Comic Strips

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:

The maximum amount of lead permitted in food supplements according to the EFSA is 3,000 ppb (3 mg/kg), a level that CR’s food safety experts say is far too high to be health protective.

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.

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:

The average concentration of lead in the chocolate- and vanilla-flavored products we tested was 17.3 parts per billion and 15.4 ppb, respectively.

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:

Products for non-standard diets, food imitates and food supplements 8691 55 272 298 874 874

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.

Also, it’s weird to call it a fad. I remember seeing infomercials for protein shakes and pyramid schemes involving them since I was a kid.

I think it's because people are doing it randomly, or that it's less a specialised product and being further adapted by mainstream brands and shops. I don't think it's a fad, but I'm trying to just communicate with that guy