Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Nutrition Action Healthletter (pub. by The Center for Science in the Public Interest) recently drew attention to the results of toxic heavy metal tests (specifically arsenic, lead and cadmium) which were run on cocoa powders late last year by ConsumerLab.  The entire report is available at consumerlab.com, but here are the results in brief: all of the cocoa powders tested were contaminated with cadmium and/or lead. So I asked Viva Lab why their product hadn't been submitted/tested and here is their reply: "We did not submit our product to ConsumerLabs, as each batch of our cacao powder is third-party tested following production. With every batch produced, our cacao powder is not approved until our Quality Assurance technician verifies it is within acceptable limitations for impurities, including heavy metals such as, including cadmium, arsenic, lead, mercury, and aluminum." Now, the credulous out there may feel sufficiently reassured by this "in-house" and anonymous "third-party" testing to continue using this product. But as someone who has recently discovered upon reading ConsumerLab's report that he had been ingesting 34 times the Canadian limit of cadmium and 58 times the California Prop 65 limit of cadmium (for a warning to be required) on a daily basis for the last three years (using a different cocoa powder product), I have to admit that I'd like a little more, fully-independent confirmation of this product's safety before using it. For those of you who don't know, cadmium is a toxic, heavy metal, a probable carcinogen, destructive of the kidneys and bone, and accumulates in the body because of its biological half-life in humans of 10 to 35 years. Here's my thought: If enough people request that Viva Labs submit to testing and ask Consumer Lab to test this product, we may get the assurance we need. Caveat emptor!