Introduction to Tamara Rubin
(for those new to this website!)
Tamara Rubin lives in Portland, Oregon and is a child health advocate, author, documentary filmmaker, and mother of four sons. Her young men are now 24, 18, 15, and 12. She has won multiple national awards for her Lead-poisoning prevention advocacy work (including two from U.S. government agencies). In 2020 she had more than 1.165 million unique individual readers visit her #LeadSafeMama blog – from more than 200 countries (per Google Analytics) around the world!
It is with the help, support, and participation of these readers that she conducts and reports on independent testing of consumer goods for toxicants (Lead, Mercury, Arsenic, Cadmium, and Antimony), using high-accuracy X-Ray Fluoresence analysis (read more about that here). She goes by #LeadSafeMama on Twitter, Facebook & Instagram and has over 2,700 separate posts of information (mostly consumer goods test results) on her blog here at LeadSafeMama.com.
Tamara’s advocacy work has been mentioned in print in The New York Times; the New York Post; Mother Jones; Parents Magazine; Vice.com; MNN.com; TruthOut; WebMD; the Huffington Post,;USA Today; Grok Nation, and more (too many outlets to list!) – and in other media (T.V. and radio), on the Today Show; Kids in the House; Al Jazeera English; The Voice of Russia; CBS This Morning, and through news stories on CBS; ABC; NBC, and even Fox News – as well as in countless podcasts and other interviews.
Continue reading below the images.
My affiliate link for this product: https://amzn.to/3oS5DR8
I bought these pans for my son (A.J.) to use in his apartment at college. He absolutely loves them and has been using them every day that he cooks. He especially likes the high edge, so they can used as a tray even when not being used for baking or roasting. Bonus: they also ended up being low-nickel stainless steel AND they are fairly inexpensive.
When tested with an XRF instrument the pans pictured here [Wildone Baking Sheet Set of 3, Stainless Steel Cookie Sheet Baking Pan, 9/12/16 Inch, Non Toxic & Heavy Duty & Easy Clean] had the following readings.
- Chromium (Cr): 131,500 +/- 2,000 ppm
- Nickel (Ni): 1,092 +/- 234 ppm
- Iron (Fe): 861,000 +/- 2,300 ppm
- Manganese (Mn): 4,065 +/- 707 ppm
- Vanadium (V): 1,028 +/- 511 ppm
- No other metals were detected in consumer goods mode.
“Tamara, tell me more about this testing…”
Testing is done with the same instrumentation used by the Consumer Product Safety Commission to test consumer goods for Lead (and other toxicants), when screening for safety (including screening items intended for use by children to make sure they fall within acceptable levels.) All tests are done for a minimum of 60 seconds unless otherwise noted. Tests are repeated multiple times on each component to confirm the results. Test results are science-based, accurate and replicable.
Some additional reading for those interested:
- More pots & pans that I have tested.
- Stainless steel cookware I have tested.
- What is stainless steel? That is explained here.
- This is a post that has a video explaining how best to navigate the more than 2,700 posts and pages here on the Lead Safe Mama website (worth checking out, I promise you!)
- My overview post about the concern for Lead in dishes (& cookware).
To read more about the testing methodology for nearly all test results reported on this blog, click here. Thank you for reading and for sharing my posts. As always, please let me know if you have any questions. With 1.165 Million unique readers in 2020 alone I am not always able to answer each and every question personally, but I do try. Thank you.
Tamara Rubin
#LeadSafeMama
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