Hello and welcome to Nutrition Facts. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger. Today we're going to explore smart nutrition choices based naturally on facts.

Have a history of high blood pressure in your family? How about heart disease? Diabetes? There are foods we can eat that may not only help prevent many of these chronic diseases, but even stop them in their tracks.

Today we dive deep into a heavy topic, a chemical element that can cause a wide range of health problems. It's the heavy metal known as lead.

When it gets into our system and cause brain and blood disorders, here's a little bit of background on how industry has been able to continue using lead in manufacturing.

The 69 year old delay in banning lead in paint in the US has been attributed to the proud marketing and lobbying efforts of the industry profiting from the poison. Here's the story.

We have known that lead can be toxic for thousands of years, and specifically that children could be poisoned by lead paint over a century ago.

And since those first cases, the lead industry has mobilized against the advances of science.

By 1926, lead poisoning was already a relatively frequent occurrence in children. Yet the United States continued to allow the use of lead-based paint until 1978.

In contrast over in Europe, many countries said, hmm, poisoning children? No thanks. And ban the use of lead paint as early as 1909.

The delay in the US was due largely to the proud marketing and lobbying efforts of the industry profiting from the poison. They knew they couldn't hold off forever, but boasted that their victories have been in the deferral of implementation of regulation.

And now, peeling paint turns into poisonous dust and guess where it ends up.

As a Mount Sinai Dean and Harvard neurology professor put it, lead is a devastating poison. Damages children's brains, erodes, intelligence, diminishes creativity, judgment, language, and failure.

Yet despite the accumulating evidence, the lead industry didn't just fail to warn people, but engaged in an energetic promotion of lead-ed paint.

After all, a can of pure white lead paint had huge amounts of lead which meant huge profits for the industry.

But see, there's no cause to worry if your toddler smudges up against lead paint because those fingerprints can be easily removed without harming the paint, wouldn't want to harm the paint.

After all, painted walls are sanitary.

You see, as advertised by the Dutch Boys National Lead Company, lead helps to guard your health.

The director of the Lead Industry Association blamed the victims, the slum dwelling ignorant parents.

It seems that no amount of evidence, no health statistics, no public outrage could get industry to care that their paint was killing and poisoning children.

But how much public outrage was there really?

I mean, it goes without saying, lead is a devastating debilitating poison, literally millions of children have been diagnosed with various degrees of elevated lead levels.

Compare that to polio, for example, though, and in the 1950s, fewer than 60,000 new cases annually created a near panic among American parents and a national mobilization led to campaigns that virtually wiped out the problem within a decade.

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