March 28, 2023 - Epoch Times
14:08
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| There is a new, rather serious warning about the spices that are in your food as well as in your pantry. | |
| According to an analysis that was conducted by Consumer Reports, it found that many of the spices that very likely are in your cupboard right now contain high levels of dangerous heavy metals, including arsenic, cadmium, and lead. | |
| This report investigated many different types of spices, including cumin, chili powder, oregano, basil, ginger, paprika, turmeric, black pepper, and so on and so forth. | |
| And as you can see on your screen, what they did was that they took five to ten brands of each spice and tested them for different heavy metal contaminants. | |
| And after running those tests, they gave each brand a ranking, either a green checkmark indicating that it's safe, or the brand got one, two, or three red circles, indicating that there's either a mild or serious reason to be concerned. | |
| And after running their full analysis on the 126 different products, which range from national brands down to private label store brands, they found that about a third of all the samples contained either concerning or even dangerous levels of heavy metals. | |
| A third of the brands that are currently on the supermarket store shelves. | |
| Here's specifically what the report found. | |
| Quote, Meaning, | |
| in practice, that as you're busy making sure that your house and your kids' rooms don't have any peeling lead paint, and you're making sure that nobody's drinking water from the East Palestine Reservoir, Well, your kids can still be getting high levels of heavy metals through the spices that are being added to their foods. | |
| Even if, I should mention, even if those spices are quote-unquote organic. | |
| Because among the disconcerting discoveries in the study was that it didn't really matter what the brand was and whether that brand was quote-unquote organic. | |
| Because according to the analysis, there was no single brand that stood out as being completely safe across the board. | |
| Here's specifically what they wrote. | |
| Now, some of the spices fared much worse than others. | |
| For instance, in 31 of these spices that were tested, the levels of lead were, quote, so high that they exceeded the maximum amount that anyone should have in a full day. | |
| And for some particular categories of herbs and spices, these researchers found that there were just no safe options at all. | |
| For instance, when the researchers looked at the herbs thyme and oregano, they found that all of the different brands that they tested had, at best, concerning levels of different heavy metals. | |
| And then for your reference, right after Thyme and Oregano, Ginger and Basil were the second worst offenders, having all but one of the brands that were tested, for both spices, come back with concerning levels of heavy metals, at least. | |
| Now obviously this report raises many, many different questions, with the first one being, how exactly is this happening? | |
| How are these heavy metals getting into these spices? | |
| Well, according to one of the lead chemists who was involved in the testing of these samples at the Consumer Reports Laboratory, well, a lot of this contamination can be attributed to where the spices were grown and or with the manufacturing process. | |
| Here's what he said, quote, Heavy metals may also get into food, including herbs and spices, during manufacturing, from processing equipment or packaging, for example. | |
| And interestingly, this is something that the different spice trade organizations acknowledge. | |
| For instance, here is what the executive director of the American Spice Trade Association said regarding this matter. | |
| It's almost impossible to rid herbs and spices of all heavy metals because of the unavoidable presence in the environments where they are grown. | |
| The amount of heavy metals absorbed from the soil and the part of the plant where they can end up differs from plant to plant. | |
| According to a recent risk analysis by the American Spice Trade Association, spices make up less than.1% of dietary lead exposure in children ages 1 to 6. | |
| And for adults, the American Spice Trade Association believes that the risk is low in large part because spices are a very small component of the diet. | |
| The argument is essentially that the contaminants are there, you can't do much about them, But it's okay because spices are, after all, a small part of the human diet. | |
| However, that does not explain the wild range between different brands, the wild range of contamination between each individual brand. | |
| And furthermore, the problem becomes more magnified when you involve small children. | |
| That's because, and this is according to this report, quote, Lead arsenic and cadmium can increase the risk of cancer, cognitive and reproductive problems, as well as other adverse conditions, even in small amounts. | |
| Exposure puts children at risk for lowered IQ, Behavioral problems, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, type 2 diabetes, and other health issues as well. | |
| Furthermore, the problem with these heavy metals is that they accumulate in the body over time. | |
| Here's, for instance, how an investigator with Consumer Reports, here's how she explained her findings in an interview over on CNBC. Heavy metals cannot easily be cleared or metabolized by the body. | |
| They have a cumulative effect, and so they literally stay in you. | |
| They're a type of almost a forever chemical. | |
| You know, it's bad for adults, but it's really not good for kids and babies and very young children with developing brains. | |
| And unfortunately, there have been recent examples of young children living in households that use a lot of spices falling ill. | |
| For instance, this study right here Was able to link a case of lead poisoning in a 12-month-old boy out of Massachusetts, at least in part, to the turmeric that was used by the family. | |
| And after that case, there were five more similar cases discovered in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, and New York. | |
| And since that study was made public, by the way, over a dozen turmeric brands have been recalled. | |
| Then there was another study that was published in the CDC's weekly report back in the year 2018, you can see it up on screen for yourself, which found that, quote, high lead levels in 22% of food samples, mostly spices and herbal remedies, taken from homes of children with lead poisoning in North Carolina. | |
| And so, in short, this is a serious problem that warrants at least serious consideration. | |
| And now you might be asking yourself, how could this be happening here in America? | |
| With all of the tax dollars, the billions of tax dollars that flow to the regulatory bodies like, for instance, the FDA, how could this problem exist? | |
| The FDA can't possibly be using all of the billions of dollars in their annual budget just to go door to door to make sure people are up to date on their booster shots, right? | |
| There must be some money left over to test for these contaminants. | |
| But here's the kicker. | |
| The money might be there, but the mandate is not there. | |
| That's because while the FDA is technically the responsible agency for regulating both herbs and spices here in America, what happens in practice is that the spice industry is pretty much self-regulated, and the testing that the FDA does do focuses more on bacterial diseases like salmonella rather than on these forever chemical heavy metals. | |
| Here's what the Director of Food Policy for the Consumer Reports, here's what he wrote in this analysis. | |
| Quote, And one of the reasons that the FDA doesn't really do this type of testing for heavy metals is because nationwide, there is not a standard threshold that's considered unacceptable. | |
| Here's how the report describes the national situation. | |
| For years, while California has required that products that exceed limits for substances known to cause cancer or reproductive harm, including heavy metals, carry a warning label, New York is currently the only state to have enacted limits for heavy metals in herbs and spices. | |
| And that actually brings me neatly along to the sponsor of today's episode, which is the company that sold me this beautiful coin. | |
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| So pick up the phone and call 866-242-2352. | |
| That's 866-242-2352. | |
| Or text ROMAN to 65532. | |
| The link will also be down in the description box below. | |
| And then let's head on back to the studio. | |
| And by the way, just for your reference, the state of New York only set those limits after having to issue over 100 recalls for herbs and spices because of heavy metal contamination. | |
| And other states have yet to follow suit. | |
| However, that is not stopping consumers from filing lawsuits themselves. | |
| In fact, over the past two years, there have been four major lawsuits filed against big brand name herb and spice dealers for exactly this issue, significant levels of toxic heavy metals in their products. | |
| The first lawsuit was against McCormick and Company. | |
| It was a class action lawsuit filed in January of 2022 and settled five months later in May for a total of $3 million. | |
| Then in March of last year, a class action lawsuit was filed against Amazon for their Happy Belly brand of spices. | |
| In June of the same year, in June of 2022, another class action lawsuit was filed, this time against Walmart for the herbs and spices that they sell under the Great Value brand. | |
| And then the final class action lawsuit that's been filed, at least to date, was actually also against Amazon. | |
| But this time it was for their spices that are sold under the Whole Foods 365 label. | |
| And so that's the situation as it currently stands. | |
| The Consumer Report is available to the public, the FDA is reminding you to get your updated COVID booster shot, and there are three class-action lawsuits that are still making their way through the court system. | |
| All the while, you can go to your supermarket store shelf and buy as many spices and herbs that still contain arsenic, cadmium, and lead. | |
| Now, if you'd like to do a deep dive into the full list of brands that were outlined in this study, I'll throw a link to it down into the description box below. | |
| And what I would recommend is that you check the list against the spices in your cabinet and consider getting rid of anything with a red warning label and replace it with anything that's on this list that has a little green checkmark. | |
| Again, the full list will be down in the description box below for you to peruse at your own leisure. | |
| And lastly, speaking of food, as some of you might know, my team and I for the past six months or so have been working on a full-length documentary. | |
| Its title is Eat the Bugs, and it exposes a topic that I believe is important to everyone, the global war on farmers, as well as the agenda that's behind it. | |
| Now, as many of you know, this all started when my team and I last year traveled to the Netherlands to cover the farmer protests that were springing up there. | |
| And after meeting with the local farmers and hearing their stories about how they're going to lose their generational farms because of these government policies, well, I was really shocked to say the least. | |
| But after leaving the Netherlands, coming back to the U.S. and digging into it deeper, it became obvious that this was not confined to that one little country in Europe. | |
| In fact, this war on farmers was happening everywhere, including right here in the U.S. It just takes a slightly different surface-level manifestation. | |
| And for some odd reason, this attack on farmers and farming coincided perfectly with the trend of celebrities all of a sudden promoting edible insects. | |
| And so we've been traveling for the better part of the last year on a mission to really understand this global war on farmers, the agenda behind it, what it means for the future of food on our supermarket store shelves, as well as what common people like you and me, who are caught up in the middle of all this, can actually do. | |
| And right now, we're putting together all the interviews and all the findings into the new documentary, the one that's called Eat the Bugs. | |
| I think it's going to be quite good. | |
| And if you would like to help back the project, to help us with the funding to not only finish the editing of the documentary, but also to make sure that once it's finished editing and once it's published, it gets out and reaches as many people as possible, well, that would be just awesome. | |
| The World Economic Forum, they have billions of dollars at their disposal. | |
| We, on the other hand, we have pretty much a skeleton crew with a few cameras and a few video editors. | |
| But on the flip side, I believe that exposing the truth is very popular and also powerful. | |
| And the people around the world yearn to know what's really happening behind the curtain. | |
| And so if you would like to help, I'll throw a link down into the description box below. | |
| By clicking on that link, you can go over to the website. | |
| You can learn more about the project. | |
| You can sign up for updates. | |
| You can share the project with your friends and family. | |
| And if you can, you can donate some funding to help make sure that we can share the powerful voices of all these farmers that we spoke to around the world so that people not only know their plight, but also know that the plight of pretty much everyone that shops for food, the plight that's coming up for both ourselves and our children and our families and everyone else. | |
| Because, again, with the topic of today's show, talking about herbs and spices that contain arsenic, cadmium, and lead, that's a problem. | |
| That's a big problem. | |
| But in five or ten years, I don't want to have to do a show about how the only options available on the supermarket store shelves are insects, crickets. | |
| Mealworms and everything else like that because all the other food is just too expensive and reserved for the elites because the government policies have been put in place and in order to save the planet, you and I are now eating bugs and herbs and spices containing lead are the least of our worries. | |
| So if you want to bag the project, if you'd like to see it reach as many people as possible, that would be awesome. | |
| The link will be right there at the top of the description box. | |
| I hope you check it out. | |
| And then until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times. | |
| Stay informed. |
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