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March 8, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams

10:12

Why practicing REAL SCIENCE helps make you a CLEAR thinker

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	You know, something really interesting happened to me recently when I went on the Alex Jones show, and for the first time in four years, and a lot of the Alex Jones listeners who had known of me from four years ago, because I substitute hosted for Alex a few times back in 2013, and they had heard my shows back then, and then they heard me now, this year, in 2018.
	And the comments from those people was, wow, you...
	You actually sound totally different, and you sound way more technical and scientific, and what you were saying just makes instant sense and so on.
	This is some of the comments from people who watch the show.
	And even Alex told me.
	He said, you know what?
	There's something very different about your delivery from four years ago.
	It's like you're more determined, but also way more technically informed And the only reason I'm sharing this with you is because I've had a little bit of introspection about this, and I believe it's because of all the science training.
	The science training, actually, it's good training for critical thinking.
	When we're problem solving in the laboratory, like I was doing today, I'll tell you about the problem we're solving today in a minute here.
	When you're problem solving, you have to exercise and practice very, very In-depth critical thinking skills and problem-solving skills.
	And in the science lab, everything is based on, you know, the evidence and the facts and the data that the instruments are showing you.
	But those data can be very, very difficult to interpret based on what's going on.
	But the more you practice communicating about science issues, I believe, the more it makes you really a clear thinker and a more clear of a communicator to people.
	It's funny.
	I'm hesitating the best way to I have heard this feedback from a lot of people, and I really appreciate the feedback.
	And I want you to know my goal is to be as clear as possible.
	My goal is to bring you fact-based, evidence-based information, whether it's science, medicine, vaccines, finance, politics, whatever.
	When I have evidence, I cite it.
	When my talk is based on evidence, I cite that.
	Other times, I'm offering projections or interpretations, and I think I'm pretty clear about that when I'm doing that.
	Sometimes I'll have information that's just a straight-out opinion, and I think it's pretty clear what I'm offering that to.
	So just as an example of some of the laboratory problem-solving issues that we're having, like today, for example, we're working on pesticide extraction from plant samples.
	And when you're doing pesticide extraction in this instrument that we have, which is an automated extraction system, you have to decide which kind of dispersive powders to use to absorb some of the What we call sort of the dirty chemicals or phytochemicals that you find in plants, the things that you don't want in your analysis.
	If I'm looking for pesticides, for example, I don't want to see chlorophyll, right?
	I don't want to see all that plant pigment.
	I don't want to see plant fibers, and especially I don't want to see fatty acids and lipids.
	So you use different dispersive powders in order to get rid of those things.
	Sometimes you also want to get rid of water.
	Because I don't want water in my pesticide run when I'm using a solvent such as acetonitrile as a solvent carrier.
	So you use different kind of powders and dispersives underneath the sample in order to eliminate the things that you don't want in your instrument.
	For example, magnesium sulfate, or what we just call mag sulfate, absorbs water.
	You know, it's just one of its properties.
	So you use that to get rid of water.
	Or you can use something called PSA. Which I believe stands for primary and secondary amines.
	This is a powder that helps clean up plant samples.
	There's another material, a dispersive material called C18, which is used to absorb a lot of lipids from fatty food samples.
	So for example, if I'm running fish oils, I'm going to use a lot of C18. And there are other things that you can use carbon to get rid of pigmentation and things like that.
	But you have to look at the food that you're sampling.
	Like, let's say, oh, this is a chocolate bar.
	What am I going to use for a chocolate bar?
	Well, it's got a little bit of fat in it.
	It's got lipids, so I'm going to have to use some, you know, probably some C18. It's also plant-based.
	I'm going to have to do some cleanup.
	I better use some PSA. What if I want to get rid of, you know, some of this dark pigmentation?
	I might use some carbon, but I don't want to lose the theobromine because that's one of the Chemical constituents in cacao that I'm looking for.
	So you might have to try it.
	And you might have to see what happens.
	And then there's other things like, oh man, well the PSA, sometimes that will absorb acidic pesticides.
	Like it will lock up all the 2,4-D in your sample if there's 2,4-D and you won't be able to see the 2,4-D. This is an actual problem that we have in the lab.
	It's like, hey, I want to look for 250 pesticides at once.
	But I have to use the right dispersives that don't lock up the pesticide analytes that I'm looking for.
	And just going through that process every day makes you, it gives you a lot of practice in scientific thinking.
	And I think as I share that with you, I hope you agree, you know, I'm doing a decent job trying to communicate some of these things in terms of what's in the foods and the scientific process that it takes to look at those foods and really find out what's going on.
	And those problems are just, those are minor problems, actually, compared to some of the really big stuff that we deal with.
	I mean, for example, let's say you want to quant pesticides in a food sample, and you're doing a liquid extraction using a solvent.
	So you have to measure accurately the mass of the sample that went into the vial in the first place, and then you also have to measure accurately the volume of the solvent that was extracted from the mass of the original sample, But you also then have to eliminate any particulate matter that may have come through the extraction.
	And then you have to calculate the mass of the solvent using the density of the solvent because you've gathered the volume information about it.
	But you have to understand the mass of the solvent because you can gravimetrically weigh the extraction that you have.
	But in order to get the right volume, you have to use the density.
	And then you get the correct volume, and that volume is important because you're injecting one microliter typically, or sometimes two microliters, into the HPLC, you know, mass spec analysis system.
	And then based on the detector response that you get there for the pesticides that you find in one microliter of this stuff, you have to calculate that all the way back to the concentration of pesticides in the original mass material, you know, like Wheatgrass or whatever you're testing, you know, cornflakes, right?
	Whatever.
	You have to do all the math and calculate that back to get the actual concentration of the pesticide in the original material.
	And by the way, you never get full 100% extraction.
	Sometimes you get partial extractions.
	You can get as low as 25% extraction efficiency.
	Or you could get sometimes over-recovery.
	You could get 108% extraction recovery if you test your method.
	And there are reasons for that, but it's kind of technical, so I'm not going to get into that right now.
	I'm just saying that good science is really, really hard, but I feel very honored to be able to have gone through this process and to continue to pursue it every day because I think The exercise in thinking is very valuable.
	It makes you a critical thinker.
	And it has made me demand evidence on everything.
	It's actually made me more skeptical about the world around me and even about health claims that I see or claims of composition.
	I'm actually very, very skeptical of things that I haven't tested.
	And that's just because very often when I take something into the lab and then I do test it, I see things that We're quite shocking or surprising.
	I'm like, hey, how come they didn't mention that before?
	So anyway, that's just some inside baseball, so to speak, on science and food science and testing.
	It is very difficult.
	Sometime I'll tell you about dimers.
	I'll tell you about doubly charged masses, complex molecules on the time-of-flight mass spec system.
	We'll talk about mass overcharge ratios and things like that because you get into there and isotopic spread and isotopic ratios.
	Oh, man.
	It is heavy, heavy stuff.
	It's like when I'm in the classes doing this stuff, like everybody around me is a PhD, you know, and I don't have a PhD because academia wasn't my course, but, you know, I'm usually the guy in the class that knows the most about these instruments, by the way.
	And then the instructors will tell you the same thing.
	It's funny.
	Because for me, this is not just some degree or some academic thing.
	For me, this is something I'm super passionate about.
	So I've really gotten into these instruments.
	I've really mastered the heavy metals analysis with ICP. And I'm getting to mastery on mass spec analysis.
	But that mastery can take many, many years.
	So it's going to be a journey for me as well.
	There's a lot more to learn and a lot more to share with you.
	I appreciate all your support.
	Let me mention a couple of websites where you can see some of the results of what we're working on.
	Food.News is a new site that we publish.
	We also have Science.News and, of course, NaturalNews.com.
	You can hear more of my podcasts on science topics at HealthRangerScience.com.
	Thank you for listening.
	If you want to support our mission, visit us at healthrangersstore.com for the world's largest selection of lab-verified superfood and nutritional products for healthy living.

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