Consumer Report’s recent article about lead levels in protein powder has sent shockwaves through the wellness industry. Protein is the number one nutrient Americans try to intentionally add to their diets, with nearly 50% of us regularly consuming protein drinks or shakes, so this is an issue that impacts a wide swath of the population.
CR’s testing seemingly revealed alarmingly elevated lead levels in a number of the most popular protein powder options on the market, but the truth is that heavy metals are naturally occurring in most whole foods. Heavy metals like lead are present in the soil in most arable land, and like all other soil components show up in any crop grown in the earth—including the most organic, sustainable plants, even those grown in your own back yard.
Testing is a big part of our protocol, so we immediately spotted the red flags in CR’s reporting—especially their side by side of products high in cocoa powder, which naturally contains lead and other trace minerals, alongside other flavors. To parse out the cocoa powder from the protein itself and compare it to other real foods, Equip Foods and Light Labs launched this study to examine whether it is truly the protein that’s the problem, or if CR’s so-called discoveries actually pointed to a larger issue with our food system as a whole.
Prop 65: A Flawed Baseline
In their methodology sheet, Consumer Reports describes how they used California’s Proposition 65 laws as a benchmark for levels of lead flagged as concerning in the protein powders under review. The problem? Prop 65 has long come under criticism for its overly stringent approach to potentially (the key word here) harmful substances, using a wildly conservative 1,000X safety factor to determine the reference level of 0.5 micrograms per day.
Prop 65 also differs from the National Science Foundation (NSF), FDA, EU, and other global standards for hazardous chemicals in its goals and focus. Instead of mandating testing, which could help avoid issues like those highlighted in CR’s reporting, Prop 65 simply flags the presence of potentially hazardous chemicals, making it difficult for consumers to accurately assess their risk.
In truth, the science on safe lead consumption is more complex than the CR article might have made most readers think. The FDA has an initiative to get childhood lead consumption “closer to zero,” but elimination isn’t a realistic goal. Some lead consumption is inevitable, with most people’s daily consumption clocking in well above Prop 65’s maximum allowable dose.
Because of its presence in soil, lead is in everything that is grown in the earth. To give you an idea of a more realistic baseline, the FDA’s elimination campaign has set reference levels at 2.2 micrograms of lead per day for children and 8.8 for women of childbearing age. These numbers were calculated at ten times the actual level that would cause any real risk of harm, and are still well below California’s elevated standards.
CR’s overly cautious standards for dangerous exposure means that this article relies on scaremongering tactics to make headlines and grab reader attention. It also ignores the fact that these types of testing results can vary wildly from batch to batch, crop to crop, due to unavoidable variations in ingredients, processing, and handling between batches, in addition to non-uniformity within a single batch. These numbers might seem alarming, but they’re only one small piece of a bigger puzzle.
“When consumers see test results for heavy metals, what’s often missing is context,” explained Light Labs co-founder Vijay Manohar. “The right comparison isn’t only against Prop 65 — it’s against real food. Sweet potatoes, beets, carrots: they all contain naturally occurring heavy metals simply because they grow in soil. Comparing protein powder to those everyday foods helps people make informed choices grounded in reality.”
Lead Consumption: The Truth Behind the Numbers
So how much lead is too much—and what are we doing eating all this lead, anyway? The most recent FDA study on lead consumption shows that the average American adult consumes between 1.7 and 5.3 micrograms of lead per day, depending on individual diet. Meanwhile in Europe, mean lifetime dietary exposure was estimated at 0.68 micrograms per kilogram of body weight per day. The average European male weighs 70.8 kilograms, or 156.1 pounds, meaning their average exposure is 4.81 micrograms per day, well above the Prop 65 standard.
It’s also important to note that the highest levels of lead exposure in the studies used to determine the baseline for European citizens came from minimally processed foods like bread, tea, potatoes, fermented milk products like yogurt, and even tap water. Why? Because again, most of the lead and other heavy metals we consume comes directly from the soil.
That doesn’t mean that heavy metal exposure isn’t something to be concerned about. However, rather than representing the failures of individual protein powder brands, this issue represents much broader global issues with soil health.
Heavy Metals and Soil Health
In their report, CR describes how “…the lead levels in plant-based products were, on average, nine times the amount found in those made with dairy proteins like whey, and twice as great as beef-based ones.” People who have diets higher in plant based foods like fruits, vegetables, and legumes (pea protein powder, anyone?) also consume higher levels of heavy metals like cadmium and lead, due to these minerals' presence in the soil.
Heavy metals are present in soil since they’re a natural component of the earth’s crust, and are released into the environment through processes like volcanic eruptions, weathering of rocks, forest fires, and erosion. If you wanted to achieve Prop 65’s recommended levels of lead exposure in your daily diet, you’d have to somehow stop eating virtually all whole foods from the earth—clearly an impossible task.
So protein powder itself isn’t an isolated issue, as CR’s own history of showcasing lead dangers in everything from bread to bubble tea suggests. But since protein powder is kind of our thing, we wanted to take a closer look—highlighting the issues with CR’s original reporting and getting a more accurate viewpoint on the real risks of protein powder.
Our Testing Methodology: Doing Things Differently
For our study, we worked with Light Labs, our ISO-accredited lab partner, to buy and test all of the CR brands that offered unflavored protein to isolate whether it was the protein itself that contained heavy metals, or whether their presence could be attributed to other ingredients.
We also included an additional eight brands not in the original article to gain a wider sample size, and understand the comparable lead risks from varying protein sources. To provide the critical context Consumer Report conveniently left out of their article, we tested organic foods like tomatoes, celery, kale, wild caught tuna, and cocoa powder, to better understand how whole foods are impacted by lead and heavy metals in the soil.
Light Labs operates with validated ISO, or International Organization for Standardization, methods, which are routinely calibrated and monitored through control samples, blanks, and duplicates to ensure low measurement uncertainty and tight control limits. Their analytical capabilities allow us to test our products, and the samples we included in this study, down to detection levels at or below the parts per billion range.
After testing 18 different brands of unflavored protein and ten organic whole foods, our results were fundamentally different from the scare tactics story that CR created. Many of the whole foods we tested, such as wild caught tuna, organic spinach, and organic kale, had lead levels that were similar too or even higher than the protein powders CR had noted as being a source of concern in their article. Other foods, like organic tomatoes, celery, and rice, tested positive for elevated levels of other heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium. The charts below show how Equip’s Prime Protein Unflavored tested in contrast to the whole foods.
These results are a great demonstration of why a varied diet based in whole foods is the best pathway to holistic nutritional health. You can, for example, consume less lead by eating one food vs. another, but then your arsenic and cadmium consumption might skyrocket. This is why we recommend looking at a full heavy metal panel when making dietary choices, as opposed to simply isolating one mineral like lead, as CR did in their reporting.
Of particular note was organic cocoa powder, which tested at 26.79 ppb for lead, 581.9 ppb for cadmium, and 10.76 ppb for arsenic. Since many of the protein powders tested by CR were chocolate flavored, and some contained cacao, it’s likely that this healthy, whole food was the real culprit behind at least some of those elevated numbers flagged in their reporting. Ironically, cheaper chocolate flavored protein powders tested better for lead levels than powders based on real cacao. This is likely due to the fact that powders like these are often flavored with chemical compounds not sourced from the earth (and thus, containing no lead), or crafted from a blend of less than 50% real chocolate, keeping lead levels low.
We’ve organized all our findings into the chart below, but here’s the general takeaway. The elevated lead levels flagged by CR are clearly not a problem with protein powder, but indicative of larger issues with the food system as a whole.
Retesting Protein Powders: What our Results Say
At Equip, we test every batch of our protein powder for heavy metals at Light Labs and share those results transparently with customers. We also test for pesticides, molds, mycotoxins, microplastics, and other toxins that have found their way into our food supply. So it’s safe to say we know a thing or two about testing—and were able to tell exactly where CR went wrong.
For one thing, the CR study didn’t control for protein sources in isolation, instead considering products as a whole regardless of their other ingredients. They compared chocolate and vanilla flavors, even though, as our testing showed, cocoa is high in trace minerals, including lead. In fact, a previous CR article even warned against consuming chocolate after finding those same elements in candy bars.
Isolated from these variables, our study confirmed that plant proteins were higher in lead across the board, validating our soil hypothesis. Plants like peas contain higher lead levels as they naturally absorb trace minerals from soil. When plants are dried down and processed into protein powders these levels are condensed—think of how many raw peas you could eat vs. the amount contained in a scoop of pea protein where extras like starch and fiber have been removed to reduce volume and increase the protein content.
These results are backed up by the lead levels we found in the other organic foods we tested including carrots, with 2.18 ppb, and kale, with 2.95 ppb. When isolated and concentrated, these whole foods would test for even higher levels of heavy metals. Is this a good thing? Definitely not. But these numbers are indicative of the reality of a food system built on a foundation of contaminated and nutritionally depleted soil.
Equip Foods: Doing Things Differently
Clearly it’s not just protein powder that’s the problem, but that doesn’t mean that brands can’t do their part. At Equip Foods we’ve always been passionate about testing transparency. The unfortunate reality is we live within a contaminated food system, and we can’t count on government agencies to protect us. Brands need to do their part by systematically testing products and sharing their results transparently with consumers, enabling them to make more informed choices.
"We did not do this work to convince everyone to consume more protein powder,” said Equip”s Chief Executive Officer Kieran Mathew, “We believe the significant majority of people's food consumption should come from whole foods. We did this work to provide critical context to consumers and challenge the fear mongering of Consumer Reports, showing that there is no increased risk of heavy metal consumption when consuming protein powder versus whole foods.”
“We take pride in our testing and transparency at Equip. Fully eliminating heavy metals from our diets is an impossible challenge. The best thing we can do is one, test all raw ingredients and partner with suppliers that consistently test best-in-class. And two, help customers make informed choices by testing every batch of our finished goods, sharing those results transparently with them. We encourage all other brands to step up and do the same."
Ultimately, our study proved that the CR report was nothing more than fear mongering to grab clicks in an increasingly illusive attention economy. Bad news spreads quickly, and CR shared their findings without context in a manner that would ensure their landing with consumers worried about staying safe from contaminants and heavy metals.
Equip’s testing protocol is based on the idea that context is key. We want consumers to have the complete information about the products they purchase, so they can make a decision they feel good about. If nothing else, we can only hope that fervor over CR’s article inspires other brands to do the same.
