A YouTube commentary (TJ Walker) criticizing protein powders and processed ‘health’ foods for lead contamination, misleading marketing, and poor nutrition. The speaker cites a Consumer Reports finding that over two-thirds of popular protein powders contain unsafe lead levels, argues that supplements face minimal FDA oversight, and urges consumers to prefer whole foods (nuts, seeds, legumes, vegetables) over marketed protein products.
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Lead in protein powders and a lot of other so called healthy food and junk food. Even a new Consumer Reports investigation found that more than 2/3 of popular protein shakes and powders contain unsafe levels of lead. While the doses aren't high enough to cause immediate harm, the long term risk is serious. And it's a reminder of how much junk hides behind health marketing. I mean, these days people, you can go to almost any junk food store, any candy store, any fast food store, and people talk, oh, it's got protein in it. Most protein powders are loaded with sugar, chemicals and cheap fillers, the very ingredients that cause inflammation and disease. Add lead contamination and you've turned a fitness supplement into a toxic cocktail. Nutrition experts say the body doesn't need powders to thrive. You can get all the protein you need from whole foods, nuts, seeds, beans, lentils and oats without ingesting heavy metals or empty calories. As Stanford's Dr. Stephen Luby put it, we should be asking ourselves, is this exposure protein powder creating more risk than it is benefits? Okay, what's the real message here? You are being scammed. Marketers want to convince you, oh, I can put more protein powder in this powder, in this chicken nugget, in this candy ice cream cone and you're going to be healthy. It's a scam. Stop doing it. If you want protein, eat a walnut, eat a seed, eat real food, eat real vegetables. You can eat meat too. It doesn't need to be fried and candy coated to get the protein. Let's dig a little bit deeper. This is insidious and it gets back to the basic problem that we face in modern capitalism. Look, I'm a capitalist. I don't want to ban products that people want to buy just because it's not perfectly healthy. But the reality is lentils don't have a multi, multi, multi billion dollar advertising campaign budget. They just don't. Seeds in general don't have multimillion dollar ad campaigns. Walnuts, even peanuts have some, but nuts have nothing compared to what McDonald's had and what some of these so called health drinks and protein powders have. The whole reason they have money to market to you is they're taking something from the real world, putting lots of different packaging, a lot of other stuff, a little color, pretty pictures, typically sugar into it, jacking up the price a lot and selling it back to you. And it is destroying your health. Ask yourself if all these protein powders were making people so much healthier. All this extra protein and so many foods could give everyone Big bulging biceps and tiny waist. Wouldn't you notice it at the grocery store when you're walking around? When you notice it at the park, at the Walmart? I don't know about you, but that's not what I'm seeing. I'm not seeing tons and tons of ripped muscles everywhere. I'm seeing an epidemic of obesity, diabetes and people being overweight. And part of it comes from this idea that if I just buy one more potion, one more magic powder, if I just go to this fast food restaurant and get the new enhanced extra protein version, I'll be okay. No, you need to actually buy real food. And I mentioned peanuts and walnuts and sunflower seeds and chias. Those are things I eat every day in large amounts. And no, I'm not a vegetarian, but I do get a lot of protein from seeds and nuts. But even there, you got to be tricky because marketers have figured out, hey, let's take this healthy peanut, this healthy walnut, and let's just put tons of sugar and salt on it. People will like it more. And it's right. You're sitting there watching TV and you have some sort of peanuts, some sort of nuts, and it has this wonderful coating of sugar and salt. It reaches that bliss point. You eat one and you eat another and another, and before you know it, the one pound bag is gone and all the health benefits you could have received are gone because you've loaded up your body with sugar, which is going to make you hungry, and another few hours salt, which is bad for hypertension. Now, by the way, I'm not a medical doctor. These are all obvious things that everyone knows if they spend two seconds researching this. Plus, if you eat a whole bag of nuts, if you eat a pound of any nuts, that's going to be way, way more of a caloric intake than you need in a day when you eat nuts and seeds that don't have sugar and salt on them. They're tasty, they're filling, and it's much easier to stop after just a handful. Let's look at some more of the facts here. It's important to realize and remind ourselves. Supplements face almost zero oversight by the Food and Drug Administration, especially in this administration. So you can, you can go out on the street, scrape dog poop off the sidewalk, put it in a package and say, hey, the big pharmaceutical industry doesn't want you to eat this. But it's magic, it'll make you healthy. I do it every day. You can do that. Chances are you'll get away with it now that that example may be a little extreme. It could get people sick instantly, and there might be a backlash, but I'm exaggerating by only about 10%. You can sell almost any tree bark, shark cartilage nonsense, grass clippings from your backyard with zero evidence it helps people, zero evidence it makes them stronger, slimmer, healthier in any way. And as long as it doesn't kill people instantly, you'll probably get away with it. And the number one check on that for you and for me is buy real food from a grocery store. Buy a head of lettuce, buy real broccoli, buy some grapes. Spend most of your time in the fresh produce area, and you can avoid that once you buy something in a box. I'm not saying everything in a box is poison, but once you buy something in a box, can or a jar, you don't really know what's in it. And the problem most of us has, we don't even bother reading the label. If you're getting tomatoes, for example, and then you look at the label and there's 109 ingredients, chances are it's not nearly as healthy as buying an actual tomato in the produce department. And again, some of you say, well, T.J. fine for you to say you're affluent and there's nice grocery stores near where you live, all well and good. What about people who are in these food deserts? You could still at least not spend money on these protein powders. You can still at least not buy sugar water. It is killing us. Literally every single day, people are dying from the garbage they put in their mouth. And this is, this is unique in human history. For most of human history, we died because we didn't have any food. Now we're dying because we're putting too much garbage food into us. And that is should be a relatively easier problem to solve than no food.
