Protein powder had a rough year. In October 2025, Consumer Reports tested 23 protein powders and shakes and found that more than two-thirds of them had more lead in a single serving than their experts consider safe to drink daily. One vegan mass gainer came in at 7.7 micrograms of lead per serving, about 1,570% of the level CR flags as a concern. Every headline that followed said the same word: lead.
We have been pulling published lab reports into Tallow all year and attaching the actual numbers to the products they belong to. When I lined up the protein powder reports side by side, lead was not the number that jumped out. Cadmium was. And almost nobody is writing about it.
What the lab reports actually say
These are real, published third-party lab results, most of them ordered by Lead Safe Mama and run by Purity Laboratories or SGS North America. The numbers are in ppb, which is just micrograms of metal per kilogram of powder.
The per-serving column is our math, not the lab's: metal concentration multiplied by the scoop size printed on the label. I am flagging that because the lab that ran most of these tests deliberately does not report per-serving numbers, on the position that there is no safe level of lead. I ran the serving math anyway because that is the only way to compare these against the limits regulators actually use.
| Product | Lead | Cadmium | Arsenic | Scoop | Cadmium per serving |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Truvani Organic Plant Based, Chocolate | 17 ppb | 128 ppb | 16 ppb | 33 g | 4.2 mcg |
| Truvani Organic Plant Based, Vanilla | 21.7 ppb | 46.6 ppb | 15.8 ppb | 29 g | 1.4 mcg |
| Just Ingredients, Chocolate (whey first) | 12 ppb | 71 ppb | 8 ppb | 33 g | 2.3 mcg |
| Just Ingredients, Vanilla Bean (whey first) | 7 ppb | 13 ppb | 7 ppb | 33 g | 0.4 mcg |
| Vital Proteins Collagen Peptides | not detected | not detected | 20 ppb | 20 g | none detected |
Now put that against the limits. California's Proposition 65 sets a maximum allowable dose level of 0.5 micrograms a day for lead and 4.1 micrograms a day for cadmium. One 33 gram scoop of the chocolate Truvani works out to roughly 4.2 micrograms of cadmium. That is your entire day's cadmium allowance in one shake, before you have eaten anything else.
The lead in these same products is honestly not the scandal. It is right around the line, not ten times over it like the worst products Consumer Reports found. The cadmium is the part that goes unmentioned, because nobody is looking for it.
Chocolate is the tell
Look at the table again. In both brands, the chocolate version has several times more cadmium than the vanilla version of the exact same product from the exact same company. Truvani chocolate has about 2.7 times the cadmium of Truvani vanilla. Just Ingredients chocolate has about 5.5 times the cadmium of their vanilla.
The ingredient lists explain it. Truvani's chocolate lists alkalized cocoa as the second ingredient, right after pea protein. Just Ingredients' chocolate lists cacao third. Neither vanilla version contains any cocoa at all. The formulas are otherwise built from the same short list of protein sources, and the cocoa is the biggest thing that changes between them.
Cocoa is a cadmium sponge. The cacao tree pulls cadmium up out of the soil and concentrates it in the bean. Europe has treated this as a real food safety issue since 2019, setting legal cadmium ceilings on chocolate that scale with cocoa content, plus a separate limit for cocoa powder sold for direct consumption. In their words, "the darker the chocolate, the higher the maximum levels are," with the strictest limits reserved for the varieties children eat most.
So chocolate is a known cadmium problem, and regulators have known it for years. Nobody carried that fact over to the scoop of chocolate protein people drink every single morning.
The Clean Label Project found the same thing at scale. In their protein powder study, which tested 160 products from 70 brands, chocolate powders averaged 110 times more cadmium than vanilla ones.
Why cadmium is worth caring about
Lead gets all the attention because lead is genuinely awful and because Prop 65's lead limit is brutally strict at half a microgram. But cadmium has a property that makes it a slow problem rather than a loud one.
Your body barely gets rid of cadmium. Its biological half-life is roughly 25 to 30 years, and the kidneys alone can hold up to half of your total body burden of it. So it accumulates over a lifetime rather than clearing between doses. The ATSDR is blunt about where that lands: "the kidney is the principal organ targeted by chronic exposure to cadmium", and severe chronic exposure eventually shows up in bone as well.
So the risk profile is a bad match for how protein powder gets used. This is not a food you eat twice a year. It is a scoop a day, every day, for years, which is exactly the exposure pattern a 25 year half-life punishes.
The organic and plant-based trap
Here is the part that should annoy anyone who shops carefully. The labels people trust the most are the ones testing worst.
Clean Label Project's numbers:
- Certified organic protein powders averaged three times the lead of non-organic ones.
- 79% of organic protein powders tested over Prop 65 lead levels.
- 77% of plant-based powders tested over Prop 65 lead levels.
- Plant-based powders held five times more cadmium than whey-based ones.
- 47% of all products exceeded at least one federal or state safety limit, and 21% came in at more than double Prop 65 levels.
Consumer Reports found the same direction independently: lead in plant-based products averaged about nine times higher than in dairy-based ones.
None of this means organic is a scam or that the brands are cheating. It is simpler and dumber than that. Heavy metals come from soil. Plants pull them out of the soil. Whey and collagen come from an animal that filtered a lot of that out for you first. When you build a protein powder entirely out of pea, pumpkin seed, chia and cocoa, you are concentrating a lot of plant matter into one scoop, and whatever was in the dirt rides along. Organic farming controls for synthetic pesticides. It does not control for what is already in the ground.
Our own table shows this cleanly. The collagen powder, the only animal-sourced product in the set, was the one that came back non-detect for both lead and cadmium.
To be fair to the brands here
Two things need saying, because I do not want this read as a hit piece.
Truvani's lead is fine. When Consumer Reports went back and tested five more powders that readers asked about, Truvani's chocolate came in at 0.46 micrograms of lead per serving, under CR's 0.5 level of concern. That independently lines up with the 17 ppb the other lab found on a different lot. Two labs, two lots, same answer. Truvani does not have a lead problem.
They have a cadmium number that nobody asked them about, in a category where nobody is required to measure it.
And second, these are single-lot results. One jar is not a brand. The avocado oil study we wrote about last week bought two separate lots of everything for exactly this reason, and it mattered, because some products passed one lot and failed the other. Treat the table above as a real signal about the chocolate-versus-vanilla pattern, not as a permanent grade for any one company.
Nobody is required to test any of this
There are no federal limits for heavy metals in protein powder. The FDA does not review, approve, or test supplements before they go on sale, and manufacturers do not have to prove safety first. Every number in this article exists only because a nonprofit, a magazine, or one woman with a lab budget decided to go buy the product and pay for the test themselves.
That may change, at least in one state. In February 2026, California Senator Steve Padilla introduced SB 1033, which would require protein powder makers to test for heavy metals and publicly disclose the results. Until something like that passes, "we test every batch" on a website means whatever the brand wants it to mean, because no one checks and no one has to publish.
What I actually do about it
Nothing here says stop eating protein powder. Protein is good. This is a contamination problem, not a protein problem, and it is fixable by choosing differently.
Pick vanilla over chocolate. This is the single highest-leverage swap in the whole article. Same brand, same protein, a fraction of the cadmium. If you drink one every day, take the vanilla.
If you use it daily, lean whey or collagen. Plant protein is fine occasionally. But daily, for years, is the exposure pattern that cadmium's 25-year half-life actually cares about, and the animal-sourced options are consistently cleaner on both metals.
Ask for the certificate of analysis. Not "third-party tested." The actual document, with the metals named and numbers next to them. Brands that really test will send it. The reaction you get when you ask tells you most of what you need.
Rotate. If you use the same scoop of the same product every morning for three years, any contamination in it compounds. Switching brands and protein sources spreads that out.
How to know what you're actually drinking
A clean label is not evidence anymore. Every product in that table is certified organic, or grass-fed, or six-ingredient, or all three. Those claims were all true. They just had nothing to do with what the lab found.
This is exactly why we built Tallow. Scan a barcode and you get what is actually in the product: ingredients rated one by one, and the real published lab results attached to the product when they exist. Every number in this article is in the app, linked to the exact product and the exact report it came from, so you can scan the tub in your kitchen instead of trying to remember a table you read once. Eat clean, drink clean, and make the label prove it.
This article reports publicly published third-party lab results for consumer-information purposes. Per-serving figures are calculated by Tallow from reported concentrations and label serving sizes, and are not part of the original lab reports. Results reflect the specific lots tested and are not a statement about every batch a brand produces, nor a legal determination against any company. Sources: Consumer Reports, Clean Label Project, Lead Safe Mama, California OEHHA, ATSDR, The Effects of Cadmium Toxicity, European Commission, and Consumer Reports Advocacy.