These Terms of Use govern access to and use of the Heavy Metal Index at heavymetalindex.com. By using the site, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, do not use the site.
Operator
Heavy Metal Index is operated by the Paleo Foundation, Cyprus. Contact routes for corrections, licensing, media, regulatory, and legal inquiries are listed on the contact page.
Reference Use
Heavy Metal Index is a public reference on heavy metals in food, ingredients, supply chains, consumer-product categories, and regulatory standards. It reports what cited scientific and regulatory sources support.
The site is not medical advice, legal advice, regulatory advice, product-safety advice, or a substitute for professional judgment. Readers are responsible for their own decisions, risk assessments, product formulations, regulatory compliance, and legal positions.
Ask the Index
Ask the Index is a site-grounded reference assistant. It is designed to answer questions using retrieved Heavy Metal Index pages and to link back to cited pages. It is not a general-purpose chatbot and should not be treated as an authority independent of the cited source pages.
Assistant answers may be incomplete, may omit relevant pages, and may reflect limitations in the current corpus. Users should verify important claims against the linked pages and underlying primary sources. Do not submit confidential, private, regulated, or sensitive information through the assistant.
Intellectual Property
The Paleo Foundation owns or controls the Heavy Metal Index compilation, page text, editorial selection, organization, metadata, source annotations, and database structure, except where third-party materials are identified. Third-party source documents, names, marks, and excerpts remain the property of their respective owners.
The Heavy Metal Index is a curated database. Database rights, copyright, and other applicable rights may protect the selection, arrangement, verification, and extraction of the material.
Permitted Use
You may read, link to, search, and cite individual Heavy Metal Index pages for academic, journalistic, regulatory, educational, professional, and non-commercial research purposes, provided that you give appropriate attribution and do not misrepresent the source or context.
Search engines, scholarly indexes, accessibility tools, and ordinary archival tools may crawl the site for indexing, citation, preservation, and discoverability.
Restricted Use
Without prior written permission from the Paleo Foundation, you may not:
- reproduce, republish, or redistribute substantial portions of the site or database;
- build a competing database, dataset, search product, commercial report, or training corpus from the site;
- scrape, extract, harvest, or copy the site at scale for commercial use;
- remove attribution, source links, provenance notes, or editorial context;
- use the site in a way that suggests endorsement of a product, company, certification claim, litigation position, or regulatory conclusion;
- interfere with the site, bypass access controls, overload infrastructure, or attempt unauthorized access.
Commercial licensing for bulk access, derivative works, enterprise use, data exports, or commercial redistribution is available by arrangement with the Paleo Foundation.
No Product Endorsement
The site does not rank brands, endorse products, certify products, or publish Heavy Metal Tested & Certified limits. References to external entities, standards, agencies, studies, or products are for source identification and analysis.
External Links and Sources
The site links to third-party sources and websites. Those links are provided for provenance and reader convenience. The Paleo Foundation does not control third-party sites and is not responsible for their content, availability, security, or policies.
Corrections
Reports of factual errors, outdated regulatory values, broken provenance links, or missing sources are welcome. Submission of a correction report does not create an obligation to publish a correction on any specific timeline. Corrections are reviewed under the editorial standards.
No Warranty
The site is provided as a reference on an as-is and as-available basis. The Paleo Foundation does not warrant that the site is complete, error-free, current for every jurisdiction, fit for a particular purpose, or suitable for reliance without independent verification.
Ask the Index is also provided as-is. The Paleo Foundation does not warrant that assistant responses are complete, current, or suitable for reliance without reviewing the cited pages and underlying sources.
Limitation of Liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Paleo Foundation is not liable for losses arising from use of, reliance on, inability to access, or interpretation of the site or its linked sources.
Changes
The Paleo Foundation may update these terms as the site, corpus, licensing model, or applicable law changes. The updated date at the top of this page identifies the latest published revision.