It's no secret that lead poisoning is bad for you, and that's a large part of the reason

leaded gasoline has been banned worldwide since 2021. High levels of exposure can damage many

of your body's systems, but now we're hearing that even normal levels of exposure have been

causing millions of mental health problems.

Is that true? Or are there safe levels of lead?

That's coming up right now on Skeptoid.

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Each episode, our Peabody Award-winning show, travels beyond the headlines to answer the question, how did we get here?

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You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Letted gasoline and mental health.

Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history

from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's

not. In December of 2024, headlines shouted that leaded gasoline had caused some 150 million

mental health cases in just the United States alone.

That's a huge number.

The population of the United States is 340 million.

Nearly half of us have a mental illness that was caused by leaded gasoline?

If that sounds a little sketchy to you, count me right there alongside.

It seems to be a thing that is crying out for us to

point our skeptical eye at it. Did leaded gasoline cause mental health problems? And are the numbers

really that high? In the 1920s, it was discovered that adding tetraethyl lead to gasoline reduced engine knock and improved engine

performance, and it quickly became widely used all over the world.

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