I don't think peer reviewers need to be redoing every calculation, but you might expect them to be familiar enough with the field that "toxins in kitchen utensils are close to the EPA limit" would be surprising enough that they'd question it and double check it.
How many researchers do you think are working on cookware toxins? "Peer" is used broadly here.
The article made waves because it didn't surprise anyone, because in fact a ton of household staples are full of toxins (spices are full of lead, etc).
I don't agree that it didn't surprise anyone. Flame retardants are surprising, black plastic being worse than others is surprising, common household tools nearly at the legal toxin limit is surprising. Even the general idea of plastic being potentially bad for you is still new information for a lot of people.
Your comment is the first time I've ever heard anything about lead in spices, and I read a lot of news. In my experience, very few things are actually "common knowledge", it just seems that way when everyone in our particular social circles knows something.
> common household tools nearly at the legal toxin limit is surprising
Personally, I would expect a lot of products to be near a lot of limits for various toxins. Especially around food, my expectation is for limits to be safe with a nice-sized buffer, sometimes too big of a buffer. The point of having limits is that products inside them are fine.
> The article made waves because it didn't surprise anyone
So the reason it made waves is because it confirmed everyone's previous biases. Which is why people defend it even when that "confirmation" was based on an error of simple arithmetic.
Reminds me of a bunch of studies that were taken out by Excel errors, like that economics failure about national debt going higher than GDP being some sort of trigger for societal failure. The people who boosted that study were the people who were saying the same thing, with no study, for no other reason than that the numbers are of a similar magnitude. After it was shown that the study showed no such thing, its supporters insisted that it was still true because of course it was true.
