Lead in Rival Crockpots

Gahhhhhhh! Crockpots are supposed to be energy saving devices. Did you know they also might have lead? We ditched ours last year because of the rumor (who's paranoid NOW?). From KUTV in Salt Lake City, they actually did the tests, and the results aren't pretty.
------------------------------------------------------
SALT LAKE CITY - It's an investigation that started right here in Utah and sparked a fire among lawmakers in our nation's capital.
Bill Gephardt found dangerous lead in the plates and bowls you might eat off every day. And that investigation sparked a flood of calls to the "Get Gephardt" tipline when people realized there could be danger lurking elsewhere in their kitchens.

Now, Gephardt found that a slow cooker, something that heats food for many hours, might also contain lead. Is it possible that it's actually cooking the lead right into our food?

Stacia Stuart is raising three young daughters in her Weber County home. She is one of many mothers shocked by what I found last fall. Lead in the paint and glaze on dinnerware leaching into food.

“I saw your story... I knew I wanted to try my dinnerware,” she said. “I thought… the crock pot!"

Stacia wondered about her paint-covered cooking appliance that she has regularly used for years.

"I use it twice a week,” she said.

Stacia took her plates and "crock pot" down to the Weber County fairgrounds during a free lead test day and lead was found; a lot of lead.

“The crock pot I have, the rival crock pot [was] full of lead," she said.

I took Stacia's crock pot, along with several new and used slow cookers, to be tested by Jim Kenyon at "Kenyon Consulting." He used an XRF gun -- or "x-ray fluorescent" device -- to peer into the surface of the cookers to determine if they have lead.

Of the small sampling of slow cookers tested for me, 20 percent tested with a measurable amount of lead. But is lead actually leaching out of the cookers that contain lead?

I took Stacia's crock pot cooker to DataChem labs in Salt Lake City to find out. This is the same place where we tested plates I purchased from stores last fall and discovered lead was actually leaching into food.

Not only that, but when ceramic ware was heated to just 80-degrees, it released nearly 10-times the amount of lead as a plate at room temperature. Slow cookers heat up to more than 250-degrees.
read more here.