A couple of milestones

Melina has passed a couple of important milestones lately: she doesn't need pullups anymore, and she can buckle herself into her own car seat! Yay! She also rode her bike to school for the first time the other day (I went with her) and rode her bike around the block alone with her friends for the first time. And her two bottom front teeth are loose. Time keeps marching on!

A correction on lead

I just noticed that in my last discussion of lead in eggs I failed to mention that my calculations were off by a factor of 10 - as the chemist wrote, "Your egg results are 0.2 to 0.4 ppm (ug/g) not 2-4 ppm! Therefore 0.4 ug/g from a 18 g egg would be 0.4ug/g * 18g (g canceled out) equal to 5.8ug (micrograms) per egg yolk." For an egg with 0.2/ug/g that would be 2.9 ug/yolk, I think. (Anyone with more knowledge of microchemistry than me is welcome to check my figures!). According to the FDA, the average adult takes in 2.5 ug of lead per day from dietary sources (1994-1996), compared to 38 ug per day, on average, between 1982 and 1984 and presumably before (!). (That's because lead was removed from cans). In Australia, the PTTIL (provisional tolerable total intake level) - the amount safely consumed per day - is less than 75 ug/day. I believe the US PTTIL is similar. (This level was determined in order to figure out how many oysters people could safely eat a day).

So I guess what this all means - to me, anyway - is that it's OK if we eat an egg from our chickens once in a while. We shouldn't eat more than seven a day. The fact that my blood test for lead came back "zero" after many months of eating our eggs confirms that. For kids it's still a different matter, though - kids don't get rid of lead in their bodies as well as adults and their tolerance is much, much lower.

Another egg lead test

I had our eggs tested for lead again, and they came up pretty much the same as last year - .2 and .3 ppm (last year the results were .2, .3, and .4 ppm). The chemist washed one of the eggs before testing it and ended up with the lower result. She suggested that we wash the eggs in the future before eating them. That lower result could also be because the egg came from a different chicken, but I often wash our eggs anyway because they tend to get dirty. (By the way, if a backyard egg is dirty you should it in warm water - cold water pulls bacteria into the shell. No need to wash a clean backyard egg. Wash eggs just before using, because eggs have a natural coating that keeps them fresh. You don't need to wash store-bought eggs at all - they have already been washed.)

So, disappointingly, fencing off the neighbor's garage didn't help. The lead must be in the soil of our backyard, which reinforces the need for Melina to wash her hands after playing in the dirt. Which she doesn't do much anyway, preferring to climb trees.

These results aren't terribly bad from an adult perspective (we could eat something like 7 eggs a day without reaching the maximum level recommended by the FDA) although of course lead isn't good in any amount. The benefit of eating backyard eggs (higher Omega-3s, etc.) might arguably outweigh those risks. But it looks like it's still store-bought eggs for Melina.