ConsumerLab tested popular seaweed snacks and dried seaweeds (https://bit.ly/3qauAcy), including GimMe, Kirkland (Costco), SeaSnax, Trader Joe’s, and Maine Coast Sea Vegetables, checking for iodine, arsenic, cadmium, and lead. Learn what CL found and whether or not seaweed products are safe for children and adults.
0:00 Why eat seaweed?
3:15 The risk of toxicity from arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury
3:40 Understanding California’s Prop 65 warnings
6:10 How much can a child or adult safely eat?
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hi i’m dr todd cooperman president and founder of consumerlab.com and we’ve just tested seaweed snacks and other dried seaweeds to see really what’s in these and i want to talk to you about some of the important things that we found in terms of really what’s in these products and are they safe so first in terms of why you might want to eat a seaweed snack or a dried seaweed product is that they are very healthful in terms of having carbs that are mostly fiber some protein if they are snacks they’re most likely roasted with some oil which is typically an unsaturated fat so in a serving of say a seaweed snack one serving is typically about five grams which is about the amount you’d get in a pack like this that’ll give you one or two grams of carbs one to two grams of protein and one or two grams of fat that’s all fine people often say oh you know there’s a there’s other special vitamins and minerals in seaweed yes and no for the most part you’ll get less than five percent of the daily value for for most vitamins and minerals including iron and potassium you will get a bit more in terms of potassium from some of the the dried seaweed products as opposed to the seaweed snacks but what you will get a lot of which can be good or bad depending on how much you’re getting is iodine iodine is an essential mineral we all need it we need it for our metabolism our thyroids need it but if you get too much it can be dangerous so the amount that an adult needs is 150 micrograms per day of iodine people who are pregnant or lactating need a bit more these seaweed snacks we found that contain about 70 to 120 micrograms of iodine and as i said in a serving of about five grams however when you’re dealing with some of the dried seaweeds like kelp or kombu you can get enormous amounts of iodine more than you really want in fact they’re not even making a secret of that this product actually claimed and we verified claims um 19 000 micrograms of iodine per 7 gram serving which is a bit more than 5 grams in here but that’s an enormous amount of iodine there is a tolerable upper level for iodine that you really shouldn’t exceed on a regular basis and that’s 1100 micrograms for an adult so this had nineteen thousand so we’re talking about you know eighteen nineteen times the upper limit let alone having uh you know about over a hundred times the daily value uh for iodine so you really wanna be super careful when you’re dealing with kelp this is a laver or nori product also had very high levels of iodine it did it did disclose it wasn’t as high as this but had about 350 micrograms of iodine actually a little lower than than than was claimed but these are natural products so there can be some variation so you want to be careful with iodine you do want to getting some is fine but you don’t want to overdo it but here’s the thing about all these products is they can be contaminated with heavy metals lead arsenic cadmium you really don’t find mercury even though you you would find mercury say in fish meat you don’t really find it in the seaweeds fortunately but some of these products exceeded the california prop 65 limit for lead above which you need a warning label a warning of potential reproductive harm or cancer at a at a higher level and some of these products do have these warnings some of them don’t in fact we found that one that probably should have a warning didn’t and one that did have a warning really didn’t need it so you can’t just base it on those warnings those warnings will look something like this if you can see it a warning cancer and reproductive harm and it gives a website of the california prop 65 information you’ll also see it say on this kelp product where it also exceeded levels of lead and other heavy metals and the warning here is consuming this product can expose you to chemicals including lead which is known by the state of california to cause cancer and birth defects and other reproductive harm so if you see these warnings you know there’s something in there or at least the manufacturer believes that there could be something in there that exceeds those limits and this also protects them legally if they don’t have that they’re typically lawsuits that follow the other things that we found in these products in addition to lead we also found cadmium to be above the california prop 65 level cadmium also can cause reproductive harm and a number of other toxicities we also found arsenic at very high levels in some of these products however really the most toxic form of arsenic is inorganic arsenic and that we found at much lower levels or even undetectable levels in in products like these so you really need to be careful with seaweed snacks and seaweed dried seaweed products this is what kelp looks like this is nori and again this is what the seaweed snacks look like all of these products that we tested they all look pretty much the same we did have our top pick two of these products that we we liked were low in contamination had a good amount of iodine but not too much and among those we had a top pick that’s in the information for our our members on our site but i really just wanted to give you an overview of you know the good and the bad when you’re dealing with seaweed snacks and dried seaweed if you’re thinking of giving one of these snacks to a child some of them are fine but i would not give more than one snack per day you know one serving per day to a young child otherwise you may be exceeding some of these limits on heavy metals or for iodine itself even for an adult i would not recommend taking more than one or two servings per day of these snacks and again i’d be very careful with some of these other products particularly due to their very high iodine content and heavy metals so again this is dr todd cooperman of consumerlab.com and we’ve been testing these types of products and all kinds of supplements since 1999 we’ve tested over 6000 products the results of these tests and all of our other recent reviews are all on our website for our members at consumerlab.com