Two things that go together in the holidays - drinking beverages like wine, juice and pop and drinking them from fancy leaded crystal. We always bring out our fancy dishes when guests come over and we definitely drink the fun bubbly drinks! I'll bet it has never occurred to you that you could be drinking something poisonous?
My friend sent me this the other day, and of course because I am a toxicologist by trade it was of great interest to me. I believe that everyone - especially parents with young kids, should think twice before serving drinks from crystal this holiday season.
This is a cautionary tale regarding the use leaded crystal wine glasses or decanters.
An NWRC employee received a set of leaded crystal wine glasses as a gift, and asked me if it was safe to drink wine from these glasses. Leaded crystal glassware contains >25% lead (Pb) by weight. I suggested an experiment: put equal volumes of wine in the glasses for various periods of time, bring the samples in to NWRC, and we'd measure the lead concentrations. The results: white wine directly out of the bottle had almost undetectable amounts of lead (<0.01 ppm), but within 1/2 hour in a leaded crystal wineglass, the lead concentration had risen to about 0.6 ppm, and within 24 hr, it was 3.4 ppm. Consuming a single 200 ml serving of wine containing 0.6 ppm Pb would result in a Pb intake of 120 ug Pb. If you had one glass of such wine per day, you'd consume about 840 ug Pb per week from this source alone, roughly 5-times the average total weekly dietary Pb intake for Canadians as estimated by HC in the 1990s (168 ug). If you were to keep port, brandy, whiskey, etc in a leaded crystal decanter for long periods of time, it would likely accumulate much higher levels of lead than the levels we measured.
link to Health Canada about Leaded Crystal
link to Health Canada and the effects of Lead on Human Health
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