Yes, empirically, I guess at least gold cannot be too or immediately toxic, since thin gold leaf is sometimes put on sweets as a decoration in India - usually on peda kind of sweets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peda

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vark

Silver too, according to the above page.

If I recall correctly, gold is extremely unreactive as far as metals go -- I'd imagine that it may just be more-or-less biochemically neutral.

Edit: I may be dead wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organogold_chemistry

I think you're correct. Pure gold is extremely hard to dissolve or oxidize. There's three common methods, using a mercury amalgam(which is an alloying, so the gold is still unreacted), cyanide, or a mixture of hydrochloric and nitric acid called aqua regia.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold#Toxicity, the gold ion is toxic, but there are no chemical processes known to occur in the human body that can solubilize metallic gold.

> Yes, empirically, I guess at least gold cannot be too or immediately toxic

Gold goes out from the body unchanged from how it went in.

An attribute capitalized upon by this product http://incrediblethings.com/food/this-gold-pill-makes-you-po...

Gold... toxic?

there was even an episode of house where the cause was gold poisoning.

I'm pretty sure it was silver, not gold.

It gives a person a "gray/purple" skin color that makes them look dead. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argyria

That doesn't necessarily mean that the element is poisonous per se. Many good/healthy substances are poisonous at high levels,e.g.: Vitamin A poisoning [0] Water poisoning [1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervitaminosis_A [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication