Comic Strips

20212 readers

1819 users here now

Comic Strips is a community for those who love comic stories.

The rules are simple:

The post can be a single image, an image gallery, or a link to a specific comic hosted on another site (the author's website, for instance).
The comic must be a complete story.
If it is an external link, it must be to a specific story, not to the root of the site.
You may post comics from others or your own.
If you are posting a comic of your own, a maximum of one per week is allowed (I know, your comics are great, but this rule helps avoid spam).
The comic can be in any language, but if it's not in English, OP must include an English translation in the post's 'body' field (note: you don't need to select a specific language when posting a comic).
Politeness.
AI-generated comics aren't allowed.
Adult content is not allowed. This community aims to be fun for people of all ages.

Web of links

!linuxmemes@lemmy.world: "I use Arch btw"
!memes@lemmy.world: memes (you don't say!)

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

lawrence@lemmy.world

301

Lead and Circuses | Jen Sorensen (infosec.pub)

submitted 2 weeks ago by sundray@lemmus.org to c/comicstrips@lemmy.world

15 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Jen Sorensen.

From her website:

Consumer Reports recently made headlines with a new study showing high levels of lead in many protein powders and shakes. The average amount of lead detected had increased from a previous study done 15 years ago. It’s ironic that this particular wellness fad, like many others, may actually be compromising people’s health.

Ultimately, this cartoon is about more than just one scientific finding. If we look at what happened with COVID, or childhood vaccinations, or even climate change or January 6, we can see how easily conventional wisdom gets turned on its head by bad faith actors, especially in a media environment lacking responsible editors.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] turdas@suppo.fi 3 points 2 weeks ago

That protein shake will probably replace some other kind of food you would otherwise eaten and which will naturally contain some amount of lead, so it's not just a straight up increase on top of your normal daily intake.

But yeah, you're right, avoiding the ones with unusually high lead levels like the Huel powder obviously makes sense.

The way the CR report presents their data is super terrible -- they present it as a per-serving percentage of their arbitrarily-defined concern level of 0.5 µg/day (which by the way is 2.5% of that 21 µg average you cite; unrealistically low) and the serving size they use is whatever the American label of the product reports (serving sizes on American back labels are notoriously arbitrary).

Anyway, the most sensible number I can find in their article is this:

The average concentration of lead in the chocolate- and vanilla-flavored products we tested was 17.3 parts per billion and 15.4 ppb, respectively.

17 ppb is 0.017 mg/kg, which is far below what the EU considers the maximum safe level for any food category, except for infant formula where it's only just below the maximum of 0.020 mg/kg (and exceeds the liquid infant formula max of 0.010 mg/kg, but then these are mostly powders).

According to the report you linked section 3.1.2, 17 µg/kg seems to be pretty closely in line with the average for general foodstuffs. For example dairy has a median lower bound of 2.50 and upper bound of 9.77 µg/kg, while cereals and grains are 11.0 to 28.2.

One funny thing in that EFSA report is this line:

Products for non-standard diets, food imitates and food supplements 8691 55 272 298 874 874

which shows that food supplements (which presumably includes protein powders, but will also include a lot of other stuff like vitamin pills) had, in that study, a median lead content of LB 272 µg/kg and UB 298 µg/kg.