Lead in Protein Powder: 2025 Consumer Reports Test

Key takeaways

• Consumer Reports tested 23 protein powders and ready-to-drink shakes in October 2025. More than two thirds delivered more lead per serving than CR's 0.5 microgram per day threshold. Naked Nutrition Vegan Mass Gainer hit 7.7 mcg per serving (about fifteen times the threshold); Huel Black Edition hit 6.3 mcg (about twelve times) .
• Plant-based powders averaged nine times the lead of dairy-based powders and roughly twice the lead of beef-based powders. CR found no meaningful chocolate-vs-vanilla effect on lead (17.3 vs 15.4 ppb) .
• CR's January 2026 follow-up tested five reader-requested products and reported all five at low lead: Clean Simple Eats (0.21 mcg), Equate (0.27 mcg), Premier Protein (0.38 mcg), Truvani Plant-Based (0.46 mcg), Ritual (0.53 mcg, just over the 0.5 mcg threshold). MuscleTech 100% Mass Gainer was the only product in the original round CR could not detect lead in .
• The widely circulated organic-three-times-worse and chocolate-up-to-110-times-more-cadmium claims come from the Clean Label Project's separate January 2025 whitepaper, not the CR retest. The two studies do not agree on the flavor effect .
• California SB 1033 (Padilla, introduced 2026-02-11; Senate Environmental Quality Committee approved 2026-04-22) would require lot-level heavy-metal disclosure for protein products sold in California starting 2028-01-01. It is the first credible state-level attempt; federal DSHEA does not require pre-sale testing .

Skip to:

• What CR tested clean
• What Consumer Reports actually tested in 2025
• Plant-based vs dairy: a soil story, not a brand story
• The counterintuitive stuff (organic, chocolate) is from a different 2025 study
• California SB 1033: the regulator is catching up to a thirty-billion-dollar industry
• The harm is not symmetric across populations
• Bottom line

What CR tested clean

• MuscleTech 100% Mass Gainer. Lead not detected in CR's October 2025 test. Dairy-based, large 357 gram serving size .
• Clean Simple Eats Protein Powder, Chocolate Brownie Batter. 0.21 mcg lead per serving in CR's January 2026 follow-up, less than half the threshold .
• Equate Whey Protein Powder, Rich Chocolate. 0.27 mcg lead per serving in the January 2026 follow-up .
• Premier Protein Protein Powder, Chocolate Milkshake. 0.38 mcg lead per serving in the January 2026 follow-up .
• Truvani Plant-Based Protein, Chocolate. 0.46 mcg lead per serving in the January 2026 follow-up. The cleanest plant-based result in either round .
• Ritual Essential Protein Daily Shake, Chocolate. 0.53 mcg lead per serving in the January 2026 follow-up. Just over the 0.5 mcg threshold but well below the headline figures from the original round .

What Consumer Reports actually tested in 2025

The October 2025 CR retest is a small but focused study, and the design matters because the headline numbers depend on it. CR bought 23 protein products (powders and ready-to-drink shakes) from a mix of physical and online retailers, mostly mainstream brands. Sampling ran roughly three months from November 2024. CR tested for lead, cadmium, and inorganic arsenic, and reported lead per serving against the company's internal food-safety threshold of 0.5 micrograms of lead per day .

The 0.5 microgram per day threshold is not an FDA limit. It is a CR internal benchmark, derived from agency-level guidance and the public-health consensus that there is no recognized safe level of lead exposure (which is how CDC frames the body of evidence on lead in blood) . The threshold exists so a consumer-facing test has a single number to compare a serving against, and it is conservative on purpose because lead is cumulative.

CR found more than two thirds of the 23 products tested over that daily threshold in a single serving. The worst-tested products and the per-product lead, cadmium, and arsenic figures are enumerated in the caution callout in the tested-clean section above; this section focuses on the study design rather than re-listing the numbers.

The over-threshold spread is wide. The worst single-product lead result was roughly fifteen times the CR daily threshold, and CR flagged separate cadmium and arsenic exceedances on different products in the same round . That spread is the load-bearing point of the retest, because it says brand selection is doing most of the work, not the powder-vs-no-powder question.

Plant-based vs dairy: a soil story, not a brand story

CR's most striking apples-to-apples result was the category split. Plant-based powders (pea, rice, hemp, soy, mixed) averaged nine times the lead of dairy-based products in the 2025 test, and roughly twice the lead of beef-based products. This is the part that runs against the marketing positioning. Plant-based is typically sold as the clean-eating tier; the lab numbers say otherwise on lead .

The mechanism is not specific to protein powder. Plants take up lead and cadmium from soil through the root system, and the heavy metals concentrate in different tissues by species; legumes (peas, soy) and grains (rice in particular) are known accumulators. When a manufacturer concentrates pea protein from many kilograms of input crop into one kilogram of isolate, anything the plant accumulated rides along. Dairy proteins are concentrated through milk fractionation, and the upstream cow does not concentrate environmental lead the way a pea plant does. Beef-based protein sits between the two for similar reasons.

This does not mean plant-based protein powder is categorically unsafe, and it does not mean every plant-based product is contaminated (Truvani Plant-Based came in at 0.46 mcg in the January 2026 follow-up, the cleanest plant-based result either round). It does mean the category average is higher, and a single serving of the wrong product can put a regular user well over the daily reference. Brand-level data is the load-bearing question; category data is the starting prior.

The counterintuitive stuff (organic, chocolate) is from a different 2025 study

Two of the most-circulated claims in the 2025 protein powder news cycle do not come from CR. They come from the Clean Label Project, a Colorado non-profit advocacy organization that publishes consumer-product testing whitepapers. The Clean Label Project's January 2025 Protein Study 2.0 reported on 160 products from 70 brands (the group says roughly 83 percent of the US market by sales) using ICP-MS through their lab partner Ellipse Analytics .

The Clean Label Project report makes three claims that drive most of the counterintuitive coverage. First, that 47 percent of the 160 samples exceeded California Proposition 65 regulatory levels for at least one heavy metal, and 21 percent exceeded by at least two times. Second, that organic-labeled powders averaged about three times the lead and twice the cadmium of non-organic comparators. Third, that chocolate-flavored products averaged about four times the lead and as much as 110 times the cadmium of vanilla-flavored products .

The Clean Label Project report is also not peer-reviewed and has been publicly disputed by industry trade groups. The Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), the largest US trade association for dietary supplements, called the framing misleading because it tested against California Prop 65 thresholds (state reference doses calculated with a thousandfold safety factor) rather than against FDA's interim reference levels, and because the comparator method tended to flag plant-derived and chocolate products that have higher baseline metal exposure from the crop .

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) added that the report had not been peer-reviewed and that the full methods were not disclosed; the Natural Products Association (NPA) demanded methodology and funding disclosure. The pushback does not refute the underlying numbers, but it does push back on the framing .

The chocolate-cadmium signal has a plausible mechanism. Cacao plants accumulate cadmium from volcanic soils, and the chocolate industry has a multi-decade cadmium contamination story that pre-dates the protein powder conversation. The organic-vs-conventional gap is harder to explain on mechanism; one fair read is that organic labeling correlates with plant-protein sourcing (organic whey is rare, organic pea and rice are common), which would push the organic average toward the plant-protein average CR also flagged.

California SB 1033: the regulator is catching up to a thirty-billion-dollar industry

Senator Steve Padilla (D-San Diego) introduced California SB 1033 on February 11, 2026. The bill is the first state-level attempt to force routine heavy-metal testing and lot-specific public disclosure for protein products sold in California, and it was written in direct response to the CR retest.

If enacted, manufacturers of bulk or packaged protein products sold into California would test a representative sample of each lot for arsenic, cadmium, and lead, report results to the California Department of Public Health, and publicly disclose lot-specific results on the brand's website. Implementation date in the introduced bill: January 1, 2028 .

The bill cleared the Senate Health Committee in March 2026 and the Senate Environmental Quality Committee on April 22, 2026, with CR's advocacy arm tracking the committee progress in real time. The April 22 committee approval is the most recent procedural milestone as of this writing .

On the federal side, the legal floor for protein powder is the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA), which treats supplements as food. FDA does not approve dietary supplements for safety or effectiveness before they are sold. Manufacturers carry the upstream responsibility for safety and labeling; FDA's enforcement runs post-market against products it identifies as adulterated, misbranded, or making unauthorized drug claims .

The protein supplement market under DSHEA is roughly thirty billion dollars globally in 2025, US the largest single-country share. DSHEA was written for a much smaller, less industrialized supplement market. That is why a state-level test-and-disclose bill in 2026 would plausibly be the first time a manufacturer was legally required to publish what is in the can.

The harm is not symmetric across populations

The trap here is reading this story as either total panic or a shrug. Neither is right. The lead is real, it adds up, and the spread between brands is big enough that which tub you buy matters more than whether you use powder at all.

Children, pregnant people, and adults with iron-deficiency anemia absorb a larger fraction of ingested lead and are at higher risk from cumulative exposure. CDC's blood-lead reference value is structured around the pediatric population for that reason . A daily two-scoop habit in those groups is a different calculation than an occasional post-workout shake in an adult with no risk factors.

A pragmatic move: get the daily protein target from food first (lean meat, dairy, eggs, fish, legumes plus grains) and use powder to top up rather than as the main load. Read brand-level testing reports where they exist (and SB 1033 is trying to fix the cases where they do not). The general posture for evaluating any contested-evidence story (which this one is) is covered in reading contested evidence without the degree. The broader case for creatine as the high-evidence supplement to actually prioritize is a useful comparison: most supplement claims are weaker than that one, and a heavy metals story like this only shifts the calculus toward more selective purchase, not toward abandoning the category.

Bottom line

Consumer Reports' October 2025 retest of 23 protein powders is the cleanest current public-facing dataset on lead in the category. More than two thirds tested over CR's daily lead reference in a single serving, and the worst were over ten times the reference. Plant-based ran nine times the dairy average, and the mechanism (soil uptake by the crop) is well established. The chocolate-cadmium and organic-lead claims circulating in broader coverage are real, but they are from the Clean Label Project's 2025 whitepaper, not the CR retest, and the two studies do not agree on the size of the flavor effect.

The six products CR has so far reported at or near clean (MuscleTech 100% Mass Gainer, Clean Simple Eats, Equate, Premier Protein, Truvani Plant-Based, Ritual) are the most concrete actionable takeaway. California SB 1033 is the first credible state-level attempt to force lot-specific disclosure; it is not yet law. The federal floor under DSHEA remains a post-market enforcement framework that does not require pre-sale testing or disclosure for the protein category.

For research and educational purposes only. Not medical advice.

pepSmart has not commissioned independent clinical review of this article. Concrete decisions about supplement use, especially in pregnancy, in childhood, or with iron-deficiency anemia or kidney disease, belong with a qualified clinician.

For more on how this article was sourced and reviewed, see Editorial process and contributor disclosure and Sourcing posture.

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Sources: 10 entries, primary canon plus reputable secondary sources (Consumer Reports, Clean Label Project, NutraIngredients, industry trade groups) with inline acknowledgment, last reviewed 2026-05-27.

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