The Internet Is The World's Worst Pharmacy w/ Paris Martineau & Ashwin Rodrigues
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 688 Ratings
🗓️ 29 October 2025
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Welcome to Radio Better Offline, a tech talk radio show recorded out of iHeartRadio's studio in New York City.
Ed is joined in-studio by Paris Martineau of Consumer Reports and freelance writer Ashwin Rodrigues to talk about the amount of lead in protein shakes, why people turn to the internet for medical advice, and how supplements are the wild west of e-commerce.
Paris Martineau
https://www.consumerreports.org/about-us/our-people/our-experts/paris-martineau/
https://bsky.app/profile/paris.nyc
Protein Powders story: https://www.consumerreports.org/lead/protein-powders-and-shakes-contain-high-levels-of-lead-a4206364640/
Ashwin Rodrigues
https://bsky.app/profile/ashwinrodrigues.com
Supplements Story: https://archive.ph/L6OZz/again?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/well/doctors-supplements.html
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.6 | CallZone Media. |
| 0:10.3 | Hello and welcome to Better Offline. |
| 0:12.5 | I'm your host, Ed Zetron. |
| 0:18.1 | Better Offline. Yeah. Now the other day, someone suggested I shouldn't do ASMR-style voices, and I'm still not sure what that means, but does it mean I shouldn't be this close and being like, you're in the bathtub? |
| 0:36.3 | Either way, I'm never listening to a single |
| 0:38.1 | bit of feedback I've ever received. But today I'm in studio in New York goddamn city, and I'm |
| 0:42.8 | joined by the incredible freelance writer Ashwin Rodriguez. How you doing Ashwin? Good. Thanks for |
| 0:47.3 | having me. And Paris Mardonn-O of Consumer Reports. Hello. Should I do mouth noises too? |
| 0:52.5 | Yeah, they love them. No, ma-mom. But you had a huge story, Paris, in the last week or so. It was like a week or two times a bit of a blur, honestly. So it was a story around 23 protein powders and ready to drink shakes and properly brands. And you found that heavy metal contamination was common? |
| 1:11.3 | How common exactly? |
| 1:12.4 | Yeah, very common, actually. |
| 1:14.2 | Like more than two-thirds of them. |
| 1:16.0 | Actually, this will be really important for you. |
| 1:17.8 | Your Lister's 69% of them had, 69% of them had levels of lead in one serving that are more than what like our food safety experts say is safe to take in a day. |
| 1:32.1 | Jesus Christ. |
| 1:33.1 | And the more you kind of dig into the specifics, I feel like the more concerning it gets. |
| 1:38.8 | Some of the most contaminated powders we found were plant-based ones and overwhelmingly plant-based |
| 1:45.2 | powders instead of, you know, versus like way or dairy-based products like way or beef-based, |
| 1:51.4 | they had just higher levels of lead. Why is the lead getting in? I mean, the lead is getting in |
| 1:57.5 | from a lot of different ways, but probably the most common is like the soil |
... |
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