My Search for Lead-Free Prenatal Vitamins

As you may recall from my last post about the FDA finding lead in women’s and children’s vitamins, I found my very own prenatal on the FDA list.  Since then I’ve been on a search to decide if I should go ahead and switch to another prenatal or if lead is pretty much unavoidable.  I’ve found some interesting things.

It seems like every brand I decided to look into cost much more than my Rainbow Light Just Once Prenatal.  I looked at Megafood Baby & Me, New Chapter, Synergy Group, Juice Plus, and Garden of Life.  Some of these companies don’t make prenatals, but I thought I could add in more of whatever I needed.  Anyway, they were all much more expensive.  But while searching for these brands, which are all very high quality, I found a few of them on the FDA list.  WHAT?!  This made me start to question the whole lead thing even more.  I was especially surprised to see a Garden of Life product, so I emailed them to find out why.  Here is what they said.

Thank you for your email and interest in Garden of Life’s products.
Garden of Life has been a recognized leader in innovative, whole food
supplementation.  We firmly believe that this approach is best for our
bodies and our customers’ have come to depend on us for these quality
nutrients.

Among the challenges we face when sourcing the raw materials for our
products, though, is that they originate in natural and organic
ingredients.  It’s not uncommon when dealing with natural or organic
products and foods, derived most frequently from organic soils, to see
traces of all kinds of elemental ingredients.  Lead is a natural
component of the soil that the plant materials are grown in.  No lead is
added to the soil or to the products during manufacture; rather, the
lead is taken up by the plants from what is already in the soil.  The
amount of trace minerals and variable content from lot to lot are beyond
our control and are just part of the nature of the product.

With regard to Living Multi, the FDA clearly noted that the trace
amounts of lead found in the lot it tested did not present a safety
issue.  The Living Multi product line is another way that we, at Garden
of Life, endeavor to deliver quality supplements to our customers.

Now, to me this really makes it seem like lead is unavoidable.  I mean, if it’s even in soil, then it’s in our fruits and veggies, right??

From there, I moved on to this post at Treehugger, and I read the comments.  These two really stood out to me:

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 occurring 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.

And this one…

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.

So there you have it.  I feel much better after digging a little deeper into the “lead in my vitamins” issue.  I’m not worried anymore, and once again, for now I’m sticking with my Just Once-Rainbow Light Prenatals; at least until I can afford something better.  If I don’t get lead from my vitamins, I’ll just get it from my food anyway.