“Hey Tamara, I heard you are paid off to promote certain products.” — My response

A question we got via email today — and my response
February 12, 2026
Thursday
Hi all – the 18 graphic cards below include a question I got via email earlier today and my detailed response. A “text only” version of this exchange is below the graphic cards (for those who need a text-to-speech reader). If you share this on social media, please share all 18 cards and share them in the order they are numbered. Thank you! — Tamara

Text Version of the Communications Above (for those using a text reader)
Email to Tamara
Hi,
I am apart of several “natural” and toxic free groups on Facebook. Yesterday I was reading on one of them about metals in our food and I saw several comments from different people about you. They were all claiming that you are very biased and your reports are based on the companies that pay you. While I don’t believe every thing I read or hear, I know that could be true and has been with others. So, I ask, how do you respond to that claim and do you have anything to back up your claim?Thank you
Tamara’s Response (with minor corrections of typos)
Hi Gina!
Thanks for writing.I don’t usually have the time to write such a long and detailed response but you caught me at a good time, and I have written this so that I can also share it on social media.
I’m always overly frank, so I will apologize in advance for swearing. 🙂Mostly I respond by telling people like that to fuck off.Frankly I don’t have time in the day to address all the bullshit.
I am both a business owner and a mother of acutely lead poisoned children with severe disabilities caused by their lead exposure and I don’t have the bandwidth (nor time in the day) to deal with people spreading lies (in addition to to the time needed to run my business).Enough people (literally millions of people) know that I have more integrity in my left pinkie finger nail than these people who are spreading lies have in their entire body, so I’m not too concerned when certain ignorant people (or people literally being paid to defame and discredit the work of Lead Safe Mama, LLC – see article published yesterday in the Hollywood Reporter below) try to discredit us.
We have no (ZERO) corporate sponsors this year — although we do have conversations in progress with three prospective partners. We always announce the details of our corporate partnerships when they happen. We engage in a unique approach — using radical transparency for all things related to running the business of Lead Safe Mama, LLC.We also removed all ads on our website this year (yay!) — so there are no pop up ads or in-article ads anywhere on our website (as of this month actually — February 2026).We removed the ads from our website because we didn’t like the advertising paradigm based on cookies (used by MediaVine and Google and other companies that broker advertising contracts for websites).For example if a person did a search for Hiya Children’s Vitamins – and then looked them up on our website, you would find the Lead Safe Mama, LLC lab report that shows that Hiya Children’s Vitamins test positive for Lead, Cadmium, and Arsenic (and – as such – we do not recommend them). Unfortunately the pop-up ad paradigm might still serve you an ad recommending that product to you on / within our article (because you had previously searched for that product and a cookie was put in your browser) even though our article is clearly sharing that this is a product you should not use as there is no safe level of Lead exposure for children.It is for this reason (the automatic online promotion of products we recommend AVOIDING) that we gave up our advertising contract this year.
We had only TWO corporate sponsors last year (2025), each joining us in the 4th quarter of 2025: Naturepedic and 360 Cookware.We only invite corporate sponsors to collaborate if everything they make tests clean / safe by all standards (including the strictest and most health-protective standards proposed by the scientific and medical communities).We also have ZERO direct-to-manufacturer affiliate relationships (we only earn affiliate income through Amazon, and we only share links to products that test clean through the independent, third-party, scientific testing that we coordinate — with the rare exception being we do a “round-up” of Lead-contaminated products that it is possible to buy on Amazon – products that you should not buy). If a product we tested that tested clean is then retested and found to be contaminated (in a later batch), we remove that product from our current Lab Tested Safer Choices List (and our team works to keep all of the iterations of that list as up to date as possible).The total bullshit smeared around in these “mommy groups” is usually because people in those groups (either the group leaders or friends of the group leaders) sell or otherwise promote one or more of the products that we have discovered are toxic (products that test positive for Lead, Cadmium, Mercury, and/or Arsenic), or because those same people believe the marketing hype of the manufacturers of these products – which one should never do.Brand loyalty is something one should never have. Brands are not your friends. Brands create imagery and culture (and “trust”) through marketing campaigns designed to sell you stuff. A lot of well-meaning people are unknowingly sucked in by these marketing campaigns — and we need to teach ourselves (and our friends) not to be.Lead Safe Mama, LLC’s sponsors are YOU (concerned parents all over the world)!Our readers nominate products for testing and our readers (moms like you) contribute to help pay for the testing. Our Amazon income, sponsorship income and Patreon income helps to cover the gaps in funding so that we can test as many products as possible.The business model of Lead Safe Mama, LLC is truly a unique community-collaborative business model — which we are 100% transparent about and have written about on nearly every single one of our 5,000+ articles on our website. Our business model: what we do is entirely dictated by the interests (and financial contributions) of the 2.3 million people around the world who read our website every year.Ask the people in these mommy groups WHICH companies they think pay us. I always think this claim is hysterically funny, and would love to know which companies are allegedly paying us off!I often joke that if we are being paid off, where’s the damn money? In the past three months I have been consistently two months behind on my mortgage. My family is dealing with food scarcity (and I don’t have the funds to cover my disabled son’s college payments for this semester). Somehow these people “paying me off” must have sent the money to the wrong bank account! Please help me find out who they are so I can pay my damn mortgage and feed my family. [Not that I would ever accept a payoff, this is a joke – to be clear!]Lead Safe Mama, LLC is an organization focused on childhood Lead poisoning prevention and consumer goods safety. We never lie about the test results. We never influence the test results. We never falsify test results. In fact we do the opposite of that — we send samples to labs using a “double blind” testing approach, so even the labs don’t know the brand or name of the product they are testing (to avoid any possible or perceived bias by the labs). A statement noting this is included on nearly every lab report we have published.Were we to mess with the data, companies (or their competitors) could sue us for falsifying data. While unethical companies (who have a history of making toxic products and not admitting – nor appropriately dealing with – the problem) – like Just Ingredients and Pura Stainless, and Green Sprouts (iPlay), and Primal Life Organics, and Marble King, and Xtrema, and others — have sent us cease and desist letters over the years or otherwise threatened to sue us and (in this way) have TRIED to engage in legal actions — those actions never go anywhere. This is 100% because we share 100% accurate, entirely unbiased science.You can be 100% confident in knowing that Lead Safe Mama, LLC will NEVER cease and desist our work sharing unbiased, community-directed, community-funded science.Lead Safe Mama, LLC is fundamentally a science communicator – hoping to teach parents (including you, and the others in your mommy groups – in spite of their lack of belief in science, or in spite of their corporate affiliations with companies manufacturing toxic products) enough about the science behind childhood Lead exposure and the science behind product contamination that you will have the tools to make safer (science-informed) choices for your family moving forward.To support some of what I have said above – there’s a big bought-and-paid for smear campaign attempting to discredit our work. This may have influenced the bullshit about our work being smeared around your mommy group. You can read more about that in this article published by The Hollywood Reporter.I am soooo very curious who the people in your mommy group think pays us – lol. Maybe ask them and report back to me if you learn anything. I would really appreciate that intel!To note: Lead Safe Mama, LLC is not one person – we have a team of about 10 people total, including legal representation.I am personally over $300,000 in debt because of the well-funded corporate (and government) attacks on our work over the past decade.If you are interested in supporting our work financially — there is a link to our general GoFundMe campaign below — or you could join us on Patreon with a small monthly gift in support of the work (our average monthly gift on Patreon is $3.00 per paid member and we currently have 625 paid members contributing a total of about $1,922.00 a month to help us cover the costs of the testing and reporting we do — testing and reporting we do that benefits everyone (including the jerks in your mommy groups) as the work we do is 100% public and freely available to all (on our website), never behind a paywall of any kind.Our Patreon Link, GoFundMe link, Lab Reports Link, and Lab Tested Safer Choices List Link (as well as the link to the documentary film on childhood Lead poisoning that I directed and produced) can all be found in the links in my Instagram bio as well.Have a nice day.Stay safe out there.Don’t believe everything you read on the interwebs!
Tamara Rubin
Owner – Lead Safe Mama, LLC
www.LeadSafeMama.com
@LeadSafeMama
tamararubin@mac.com
Make a contribution in support of this work via GoFundMe
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Hi Tamara,
Thank you for your time and your hard work to educate people. Your response letter is awesome! Hopefully those people will wake up and face the truth! Many, many blessings to you and your family!!!