Heavy metals are in protein powder, but it's not THAT bad

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Yes, protein powders contain measurable amounts of lead and other heavy metals, especially the plant-based protein supplements. Some plants just bioaccumulate a particularly high level of heavy metals from the soil, from the water and the air. heavy metals that emanate both from pollution and from just nature. There's a little lead in all your food and perhaps more than a little lead in your protein powder depending on how you define a little. Yes, this is all true. No, it is not as alarming as Consumer Reports makes it sound in their recent viral article. I am not a health professional. You should not care what my medical opinion on such things is. I will instead summarize some actual expert opinions for you and try to put the numbers in a context that we can all understand. In fact, I think that I will do a better job contextualizing these numbers than Consumer Reports did. This is not their best work in my humble opinion. I suppose that I am making my own interpretive evaluation of just how alarming that Consumer Reports article even is. That's a place where my opinion as a journalist is coming into play. my assessment of the language that they used, how they presented their findings, that's all my opinion. But none of the health claims I will lay before you now are original to me because I am not qualified to make original health claims. I will be deferring to experts, as I think you should, too, unless you are an expert in this stuff yourself. And if you are, please get in those comments. And if you're an expert in anything, consider hanging a shingle online with Squarespace, sponsor of this video. Whatever your business or passion is, a website makes it real. I honestly don't really trust businesses that only have a social profile or something. Whether you need to take appointments online, sell stuff, sell content, or just like host your portfolio, a computer can do more of the work now for you than ever. Though, you still get like full control where you want it. Just drag and drop stuff around. A picture here, a payment block there for people to send you money that Squarespace will process for you, whatever. And now Squarespace can help you optimize your site for AI searching so that when people are looking for stuff on the internet using a chatbot or whatever, they'll be more likely to find you for whatever reason you want people to find you. Find yourself at squarespace.com/reusia where you can start building a website for free anytime. When you're ready to take it live and have Squarespace host it for you or to register a domain name for you, well, you can save 10% by entering my code, Reggusia, at checkout. Thank you, Squarespace. Anyway, lead in protein powder. A real thing, but not as alarming as Consumer Reports makes it sound. A couple of other disclaimers before we go deep on this. Disclaimer number one, I am an enthusiastic user of protein supplements, which is why this Consumer Reports investigation got my attention. Lauren showed it to me and she was like, "Dude, you drink so much protein powder. Are you poisoning yourself?" And I thought, "Damn, maybe I am." And that sent me running to the pantry to check labels and do math. And I quickly became much less worried than I initially was, though still a little worried. just a little. I think this is an issue to keep an eye on, especially if you use the vegan protein powders, and I'll be looking out for more research on this topic as it comes. But yes, full disclosure, I love protein supplements, and I advocate them for a specific segment of my audience. Most of the health experts who have been communicating on this issue in recent days say the same basic thing, which is most people in rich countries get plenty of protein from their normal diets and they do not need these supplements, which is true. I would not challenge that assertion even if I had standing to. However, I will also point out that that's a very safe thing for these experts to say. That's the thing that they can say that'll keep them out of most trouble. And I do not think that's fully adequate because saying that most people don't need protein supplements fails to deal with the subset of the population that might have a specific good reason to supplement protein. Not all people are most people. Some of us have good reasons to slam protein shakes. We're not all a bunch of dummies under the spell of the supplement industry, an industry that is legit in need of much stronger regulation. But just because most supplements are snake oil doesn't mean they all are. I drink protein shakes because I want to be as jacked as a drug-free 43-year-old man with unremarkable genetics can hope to be. If you want to support muscle growth from exercise, it may be beneficial to get more protein than most people normally do. I also want to avoid eating what I would regard as an outrageously irresponsible amount of meat. Man, I used to do the bodybuilder nonsense where you prep 20 fish fillets for the week and I regret doing that. Not least because some of those fish also have notable levels of heavy metals in them. And if you're eating like four orange ruffy fililelets a day, that mercury could add up. But that's not the main thing that I'm worried about with using meat as a bodybuilding food. The main thing is that I have been persuaded that meat is a treat, if you eat it at all. Meat is a sometimes food, like desserts. Meat is far too resource inensive of a product to be a staple food for billions and billions of people. That would be beyond the known carrying capacity of our planet. And Jim Bros who eat chicken, steak, and rice six times a day, they are consuming way, way more than their fair share of the planetary resources necessary to produce that meat, including but not limited to the carbon carrying capacity of our biosphere. So, I advocate protein powder as a more sustainable alternative for my fellow gym bros. even the dairybased powders because those are just byproducts of a cheese industry that is going to make cheese regardless of whether you buy the leftover way. Now, I am open to being proven wrong about protein powder. After reading this uh Consumer Reports investigation about lead and protein, I was totally ready to get on here and tell you that I was wrong, that protein powder is actually bad. But I don't think we're there yet based on the specific numbers and the opinions of experts. My second big disclosure before we proceed is that one of the protein powder brands that Consumer Reports tested is a brand that sponsored a video of mine about a year ago. You have to decide for yourself whether you think I'm in the tank for big protein. For what it's worth, I had to look up all of these brand names in my email archive to remind myself whether I had ever worked with any of them. I was glad I checked because I honestly didn't remember. I will also tell you that I am not hurting for sponsors. I would be just fine if no supplement brand wanted to advertise with me ever again. Colin and I have plenty of other brands interested all the time. And even if we didn't, I've already gotten my bag, guys. Everything that I do now is just gravy on top. I really don't care if a protein brand gets mad at me. But of course, you get to decide for yourself whether you believe me. And it's entirely possible that my thinking is influenced by brands in ways that I am not even consciously aware of. Anyway, Consumer Reports. Consumer Reports is a nearly century old nonprofit that does investigative journalism on consumer products. And from what I've seen over the many years that I've been reading them, they do a ton of great work. I have cited their ratings of home kitchen appliances so many times in my videos. I even several years ago, I even cited earlier work that they had done on lead in protein powder. And maybe I shouldn't have. I mean, in my defense, I only mentioned that original 2010 report in passing. I didn't go like deep into it. I merely referenced it as another thing to consider when considering protein sources. But after Consumer Reports first tested protein powder for lead 15 years ago, there was subsequent scholarly followup that yielded much less concerning results. It's important to remember that the folks at Consumer Reports are journalists like me, not scholars. Many of them have science backgrounds. Some have serious scientific credentials, but Consumer Reports is not a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. It's a magazine, and we have to take it for what it is. Back when I taught journalism for a living, I was always struck by how similar my work was to work being done in other departments at the university, the history department, the sociology department, etc. We were all just looking at the world and trying to figure out how it works and what exactly has happened here. The only difference between journalism and scholarship, I concluded, is that journalism is quick and dirty while scholarship is slow and methodical. Both have their place in our society. But we have to take journalism for what it is, which is merely the first draft of history, as the old saying goes. And first drafts are usually full of errors and omissions because you have to start somewhere. So, I think that we can regard that original 2010 Consumer Reports investigation as the first draft of the story of heavy metal contamination in protein powder. The second draft is a scholarly investigation done by actual professional toxicologists in 2020 whose work they say was inspired by Consumer Reports. So kudos to the magazine for getting this ball rolling. These toxicologists reported no conflicts of interest, no relevant supplement industry ties, and here are their conclusions as published in the journal Toxicology Reports. quote, "Exposure to arsenic, cadmium, mercury, and lead from protein powder supplement ingestion does not increase the non-carcinogenic risk to consumers." End quote. Non-carcinogenic means things other than cancer, right? Cancer is not the big risk with lead exposure. The main way that lead hurts you is by impeding the brain and nervous system development of kids. Kids who grow up around a lot of old lead paint, for example, may grow up with cognitive impairments, uh impulse control problems, and even seizures. And in adults, serious chronic lead exposure can lead to kidney damage, cardiovascular disease, anemia, that kind of stuff. Those are the main risks with lead. And these scholarly researchers concluded that extra lead exposure that you could expect from protein powder would not increase your risk of any of those problems. though their observations were limited to adults. Kids probably shouldn't take protein powder unless advised by a doctor for some reason. We're talking about grown-ups here, okay? And a typical US adult ingests about 83 micrograms of lead a day. According to prior research cited in this 2020 journal article we're talking about, the highest daily exposure potential from protein powder as reported by Consumer Reports in 2010 was 13.5 micrograms per day, which is an amount worth noting, but it's just not that big in the scheme of things and not big enough to measurably increase your risk of any non-cancer illness. According to this analysis by professional toxicologists, what about cancer though? Inorganic arsenic is the only heavy metal under consideration here that is thought to have an observable carcinogenic effect when ingested orally. And indeed, these scientists found that the biggest risk posed by heavy metals in protein powder is associated not with the lead, which Consumer Reports tested for, but with the arsenic and the cadmium. Arsenic and cadmium in protein powder made the most significant contribution to the cumulative hazard index as calculated by these scientists, not the lead. And even then, the arsenic and the cadmium levels were still too low to result in any adverse health effects that you could predict, even in their worst case scenario math. Now, fast forward to this year, 2025. Consumer Reports went back and tested a bunch more protein brands for lead and other heavy metals. And here is the magazine's conclusion. Quote, "For more than 2/3 of the products we analyzed, a single serving contained more lead than our food safety experts say is safe to consume in a day, some by more than 10 times." End quote. Well, that's an alarming nut graph from Consumer Reports. And so this new article spread like wildfire in my internet circles. And here's the problem with it. The baseline dailyled level of concern that Consumer Reports used to arrive at that conclusion is the level set by California's Proposition 65, a ballot initiative adopted by California voters in 1986. And it is notoriously conservative. conservative to the point of being almost useless, unrealistic. According to some experts, California, whose health regulations I was just praising a few videos ago, California does have a reputation for overzealous consumer advocacy. One reason for that is California's tradition of direct democracy. Under the California Constitution, it's relatively easy for voters to adopt a law themselves instead of relying on their elected state legislators to do it for them. Direct democracy is a good and bad thing. The good part is obvious. The bad part is you can end up with laws that sound really good to lay people, but not so good to maybe an expert. though experts were certainly involved in drafting Prop 65 and you can see where they were coming from. Prop 65 says that any consumer product exposing the user to more than 0.5 micrograms of lead per day must carry a written warning of potential reproductive harm, birth defects if you're pregnant, that kind of thing. That law does not ban such products. It does not call such products categorically unsafe. Prop 65 is a right to know law. Its main purpose is to inform consumers about risks, even minimal potential speculative risks. And that makes sense for lead in particular for which the experts say there is no safe level of exposure. Ideally, you want no lead in your body at all. You don't need it. But if you cut out all foods containing more than 0.5 micrograms of lead, you literally can't eat food from the earth. According to one expert quoted in a uh vox.com article from this week scrutinizing the consumer reports piece as I'm doing now. Again, the typical daily lead exposure for an adult in the US is, according to one study, 83 micrograms a day, with some people getting hundreds a day. The California threshold that Consumer Reports used for their analysis is 0.5 micrograms. So, let's decode the numbers. Let's look at the worst offender that Consumer Reports tested, which is Naked Nutrition's vegan mass gainer. Remember that the vegan powders seem to have a lot more lead than the dairy ones. Probably because legumes tend to bioaccumulate heavy metals, and when you refine them down to a supplement, you really concentrate everything. So, Naked Nutrition's vegan mass gainer. Mass gainer, by the way, is not quite the same thing as protein powder, and I wish Consumer Reports had noted that. Mass gainer has protein and lots of carbs and other stuff. It's for guys whose football coaches have told them to come in 30 lbs heavier next season so that they can move from tight end to right tackle. Just get heavier, kid, by any means necessary. That's what mass gainer is for. It's not just a protein powder like most of the other products that Consumer Reports analyze. But anyway, a serving of this vegan mass gainer had the most lead of all the products. 1,572% of the magazine's level of concern for lead. I think it's unfortunate that Consumer Reports chose to report this finding as a percentage rather than as an absolute quantity like the number of micrograms of lead in a survey. They give a few absolute quantities elsewhere in the article but most of the findings they give as percentages which looks much more dramatic and also requires some decoding to understand. Remember, their percentages are based on California's super duper conservative Prop 65 threshold of 0.5 micrograms per day. If you want to convert the percentages on the Consumer Reports chart into actual micrograms, first divide the percentage by two because their level of concern is half a microgram of lead per day. So let's divide 1,572% by 2. That's 786. Then to convert it from a percentage to a whole number, divide that by 100. 7.86 microgram of lead in a serving of this stuff. Elsewhere in the text, Consumer Report says this particular product contains 7.7 micrograms, not 7.8. 86. I can't account for that slight discrepancy. Maybe they're using a slightly less round factor in there somewhere, but the difference is trivial. If you want to know about how many micrograms of lead you're getting from a serving, divide the Consumer Reports percentage by two and then by 100. You'll get close enough to the total micrograms in a serving. So, this vegan mass gainer has, let's round it up to eight micrograms of lead per serving. 8 millionths of a gram. To quote Captain Kirk in Star Trek 4, is that a lot? Well, again, the experts say that ideally any lead is too much lead, and we ought to take that seriously. The goal is zero. But we also live in the real world where we need to balance risks against benefits. And to that end, the US Food and Drug Administration has what they call a reference level. This is the level based on the lowest amount of lead that science has associated with observable actual health problems. For children, that's 2.2 micrograms per day. And for adults who may become pregnant, it's 8.8 micrograms a day. They give no reference level at all for other adults. just for these particularly at risk adults or rather the fetus would be particularly at risk in the case of a pregnant adult or the baby if the baby is breastfeeding. So the daily reference level which reflects the lowest amount of lead exposure correlated with any health problems at all for a particularly at risk adult population is 8.8 8 microgram with a 10x safety factor, meaning the lowest daily level of lead exposure that we think might cause any problem at all for a childbearing adult. That's actually 88 micrograms per day. They take that minimal amount and then they divide it by 10 just to be extra super duper safe to build a cushion into the reference level. But 88 micrograms is the actual lowest amount of lead exposure thought to cause any actual problems according to the pre-RFK Junior era FDA. What does that mean in practice? That means that the worst offending protein powder on Consumer Reports list has less than onetenth of the amount of lead per serving that the FDA considers potentially problematic for a particularly at risk adult. That is a much less dramatic way to say what Consumer Reports said. But we got to remember a few things. We got to remember that people often have more than one serving of these powders a day. I usually have three or four servings, at least on the days when I lift because I eat way less meat these days. And because these products are used by bodybuilders and bodybuilders tend to be insane, it's possible to imagine some people using way more servings a day. And that total lead exposure could add up to something meaningful in that context. An amount that could lead to chronic health problems over many years of heavy use. Also, we have to remember that the lead that we get in our protein powder is on top of our normal daily background exposure, which really is too high for some people in particular. If you're poor, if you live in an old building with lead paint, in an old city with old lead pipes still in the water system, if you live near an industrial area with lots of pollution, as many poor people do because that's where they can afford to live. If that's you, you might already be getting hundreds of micrograms of lead per day. and adding eight more on top of that from your daily mass gain or shake would I suppose not be great. So, I think it's awesome that Consumer Reports is doing these analyses mostly because it's pressuring scientists to do even better analyses in peer-reviewed publications. And that is a thing worth keeping an eye on. But Consumer Reports went quite a bit further than I would have been comfortable doing in their shoes as a fellow journalist. Regarding the two protein powders with the highest lead levels that they found, Consumer Reports labeled those two products to avoid. The next two down on the list, they labeled recommend limiting to once a week. And the next 12 down on the list they labeled as okay to eat occasionally. And the final seven they called better choices for daily consumption. Products to avoid is very strong, very conclusive language for a journalistic publication to use in reference to a product that contains less than onetenth of the minimum known harmful daily dose of lead for a particularly at risk adult. That's just my opinion as a journalist, not as a scientist. I have not earned any scientific opinion. The scientists at the American Chemical Society have earned an opinion. They publish many scholarly journals as well as a magazine called Chemical and Engineering News. And that magazine just published an article scrutinizing this Consumer Reports piece raising all the issues that I just raised. And they reached out to Consumer Reports for a quote. quote, "There is no immediate harm from the amount of lead that we found in these products." Well, that sounds to me like Consumer Reports reigning in the tenor of their coverage a little bit. Though, you could also just take it as a literal statement that these are levels associated with chronic health problems at worst, not acute poisoning. quote, "We're not in the business of telling people what they should eat." This Consumer Reports person told The Chemical Magazine, "Dude, you literally labeled these things products to avoid or limit to once a week. If that's not telling people what to eat, I don't know what is." A physician who does supplement research but was not involved with the Consumer Reports thing. A physician like that is also quoted in this Chemical Society magazine piece saying, quote, "There is no way to completely avoid trace amounts of lead in products." If there is protein powder with almost no lead, zero or almost none, that's what you should be consuming." End quote. I am in no position to challenge the good doctor's advice. The whey protein powder that I mostly use was also tested by Consumer Reports. It has 56% of Consumer Reports level of concern for lead, which is relative to this extremely conservative California standard. If we divide 56 by two and divide that by 100, we get about.3 micrograms of lead per serving, which is tiny tiny compared to my likely normal background lead exposure, which is around 83 micrograms a day according to that one study that we talked about. My usual protein brand, which is not the one that sponsored me, by the way. Hule was the one that sponsored me about a year ago. But my go-to brand at home has less lead than the other brands we talked about because it's whey protein from dairy, not plant protein. The plant proteins have way more lead. And this is why the advice of physicians can only get us so far as individual consumers because we all consider multiple factors in addition to our health. When we make choices, maybe you're a strict vegan, whey protein is off the table for you. That's a choice that you can make because life is about balancing competing interests. And if you're a vegan trying to get jacked, you're lifting, you want more protein than the average person, it may be perfectly logical for you to reach for one of these plant protein powders that has like eight micrograms of lead instead of.3, especially if you're a person who has no risk of getting pregnant. You deserve to know what you're getting yourself into, which is why I applaud this research. Even if I think its presentation was a little alarmist, a little clickbay. Hey, we've all done it. At least a little. What I don't like is people telling you that you shouldn't eat this stuff at all. We are not children. We balance risks against benefits all the time. And we can do that here. If you're committed to getting lean and jacked, but you don't want to take protein powder, you might end up eating more carbs than you want to. If you're eating whole legumes for protein, or if you eat meat and you don't want to take protein powder, well, you'll end up eating so much meat trying to get jacked. And eating a whole ton of meat has its own health hazards associated with it in addition to being unethical. In my humble opinion, you're never going to live a completely detoxified life. There's no such thing as clean food. Food comes from the ground. The ground was dirty before us humans even got here. And we've been making it even dirtier ever since. And that I reckon is something to be more worried about than protein powder. Pollution sucks. Make good choices because they're your choices to make. Talk to you next time.