PSA: I actually did mostly live on huel for a few years, and in my case, it led to deficiencies in vitamins D and B12 and iron, though I've also had a vitamin D deficiency on other diets, so I wouldn't attribute that to the huel.

Hi! Lead quantification expert here ( https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/science/tea-leaves-lead.html )

The latest study from CR has some serious flaws.

1) The lead "levels of concern" it indexes on are complete bullshit numbers generated by the state of California without any scientific basis. These values are likely 100-1000x lower than amounts I would view as actually concerning.

2) This kind of testing is subject to several compounding sources of measurement error that I've detailed here: https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/hes-making-a-plasticlist-hes-checking

3) There are concerns analogous to p-hacking (or selection bias at least) with this kind of study. Consumer Reports studies many types of products. Within each type of product, they test for many contaminants. They're bound to find that some combination of product and contaminant is high, and then they write an article on that one.

@bens excellent post, thanks for sharing

Huel say that the testing they do, as well as independent testing they have no control over in order to obtain some certification, has not shown unsafe lead levels:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Huel/comments/1o6j62j/comment/njilgkv/

I'll wait for independent confirmation - seems more likely to me that the one recent test is wrong than every other test done previously

@chrisjbillington Also 0.5 µg is an absurdly low threshold for CR to pick to compare to, it's well lower than any regulatory threshold I can find, and seems decently below what people are actually exposed to in their diets already

Don't get me wrong we should minimise lead exposure best we can, but it seems like this kind of exposure level is already par for the course

From a 2010 article (yes, exposure may have decreased in the last 15 years, but probably not by an order of magnitude):

https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/efsajournal/pub/1570

In average adult consumers, lead dietary exposure ranges from 0.36 to 1.24, up to 2.43 µg/kg body weight (b.w.) per day in high consumers in Europe

I weight ~80kg so if I'm an "average adult consumer" my intake would be 30–100 µg per day.

7.7µg per serving of Huel is not making a difference, hell if it's replacing other food in your diet it might even be decreasing your total exposure

https://x.com/parismartineau/status/1978155280803238160

A single serving of Huel has between 1200 and 1600% of the concerning lead intake as well as excess cadmium.

I do think if you don't chew anything that would be bad for your jaw but could be solved with chewing gum or those jaw exercise things.