▲ 89 points
back
92 comments
Strange that they do not actually disclose which brands have the high levels, and not sure I understand the logic in this statement:
“We do not disclose the names of companies we test in order to maintain fairness and consistency and to avoid potential conflicts of interest,” Bowen said.
Also note that later in their document (page 8) they do list brands that they certify as clean:
https://cleanlabelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/CleanLabelP...
One cynical take I read on this is that this is a way to get more companies to sign up for their certification.
More along the lines of avoiding lawsuits. Supplement companies sue the fuck out of everyone, since the competition is so steep for essentially selling nothing/waste products/similar (penny production to dollar margins).
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/07/18/supplement-maker-sues...
The lawsuits angle is nonsense since there are other sites that list various tested levels.
It's definitely in promotion of their certification, yeah.
The charitable reading is that this was done as a blinded study, so the testers/researchers would not know and would prevent bias in the testing and data analysis.
There should be a way to unblind in most experiment designs though
Promoting the certification would explain concealing the offending products. If CleanLabel reveals, it will discourage other companies from getting the certification.
A lead test should be required by law i.m.o.
How much does testing cost? Curious about my protein powder.
This would be cool as a crowd funded thing with publicly shared results of various products.
If it were a report of a dangerous software bug, the discovering team would first contact the affected vendor, have it patched, and then report the details.
I could imagine this being done to the powder producers, so they could pull the affected products before a huge PR backlash. Were it the case though, they likely would mention that.
For a software exploit the reason why "responsible disclosure" exists is that once the exploit is known, it can be used against innocent parties running unpatched software. No obvious such impetus exists for faulty or dangerous supplements, and in fact I'd argue it's absolutely the opposite, it would be much more likely to reach the people who are currently being hurt by this if the product SKUs impacted were known.
Responsible disclosure is about harm minimization. If you tell the world about an exploit, now there are thousands of hackers who have been informed about ways they can harm innocent people.
You should only openly disclose a found vulnerability if there's a good chance its already being widely used.
But, lead in a food product? You aren't protecting innocent people by hiding the culprit. You don't have thousands of hackers who are going to run around spiking peoples drinks with lead contaminated protein powder.
No excuses for this behavior. If you find lead in a product people are ingesting, you need to tell the world all of the details. Otherwise you are a bad actor.
The Clean Label Project did an AMA on Reddit, and people raised issues regarding their reporting, methodology, and data.
I see they haven't learned anything in the intervening 7 years.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/64mpty/we_are_the_cle...
They did an exposé on solvent use in decaf coffee and listed Peet's Coffee (a local SF brand) as having traces of methylene chloride. Yet Peet's claims to only use the Swiss Water (or similar) process to produce their decaf, possibly as of a few years ago. It's possible they changed the process after the tests were done.
The study looked dated but wasn't presented as such, and didn't caveat it with any updates. It's hard to know if Peet's changed their ways in response to the report, and if that was the case I think a disclosure is warranted.
In the end I was presented with conflicting information and didn't know who to believe. Was the data old? Was it a false positive? Did Peet's decaffeination supplier pull a fast one and was secretly using a cheaper method? (Nearly all decaffeination is outsourced.)
More info here:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2024/05/...
The Clean Label Project, a nonprofit that fights for food labeling transparency, found that several popular coffee brands including Kirkland Signature, Kroger, Maxwell House and Peet's Coffee included traces of methylene chloride, a liquid sometimes used for paint stripping that in large doses can cause a slew of health issues. (A representative for Peet's told USA TODAY the brand switched to a different means of decaffeination more than two years ago.)
Based on that and this article, it looks like they learned that people writing news stories on them either don't read or don't care about Reddit AMAs.
It's interesting that in the main study this is based on (for metals rather than BPA etc) they state both that the average results are dominated by outliers and that,
"As a whole, products in later cohorts (2016, 2019, 2022) demonstrated lower
concentrations of all heavy metals tested as compared with those in 2014, with
significantly lower concentrations of lead documented between the years 2022
vs. 2014 and the years 2019 vs. 2014."
It's not that surprising that the lowest cost "flavoring" cocoa would be contaminated, but for high priced chocolates not to know their suppliers would be more surprising.
The issue is that the cocoa plant itself absorbs heavy metals from the ground like nobody's business. It's hard to get lead-free chocolate, full stop - no irresponsible supplier required.
I use PlantFusion in my pre/post-workout protein shakes (in combination with Transparent Labs whey protein isolate and a couple different types of collagen powder), and this was one of the reasons I liked it: https://plantfusion.com/pages/faq
IS PLANTFUSION TESTED FOR HEAVY METALS?
Yes, we do indeed do third party testing on all our PlantFusion products. There’s been a whole lot of attention lately on heavy metals in nutritional supplements. Particularly those products on the market containing brown rice and/or brown rice syrup. In the early development of PlantFusion, we found through our own research and testing that brown rice protein typically had levels of certain heavy metals (namely lead, arsenic and cadmium) that were many times higher than our other plant protein sources. Because of this, and a few other factors, we opted to take brown rice out of all of our formulas and continue to test for heavy metals within our products to ensure safety and efficacy.
While that's more reassuring than no statement at all, I'd suggest keeping in mind that claims and actions don't always align and that leadership changes -- as when a startup folds in new investors or gets sold whiledale -- can and do exploit exactly the kind of trust you're investing here.
What you like about a small brand like this today could change tomorrow, or could have already changed in way that someone conveniently "forgot" to reflect on the website.
Everybody's got their own standards for risk tolerance and due diligence, but in historically shady markets like nutritional supplements and growth-chasing startups, soft skepticism and ongoing vigilance have some place.
You were right to be concerned. From the article:
"Plant-based protein powders were the most contaminated, containing five times more cadmium than their whey-based counterparts."
It raises the question: Where are things like arsenic and cadmium coming from? Is it in the brown rice to begin with? If so, why?
$38 per pound for protein powder?
Not the first time this kind of reporting has surfaced; not the first time from this same organization, either.
Same org, 2018: https://cleanlabelproject.org/protein-powder-infographic/
Consumer Reports, 2010: https://www.consumerreports.org/media-room/press-releases/20...
Toxicology reports, 2020: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7509468/
> The data in the current study suggest that heavy metal exposure via protein powder supplement ingestion does not pose an increased non-carcinogenic risk to human health. Further, no carcinogenic risk was expected from As via ingestion of protein powder supplements. This study demonstrates that health risks of heavy metals in protein powder supplements should be conducted within the context of relevant background exposures and established health based standards instead of the presence of hazardous substances alone.
Something similar in India, 2024: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10994440/
Some resources I've used:
https://www.consumerlab.com/
https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/pages/coas#certs
I love how blueprint's olive oil is actually called "snake oil" https://blueprint.bryanjohnson.com/cdn/shop/files/EVOOfront....
+1 for ConsumerLab.
It's almost embarrassing how many products they test and how lucid their write-ups as compared with the FDA given their respective budgets.
It should be noted that the report says they sourced many of them from amazon, who are notorious for having sellers who sell counterfeit supplements and cosmetics. They also co-mingle inventory, putting all units of a product from multiple sellers into one "bucket", so even if you buy a product from an official store on there it can be fake.
Original source: https://cleanlabelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/CleanLabelP...
> Of the products tested, a staggering 47% exceeded California Proposition 65 safety
thresholds for toxic metals. Organic products, on average, showed higher levels of heavy metal contamination, with three times more lead and twice the amount of cadmium
compared to non-organic products. Plant-based protein powders were particularly concerning, showing three times more lead than whey-based alternatives, and chocolate-flavored powders contained four times more lead than vanilla.
Meager report. Are they saying organic whey is more likely to have lead than non-organic whey, or is it just that organic products are more likely to be plant-based?
Chocolate... just the usual suspect I guess[0].
I'm taking away from this that non-flavored whey is probably fine.
> 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons. We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
Thanks EU for 100s of hours wasted clicking stupid meaningless banners and additionally this now.
AKA we won’t run a website without selling your data.
Just flag it (probably spyware site) and move on.
The only way to be sure you’re not being poisoned is to get your blood tested. “Safe” brands are considered safe if they test below a certain amount of heavy metals per serving, but any amount of heavy metals is toxic, you probably consume multiple servings per day, and other foods/supplements you consume may also be contaminated.
I wish we had functional food safety in this country, but until we do, we’re all on our own.
> any amount of heavy metals is toxic
That is not the case. Dose makes the poison. Many of the metals we actually need in trace amount to function. Even the ones we don't need, has to reach a certain concentration before they pose any risk to us.
And this reporting is pure FUD. Even the "high concentration" items were below the risk threshold
I think to be complete this report needs to compare the levels of heavy metals found in the protein powders to levels found in regular foods like peas or brown rice, since that's where the metals are coming from. Is there some reason to believe that the protein isolation process would tend to concentrate heavy metals to a higher degree than is found in the source foods?
It’s just coming from the source foods, yes, and Americans already eat these minute quantities of heavy metals on a regular basis from other sources. This paper makes some attempt to put the numbers in context: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7509468/
interesting note regarding chocolate versus vanilla flavoring ala the dark chocolate lead/cadmium report from a few years ago:
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...
Lead and cadmium WITH NAMES in dark chocolate:
https://www.consumerreports.org/health/food-safety/lead-and-...
Spend some time talking to a trainer to professional sports. Regarding supplements, a lot of them have meth in them and the pro athletes don’t know but they start telling their friends “hey, this one gets results!” And then the entire team tests positive.
I wouldn't use random blends of workout supplements. I would stick to individual substances. It's easy to find lots of things that legitimately get results by just looking at the WADA ban list.
No major brand is putting meth in their protein powder. They would destroy their reputation and go to jail.
Unlike in paint, there isn't an obvious reason for lead to show up in protein powders, so it must be something like bioaccumulation exacerbated by processing. How can we grow plans with less lead?
It’s in the milk because it’s in the cows because it’s in the cows’ food because it’s in the soil.
It could also be dust accumulating in ingredients exposed to the air.
Novak Djokovic accused Australian covid hotels of poisoning him with heavy metals in 2022.
I'm wondering if he uses supplement powders or has a thing for protein boosted chocolate milkshakes.
They should trace/test suppliers.
Testing should be continous, required by law.
Is there anything similar for Europe available?
5 years old, but here goes: https://www.test.de/Eiweisspulver-im-Test-1617462-1618800/
Lead is available in the water supply thanks to old pipework in Europe. You have to find the right building though.
Cadmium, I’m not sure. Maybe suck an old rechargeable battery?