If you’ve seen headlines warning that your protein powder is full of lead, you’re not alone. Viral scares like this thrive, because they hit two pressure points at once: health anxiety and something a lot of us actually consume. So, Future Perfect asked the writer Jan Dutkiewicz to do what Vox does best: pull the claim apart, look at the numbers underneath it, and tell you what’s real and what’s noise.
Short version, as Jan wrote this week: The “lead in protein” panic rests on the wrong yardstick. Consumer Reports compared a handful of popular powders to California’s Prop 65 benchmark of 0.5 micrograms of lead per day, a limit set with a 1,000 times safety buffer. That’s far tighter than the FDA’s framework, which uses reference levels of 2.2 micrograms of lead per day for children and 8.8 for women of childbearing age. Against those more realistic safety limits, even the highest-reading product in the test stays below the FDA’s level for adults and well below any level shown to cause harm. In other words: alarming graphic, not alarming risk.
Our piece walks through this step by step, including why plant-based powders often test a bit higher (they start as crops) and why that still doesn’t translate into meaningful danger for most adults.
This is what your membership makes possible: journalism that doesn’t ride the outrage wave but drains it by reporting carefully; checking the math; and giving readers a clear, usable picture of risk. If this story helped you separate signal from noise (or saved you from panic-dumping your pantry), please share it with a friend who lifts, blends, or doomscrolls — and tell them why supporting member-funded reporting matters. If you want to be a part of that mission, please consider becoming a Vox Member.
—Bryan Walsh, senior editorial director
