From her website:
Consumer Reports recently made headlines with a new study showing high levels of lead in many protein powders and shakes. The average amount of lead detected had increased from a previous study done 15 years ago. It’s ironic that this particular wellness fad, like many others, may actually be compromising people’s health.
Ultimately, this cartoon is about more than just one scientific finding. If we look at what happened with COVID, or childhood vaccinations, or even climate change or January 6, we can see how easily conventional wisdom gets turned on its head by bad faith actors, especially in a media environment lacking responsible editors.
You should know that the Consumer Reports article was a bit of a nothingburger and/or a classic State of California-style overreaction. Even one of the worst products on it (Huel Black) had 7 µg of lead per 100 g of product, which is equal to 0.07 mg/kg, which is less than half of what the EU considers a safe level for e.g. cereals and pulses (0.20 mg/kg).
The assertion that there is no safe level of lead may or may not be true, but our natural environment even without human pollution has lead in it, which makes its way up the food chain into our foods, and ingesting it is unavoidable unless you only eat produce grown in a hydroponics lab or something. As a result, humans have some natural resistance to the toxicity of lead.
The CR report is actually very measured in its takeaway from this:
It’s not that protein shakes will give you immediate lead poisoning; rather, the level of exposure is just high enough that chugging these things daily might be a problem, especially considering the negligible benefit. IMO this is a report that provides sane and relevant health advice for a very popular product.
My biggest issue with it is actually this part from a paragraph where they bemoan the fact that food safety authorities are doing nothing about this issue:
This is technically true and 3 mg/kg is indeed insanely high and obviously intended for like vitamin pills and such with serving sizes measured in single-digit grams. However, the EFSA has a ton of lead-related regulations, and not all shake powders fall under the food supplements category. I do not have any statistics at hand of how common it is for protein powders to label themselves as food supplements rather than as some kind of composite dish, but I do have one anecdote.
After I read that CR article I checked what the situation was for my shake powder of choice (Queal, a meal replacement product rather than a protein powder per se), and it is not considered a food supplement. Instead it’s some kind of composite food product (I quote: 2106.9098.49 (Generic Miscellaneous edible preparations Food preparations not elsewhere specified or included)), which under EFSA rules has to test both the raw ingredients as well as the final product, and the final product basically isn’t permitted to introduce extra lead that wasn’t there in the raw ingredients, though the actual regulation is quite complicated in this regard.
i wouldn’t necessarily say its a nothingburger but it is hard to judge these things when lead contamination is inevitable
still I think it’s more useful to look at average daily lead intake and compare to that baseline instead of arbitrary limits especially as you’ve noted there is no way to set a “safe” level of lead exposure
for adults this comes out to about 0.3μg of kg body weight - so at 70kg that’s 21μg of lead which means that adding an extra 7μg per day via that huel protein increases your lead intake by a third - so it’s up to you to decide if you think eating 30% more lead just for the gainz is worth it - i personally don’t (especially when you can find powders that don’t so this)
That protein shake will probably replace some other kind of food you would otherwise eaten and which will naturally contain some amount of lead, so it’s not just a straight up increase on top of your normal daily intake.
But yeah, you’re right, avoiding the ones with unusually high lead levels like the Huel powder obviously makes sense.
The way the CR report presents their data is super terrible – they present it as a per-serving percentage of their arbitrarily-defined concern level of 0.5 µg/day (which by the way is 2.5% of that 21 µg average you cite; unrealistically low) and the serving size they use is whatever the American label of the product reports (serving sizes on American back labels are notoriously arbitrary).
Anyway, the most sensible number I can find in their article is this:
17 ppb is 0.017 mg/kg, which is far below what the EU considers the maximum safe level for any food category, except for infant formula where it’s only just below the maximum of 0.020 mg/kg (and exceeds the liquid infant formula max of 0.010 mg/kg, but then these are mostly powders).
According to the report you linked section 3.1.2, 17 µg/kg seems to be pretty closely in line with the average for general foodstuffs. For example dairy has a median lower bound of 2.50 and upper bound of 9.77 µg/kg, while cereals and grains are 11.0 to 28.2.
One funny thing in that EFSA report is this line:
which shows that food supplements (which presumably includes protein powders, but will also include a lot of other stuff like vitamin pills) had, in that study, a median lead content of LB 272 µg/kg and UB 298 µg/kg.
Yeah, a lot of fearmongering with this. From what I understand, that “safe” amount in the article was just decided arbitrarily.
This does make sense, but idk if I honestly want to be the person who wants to find out if it may or may not be true. From my understanding, lead doesn’t leave your body and is cumulative over life, and after it reaches higher levels, you will see side effects, which include cognitive decline. To me this kind of product isn’t something you just eat once in a while, you are probably consuming a lot of it every day for months if not more. So even if it comes in at lower levels, wouldn’t the frequency at which its taken account for it being more dangerous over time compared to foods that have traces but you only eat once every few weeks?
Metal contamination in food is a double edged sword as well: if you live in America it’s unlikely you’d ever need selenium supplementation, in Europe there’s basically none in the soil so it’s not impossible to be deficient.