the reason i will not buy a collagen product that will not show me its testing

This is the least glamorous thing I have written here and probably the most important, so stay with me.

nobody checks before it goes on sale

Most people assume there is an approval step. There is not. Under the law that governs supplements in the United States, dietary supplements do not need to be approved for safety or effectiveness before a company puts them on a shelf. The manufacturer is responsible for making sure the product is safe. Regulators generally act after something has already gone wrong.

That is a system that runs entirely on trust, and trust without verification is just hoping.

why collagen deserves particular attention

Collagen is made from animal hide and bone. Bone is precisely where an animal's body accumulates lead and cadmium over a lifetime, the same way it does in humans.

That is ordinary biology rather than a scandal, but it means the raw material carries a question that a synthesised ingredient does not. What the animals grazed on, what was in the soil and the water, how the hydrolysis was run and in what equipment. None of that is visible from the outside of a can.

what independent testing has found

People have gone and looked. In 2010, Consumer Reports tested a range of protein drinks and powders and found measurable arsenic, cadmium, lead and mercury across several products, with some exceeding limits proposed by regulators at more than a few servings a day.

In 2018, the Clean Label Project tested more than a hundred protein powders and reported detectable heavy metals across a large share of the sample, including many of the organic and plant based products people buy specifically because they assume those are the clean ones.

Trace amounts exist throughout the food supply because these metals exist in soil and water. The question that matters is how much, measured against what limit, in something you might drink every single day. Daily is the word that changes the arithmetic, and it is the word that applies to us.

the labels that do not mean anything

Clean. Pure. Premium. Lab tested. None of those are defined terms, and none of them require anyone to have tested anything in particular.

Lab tested is the one to watch. Tested for what, by whom, on which lot, and how long ago? A brand can test one batch years ago and keep the phrase on the can indefinitely. It is technically true and practically useless.

The only version worth anything is a result. A document, tied to a specific lot code, from an independent lab, that you can read yourself.

what we do

Every lot of LÉS is tested for heavy metals, and we publish the results on our testing page alongside the lot they belong to. Not a certificate we mention once at launch. A page that gets updated as lots come off the line.

If a lot ever comes back wrong, that lot does not ship. That is the whole commitment and it is not complicated.

So here is my ask, and it is genuinely not a sales line. Do this to us. Ask us for the result matching the lot code on the can in your hand, and hold us to producing it. Then go and ask the same question of everything else in your cupboard.

sources

• Consumer Reports. Health risks of protein drinks. Consumer Reports Magazine. July 2010.
• Clean Label Project. Protein powder study. 2018.
• US Food and Drug Administration. Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994, and 21 CFR Part 111, Current Good Manufacturing Practice for dietary supplements.

LÉS is a beverage, not medicine, and nothing here is medical advice or a claim about any other company's products.