FDA Discovers Lead in Women's, Children's Vitamins

so absolutely horrifying. like pharmaceuticals in drinking water. awesome!

thanks for the list!

Baah, as a chemist, this article makes me want to smack some people upside the noggin'.

A pill contains something like a few billions of trillions of molecules. That is a lot. A big number with lots of zeros. Lead is a naturally occuring element. It is in everywhere, in everything, simply because it has billions of trillions of chances in each pill or apple or piece of pumpkin pie.

You know what? Pretty much everything you touch, eat, or drink has ~1 parts per billion lead. It would have lead on this order of magnitude if no person besides you had ever existed. Get over it.

The only thing this article demonstrates is how powerful our analytical techniques have become...detecting ppb levels is quite a trick.

Any lead level safe? Like it or not treehuggersville, there will NEVER be a case where there is not trace amounts of lead in materials, especially those containing other metals. It isn't like picking bad seeds out of your pot. We go through great lengths trying to eliminate certain metals from semiconductor materials and packaging - and trust me, there's big money in doing it, and can't get rid of it all. It isn't possible. So, less is better, but if you are looking for none, you'll never see it, and the more you want out, the more it'll cost you, because purification to parts-per-million (ppm) or ppb is very very expensive.

This is scary to think of how many people take vitamins thinking they are helping themselves and then to read this post and think they are hurting themselves is crazy.

So, ah, two things:

1) Quantify. How much lead are we talking about? Granted "any" is bad, but obviously more lead is more bad.

2) Source? That is, why do these vitamins contain lead? Where's the lead coming from? How's it getting into the vitamins?

If the vitamins contain calcium carbonate derived from limestone (oyster shell is an alternate source) guess what: there is likely to be some natural lead at low levels. It is possible to screen carbonate for lead prior to feestock purchase. The question is: is this exposure potential significant?

The comments so far have questioned the importance of this, so I did some research to find out. I have a personal stake in this, since my 1.5 yr old son takes half a multivitamin per day with an exposure level of about 0.1 micrograms of lead per day.

The WHO has set a permissible intake level of 5 mcg per day of lead per kg of body weight. So, for my son (12kg), the upper limit is 60 mcg. Right now, his lead exposure from his multi vitamin is 1/600 the max permissible value, and I trust the WHO values more than I would the FDA, which tends (esp under the current adminstration) to be influenced by large corporations.

My children are screened once a year for lead, and so far have been well below the permissible values. While I will consider changing multis to a lower lead brand, I don't think there is much cause for concern unless you have one of the higher-lead brands. I do think that the FDA should get more strict, however, and work with multis to reduce lead in their vitamins.

I am surprised at the amount of variation in lead, though. I understood the multivitamin industry to have only a few producers that every brand purchased from, putting their own label on the product. Does anyone know why there might be such a wide variety of lead levels in the multis?

This article leaves out a pretty important piece of information:

"These safe/tolerable exposure levels are referred to as the provisional total tolerable intake levels (PTTI)."

"Estimates of Pb exposures for ALL products were below the PTTI levels for the at-risk population groups of children, pregnant and lactating women and adult women."

This is from the FDA website that has the test data. In fact, all of the vitamins are well below what is considered by the FDA to be a safe amount.

Mmm... plumbism. Nothing better than neurological damage to start your day!

I did some research on this. Turns out lead has been falling from the sky for nearly a century due to leaded gasoline. The dust in each square foot of land outside is estimated to contain a minimum of 125 mcg of lead and a maximum of 730 mcg in dense urban environments. Each 100 g serving of vegetables organic or conventionally grown contains about 5 mcg of lead on average. Only greenhouse grown organic produce contains lead below the limits of detection used in the FDA study. Every adult has about 500 mcg of lead coursing through his/her veins at any given time.

Lead is present in all foods/supplements in direct correlation to the quantity of vegetable matter contained.

If you put all 324 products tested by the FDA into a spreadsheet and estimate the amount of vegetable matter per product, you get a perfectly linear correlation with lead content. The more vegetable matter, the more lead. Shakes, which contain 36 grams of vegetable matter, contain more than you'll find in 6-gram per serving multi-tablet supplements. These in turn contain more lead than lower weight capsules type products. And lower weight capsules have less lead than liquid supplements, which are 95% water, with very little vegetable matter at all.

The FDA does not want to sound the alarm because it calls into question the entire US food supply. Each serving of all vegetables, organic and non-organically grown, contains 5 mcg of lead on average. This means that ever ounce of food sold in California would require a warning under the strictest interpretations of Proposition 65. Immediately, all foods are now declared potentially hazardous. ALL!

In reality, we've been eating this much lead for 2 generations. And admospheric lead levels have been declining since 1987, when leaded gasoline was banned in the USA. It is terrible that our parents have done this. But it did build one of the strongest economies in history, and it kept our vehicles moving. The FDA found 100% of the dietary supplements safe, after testing 324 products. That says a lot about the supplement industry. I doubt you would get the same results from any other kind of food on the market.

I am very happy to post my comment in this blog. I gathered lot of information from this site.

A Canadian company, Naturally Nova Scotia, makes supplements from foods instead of synthetics. The have vitamin C from fruit, herbal tinctures, green drinks, vitamin D3, and others.