maybe you can try rationally explaining his position, and giving me some evidence on his behalf, if you believe him, since he doesn't seem to be able to produce any himself.
Or are you one of those irrational madmen he keeps raving about who wants to silence him? Come to think of it, I haven't heard from him in a while, and his mysterious disappearance coincides with your arrival, the two of you never having been seen in the same room together at once... Hmmm. POOF!!! What did you do??? Did you eliminate him yourself somehow??! 'Twasn't me!
I did get silenced again, the comment flagged and -14 "karma", which means my posts stay invisible. No arguments were ever given. Only on repeat, it is toxic and causes brain damage, everybody knows it, like a broken record.
THAT is the very definition of lying. So it's totally fair for me to accuse you of lying, because at first I patiently gave you the benefit of the doubt and best possible interpretation that you were telling the truth, then after that, you admitted you were not telling the truth and actually didn't endorse the paper like you said, once again I generously gave you the benefit of the doubt and best possible interpretation that you were only being sarcastic, and then YOU denied THAT too.
Therefore, you were lying, and you admitted that by denying both of my best possible interpretations and confirming twice that you did not actually mean what you said, and that your intent was to manipulate people's behavior by saying the opposite of what you really believed.
Don't blame me for your own words and lies and repeated intellectually dishonest attempts at manipulation by not telling the truth. You're a liar. There is no other charitable interpretation. End of discussion.
Now you're making a whole lot more non-credible unbelievable claims without presenting a shred of evidence, after I've asked you for evidence again and again.
What I am trying to do is to get an answer out of you, so now that you've thrown yet another paranoid infantile tantrum about your self pity and false victimhood, why don't you BREAK YOUR SELF IMPOSED SILENCE and finally answer my question:
WHAT IS YOUR EVIDENCE?