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.

I agree, as someone who literally just drank a chocolate flavored whey protein shake 10 minutes before reading this.

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.

> 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 only real defense for Clean Label's behavior here is that the lead levels found are too low to be harmful, so it's not like people are being harmed by their lack of disclosure. (Still a bad actor, but because they're trying to shake down brands, not because they're abetting poisoning consumers.)

Any amount of lead is harmful. There is no such thing as too low.

That's not really how anything works. The dose makes the poison.

This paper claims that the arsenic and cadmium levels are a bigger concern, but still not meaningful: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7509468/

> The EPA adult lead model (ALM) was selected to estimate adult BLLs, as the EPA recommended this model for assessments of non-residential Pb exposures that result in BLLs <25 μg/L [43]. A baseline adult BLL of 1.27 μg/dL was used, which was the calculated weighted geometric mean of BLLs in adults aged 20 years or older during the 2005–2012 NHANES survey years [40].

> Gastrointestinal absorption of Pb was conservatively assumed to be 20%.

> The calculated CDI range for heavy metals in 1–3 servings of protein powder supplements identified by Consumer Reports were: 0.2–16.9 μg/day for As, 0–5.6 μg/day for Cd, 0–1.1 μg/day for Hg, and 0–13.5 μg/day for Pb.

> The calculated CDI range for heavy metals in 1–3 servings of protein powder supplements identified by the Clean Label Project were: 0.09–10.3 μg/day for As, 0.03–39.5 μg/day for Cd, 0.04–2.92 μg/day for Hg, and 0.09–15.9 μg/day for Pb.

> None of the estimated BLLs exceeded the CDC guidance value of 5 μg/dL, for all examined exposure scenarios. The highest estimated BLLs were 2.24 (+0.97 from baseline) μg/dL and 1.50 (+0.23 from baseline) μg/dL, using data from the US Consumer Reports and Clean Label Project, respectively.

> Overall, findings from this analysis suggest that consumption of protein powder supplements containing As, Cd, Pb, and Hg is not associated with an increased risk of non-carcinogenic health effects due to heavy metal exposure.

> The amount of Pb an individual ingests via food is largely dependent on the Pb concentrations found in the soil, air, and water that the food was grown in Bolger et al. [24], Khandekar et al. [25] and Marin et al. [26]. Anthropogenic sources of Pb, such as the proximity to industries producing Pb emissions impact the levels of Pb in food. According to IARC [27], in the United States, the estimated daily dietary intake of Pb is ∼83 μg/day (based on a market basket survey) [27]. However, dietary intake of Pb can vary depending on geological location, for example, the daily dietary intake may range from 7 μg/day (in Malaysia) to 230 μg/day (in Belgium) [27]. For comparison, the mean Pb exposure from ingestion of three servings of protein powder supplements was 3.52 μg/day; the highest daily exposure potential was 13.5 μg/day (calculated based on Consumer Reports data).

> Together, this analysis indicates that relative to the average daily human exposure potential reported for As, Cd, Pb, and Hg from food and drink, ingestion of protein powder supplements contributes to only a fraction of the heavy metal body burdens for each heavy metal. Further, even in individuals that ingest three servings of protein powder supplements per day (potentially in individuals ingesting protein powder supplements as meal replacements), daily heavy metal (As, Cd, Pb, and Hg) concentrations ingested are well below the reported average daily heavy metal concentrations ingested by the general population.

Any amount of Lead is poisonous.

A tiny amount of lead is a tiny bit poisonous. Magnitude matters.

And time. People with a bll level 76% above baseline will wonder in ten years why they have coordination problems and trouble thinking.

That's the point -- the worst of these products don't have levels above baseline!

With an average US blood lead level of about 1 microgram per deciliter, an increase of 76% is still less than 2 micrograms per deciliter which would have an imperceptible impact on any neurological function for an individual. People with even a tenfold (1000%) increase above baseline don't show perceptible coordination problems. Not writing to have an argument. Just see a lot of people who suffer from misperception of the impacts of tiny levels of contaminants, people lose sleep non-stop worry, sometimes even lose the equity in their "contaminated" house by walking away from their loan due to misinformation about risk.

For chronic exposure, yes. You don't want it to be in your food all the time. But accidentally eating a tiny bit once would be safe.

That’s the whole point of this article. Many people will consume multiple servings of protein shake per day for most of their life, and they’re contaminated.

They're contaminated at levels comparable to other foods people eat (baseline).

They could just report their findings to the FDA if above allowable limits.

Wtf? Responsible disclosure is definitely NOT about avoiding PR backlash.