We understand how critical it is to trust the safety, effectiveness, and overall quality of your prenatal vitamin. That is why we rigorously vet each ingredient, form, dose, and supplier we use and leverage accredited labs to third-party test every product batch we release. Our testing includes potency, pesticides, solvents, and heavy metals.
The reality is that some limited amount of heavy metals are everywhere, from our water supply to organic vegetables. While some may come from industrial production such as pesticide use, many others are naturally occurring in the earth’s crust, making them virtually impossible to avoid in many fruits and vegetables – even those sold at the farmers’ market or purchased organically. At Needed, we still believe it is critical to eat these important whole foods to nourish our bodies.
For heavy metals specifically, every single Needed product batch is tested at an accredited, third-party lab to ensure levels are below California Proposition 65 limits before we release it to our customers. Prop 65 levels are the strictest applicable regulatory limits in the U.S. to date and are set with a large margin of safety. Products we sell are tested to meet Prop 65 limits for lead, arsenic, cadmium, and mercury.
Let’s take lead for example. The average tested amount in our Prenatal Multi Capsules is 0.154 mcg, or 0.000154 mg per daily serving. This equates to 0.024 ppm (parts per million, or mcg/g) and 23.73 ppb (parts per billion or mcg/kg). This is significantly below the California Proposition 65 limit of 0.5 mcg, or 0.0005 mg per serving. This equates to a 77.16 ppb limit for our Prenatal Multi Capsules, as ppb is relative to weight. Every test result for our Prenatal Multi Capsules has been well below this limit.
Putting these numbers in the context of whole foods, a cup of cooked spinach, for example, contains 7x the amount of lead, 243x the amount of cadmium, and 8x the amount of arsenic as one daily serving of our Prenatal Multi Capsules. A cup of cooked brown rice contains 99x the amount of arsenic, a single baked potato will on average have 41x the amount of cadmium, and a serving of cooked salmon on average contains 176x the amount of Mercury that we would typically find in a serving of Prenatal Multi Capsules.
Still, since day one at Needed, we have worked to limit heavy metals in our products, while also maximizing their nutritional value, as antioxidants and essential minerals, such as Magnesium and Selenium, are vital to support our bodies’ defenses and ability to clear heavy metals.
We are committed to being a leader, always working towards better quality and solutions for this exceedingly important life stage.
- We continue to work with mission-aligned organizations to reduce heavy metal levels across the industry.
- We continue to offer more robust and optimally supportive dosages of our nutrients than the industry at large.
- We continue to advocate for awareness of how nutrition changes perinatal outcomes. Not just birth outcomes, but fertility, pregnancy, postpartum, and the health trajectory of mom and baby for the rest of their life.
- We continue to proudly partner with Clean Label Project’s Baby Coalition, whose mission is to educate not just the broader food and supplement industry, but also medical and regulatory communities on the risks of environmental exposure to infants, children, mothers, and mothers-to-be.
We’re honored to play a vital role in transforming women’s lives and safeguarding their families’ health, and our community’s trust fuels our commitment to a new and higher standard.
Have more questions? Send us an email at hello@thisisneeded.com
