Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There are heavy metals in everything we eat, because they are present in the world we live in, and plants absorb them in small quantities. It's a fact of life for living on earth. Garden of life is not adding mercury to their product, it's naturally in the plants they source the protein from, the same as tuna tends to be high in mercury. As far as mercury and most heavy metals go, you can find more specific information if you are really troubled by them, but you have to understand that our bodies are outfitted to live on this planet that is full of heavy metals. We have systems in our body to chelate and remove things that are not used by the body. There is generally a set rate our bodies can shed heavy metals at, so your health is only at risk if you consume enough heavy metals that your body cannot keep up with the process of removing them and they build up to unsafe levels over time. Garden of life products shouldn't contain any more of those metals than if you just ate the raw rice, peas, and beans yourself. I feel it is a quality product for nutrition, but the taste and texture.....is horrendous. This coming from someone who can easily eat any veggies raw, not dunked in ranch. This stuff is gritty and the chai flavor is mediocre at best. Combined with other sources of texture and flavor though, it's not bad. Just ice and almond milk would probably do the trick for most. For anyone who doesn't know, proteins isn't just protein. There are many proteins used by plants and animals, and proteins are made up of different amino acids. When you eat protein, your body doesn't just take those proteins and stick them together to build stuff like little legos. Enzymes in your digestive tract break the proteins down into their base amino acids. Those are carried through your blood stream, and our body makes it's own proteins from them. The amino acids that humans need are not necessarily the same that you would get from proteins found in say rice for instance. Especially the appropriate ratio of those amino acids that humans need. If you get just a rice protein powder, it is highly ineffective for human nutrition. Garden of life gets around this by blending proteins from multiple plants together that does provide the proper blend of amino acids for your body. Even if you buy another brand, make sure it is not just pea protein, or just rice protein, it needs to be an appropriate blend of amino acids to be useful to your body.