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LANDER DetectLead
Everything about
A parent's life with lead.
The complete walkthrough — pregnancy, the first food, every age, every surface, every test that matters. Free. No signup.
I built this because I have a kid and got tired of guessing. Three years of lab work. 2,165 dishes XRF-scanned. 18,124 baby-food lots indexed. The numbers, the brands, the surfaces, the chemistry, in plain language.
— Eric Ritter, founder, FluoroSpec
Lead exposure tracks your kid every year of childhood.
Pregnancy. The first solid food. The teether. The thrifted bowl. The painted toy. The school water fountain. The college apartment. Every year has its own audit. This page walks every one.
Birth
25%
of adult brain
Lead crosses placenta. Formula is the early entry point.
6 months
50%
of adult brain
Teething. Mouth on everything. Dust on the floor.
1 year
64%
of adult brain
Walks. Hands to mouth. Solid foods. Painted toys.
2 years
80%
of adult brain
Daycare. Snacks. Crib paint. Dishware.
3 years
85%
of adult brain
Soil play. Vintage toys. Imported plates.
5 years
90%
of adult brain
School. Lunchbox food. Older siblings. Peers.
6 years
95%
of adult brain
Window closing. Lead damage from here is largely permanent.
The window opens at conception
Closes at age 6
5×
Kids 0-6 absorb roughly five times more lead per bite than an adult does. About 50% of what they swallow goes into the bloodstream and the brain. Adults absorb about 10%. The same amount of lead in the same plate of food does five times the damage to a two-year-old. The window is small and the multiplier is huge.
Same aisle. Same age range. Wildly different exposure.
Every number below is from an accredited lab, Purity Labs, ICP-MS, tested in April 2026. Click a tile to read the actual report. This is what I mean when I say trends exist.
Colgate Baby Training Toothpaste
257.6
ppb lead · ICP-MS
~0.05 µg/day
≈ 2.4% of the FDA child reference (2.2 µg Pb/day) · from toothpaste alone
≈ 110 µg cumulative exposure across the 0–6 brain-development window, twice a day, every day.
“Safe to swallow.” “For ages 3 months and up.”
📄 Purity Labs · Report 2604175 →Colgate Kids Cavity Protection (Bluey)
161.9
ppb lead · ICP-MS
~0.024 µg/day
≈ 1.1% of FDA child reference · per day · for years
Same aisle. Same age range. The number that actually crosses to the brain is what matters, not the number on the label.
Cartoon dog on the tube.
📄 Purity Labs · Report 2604176 →Dr. Brown’s Fluoride-Free Toddler
0
ppb lead · ICP-MS
0.00 µg/day
0% of FDA child reference · the only acceptable answer
Same category. Different brand. The dose math returns zero. This is the standard the rest of the aisle should clear.
“Lead lives in batches, not brands. But batches have patterns. Colgate gets hit across multiple product lines. Dr. Brown’s, across multiple batches, doesn’t. You just need the database. I built the database.”
, Eric Ritter, Purity Labs run · 2026-04-14
Two kinds of lead. Two different defenses.
Most parents obsess about food. The food matters, but the environment is usually where the crisis comes from.
Background burden
What your baby eats & drinks.
Toothpaste. Baby food. Water. Snacks. Formula. You can’t get to zero, but you can get dramatically lower with data. Handled by the Blood Lead Calculator and the 18K baby food database.
Environmental spike
What’s in your baby’s environment.
Crib paint. Teether. Thrifted high chair. Imported bowl. Bathtub toy. The plate. One environmental source can spike a blood lead level faster than a year of diet. Handled by FluoroSpec.
What's actually around your baby right now.
Five things. One in every American living room. Each one is a place lead has been documented in the last 24 months. Look around your kitchen. They're already on the counter.
The bottle
0–4.2 ppb Pb
Tested infant formulas (Consumer Reports, 38 brands)
8 brands clean. 14 over the watch line. Enfamil Nutramigen is the dirtiest. Bobbie's three SKUs are all clean.
The mug of tea
4.48 µg Pb
Per cup · Mother's Milk Lactation Tea
51% of an adult's daily FDA Pb reference. In a tea sold to nursing mothers. Lead crosses placenta and breast milk.
The kitchen tap
9M Pb pipes
EPA estimate · in 4M U.S. homes still serving water
First-draw morning water from a pre-1986 home is the highest-lead sample in any test. Worse if you make formula with hot tap water.
The painted dish
2,165 scanned
DetectLead's XRF database · Niton XL5 Plus
The decoration leaches into food. Vintage pieces, imports, hand-me-downs are highest risk. Search the database before you serve dinner on a piece you're not sure of.
The painted crib rail
37% of homes
Built before the 1978 lead-paint ban
Crib rails are the most chewed surface in the house. One chip can put a baby's blood-lead over the CDC reference value (3.5 µg/dL).
"PPB" doesn't tell you dose. Here's the math that does.
Almost every supplement and food test is published in parts per billion. It's a useful number for chemists and a confusing number for parents. The thing you actually want to know is micrograms per day. The conversion is two multiplications. Once you can do it in your head, every label tells you the truth.
µg/day = grams_per_serving × ppb ÷ 1,000
Worked example, real product:
30 g serving × 388 ppb ÷ 1,000 = 11.6 µg of Pb/day
FDA's adult Interim Reference Level (IRL) for lead is 8.8 µg/day. That serving alone is 132% of it — before any food, water, or dust.
Same conversion for a child: divide by 2.2 µg/day instead of 8.8.
The whole prenatal-supplement page in stage 3 below is this math, applied to 60 products. Names. Numbers. Every conversion shown.
Three numbers the industry hopes you never calculate.
Same math, applied to three real products on shelves right now. Independently lab-tested. Names named. Numbers in the unit that actually matters.
A tea sold to breastfeeding mothers delivers half the FDA daily lead reference per cup.
51%
of FDA adult Pb reference · per single cup
Traditional Medicinals Organic Mother's Milk Lactation Tea tested at 160 ppb of lead. At a 28 g brewed serving, that's 4.48 µg of lead per cup. The FDA tells adults not to exceed 8.8 µg per day. One cup is over half. A nursing mom drinking it every day for a 9-month pregnancy plus 12 months of breastfeeding crosses 3,000 µg of lifetime lead exposure from the tea alone. That lead crosses the placenta. That lead crosses into breast milk.
Source · Lead Safe Mama / Tamara Rubin · ICP-MS lab testThe longevity guru is selling 132% of the daily Pb reference per serving.
11.6
µg lead per day · 1 serving
30 g × 388 ppb = 11.6 µg/day Pb. That's 132% of the FDA adult Interim Reference Level (8.8 µg/day) from one supplement. Before water. Before food. Before dust. He calls himself "the most measured man on Earth." Did he measure this?
Source · Lead Safe Mama / Tamara RubinThe formula your allergic baby drinks has the most lead of any formula tested.
23%
of FDA child Pb reference · daily, from formula alone
Enfamil Nutramigen Hypoallergenic: 4.2 ppb. Nutricia Neocate Gold: 4.1 ppb. EleCare: 3.0 ppb. The hypoallergenic formulas, sold to parents whose babies can't tolerate normal milk-based ones, came up the dirtiest. At a typical 28 fl oz/day infant intake, that's 0.51 µg/day Pb — 23% of the FDA child reference (2.2 µg/day) from formula alone.
Source · Consumer Reports lab tests, 2023Seven tools. Three years of work.
All free. Yours the moment you drop your email above. The kit lives down below if you want it, but the information doesn’t cost anything.
01
Baby-Proof Lead Risk Calculator
Nursery-specific scoring. Ten minutes. Get back a scored map of your top three risks, crib paint, teether, high chair, paint dust, water.
02
Blood Lead Calculator
1,370 foods, toothpastes, snacks, all tested by Purity Labs via ICP-MS. Put in what your kid ate. Get back the dose.
03
18,000-Entry Baby Food Database
Every major brand, every product, every metal. Filter by lead, cadmium, arsenic. Bigger than any resource published anywhere.
04
Baby Bottle Review Sheet
Every major bottle brand. Which ones have been tested. Which ones haven’t. What showed up when they were.
05
FluoroSpec · drop test
One drop on the plate, the teether, the crib rail, the painted bowl from Aunt Linda. Green glow means lead. Clear means safe. Thirty seconds.
06
Leaducational Pages
2,165 dishes scanned with my Niton XL5 Plus. Every major baby bottle, cookware line, spice, and food category. All published.
07
Lead Framework Book (106 pages)
The full parent protocol. Learn. Examine. Abate. Detox. Live. PDF.
The lead-safe parent journey, in order.
It's not 100 things. It's 4 things, in order. Start at the top. End with a kid in the 95th percentile of lead-safe kids in America.
-
1
The Frame · how lead actually reaches your kid
The four routes lead takes into a kid: paint dust, water, food, and surfaces they touch. The frame everything else hangs on.
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25 min read
The Frame · PPB vs Dose
The wellness industry's favorite trick, broken down to two multiplications. Once you can convert ppb to µg/day in your head, every label tells you the truth.
Read the frame → -
3Branch by stage
The Truth · brand by brand
Names. Numbers. Receipts. The lists nobody else publishes. Pick the track that fits where you are right now:
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4Action
The Move · test, screen, join
Run the ZIP screener for your area. Get a FluoroSpec kit if you want certainty in 30 seconds. Join The Tested — the parents who refuse to be lied to with units.
Run the ZIP screener →
This page is built for the 0-6 window. If you're past it, planning ahead, or kid-free, here are the adult-track tools.
Or, if you want, grab a kit.
The information is free. The kit is for the parents who, after reading the Framework, decide they want to walk around the nursery with a drop bottle tonight.
Starter · drip-tip only
$50
One drip bottle, one UV flashlight, one spray of reagent. Good for the plate, the teether, and the crib rail. Tight, focused, cheap.
Grab the starter →Full family kit
$75
Double of everything. For the family that tests the whole house, plus the grandparents’ Sunday dinner set. No upsell ladder.
Grab the full kit →