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.
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.