All Episodes
Previous Next
March 12, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
12:02
How to calculate heavy metals total intake and unit conversion: ppm and ppb
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
In this video, I teach you how to calculate your total intake of heavy metals such as lead, cadmium, arsenic, copper, and so on based on the serving size of the different foods that we show here at the Natural News Forensic Food Labs.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the lab director and the food science researcher here.
At the Forensic Food Lab, which you can find at labs.naturalnews.com.
And I brought up this product as an example.
This is a wheatgrass powder from a company called Actives.
And this is 100% organic, USDA certified organic.
Here's the microscopy photos.
And then here are the laboratory results that we have run.
And I ran these via ICP-MS using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.
It's an atomic spectroscopy method for looking at the elemental composition of different foods.
Now as you can see, it contains, this is the average, because we did multiple runs for everything that we test.
The average is 164 parts per billion of lead, parts per billion.
So I'd like to teach you how to interpret this and what it really means.
And I'm going to focus on lead, but you can use this for any other, you know, cadmium, arsenic, aluminum, whatever you want.
And by the way, I'm not picking on this particular product.
Lots of products contain lead, even a lot more lead than this.
This is not a very high number compared to what we see in many other products.
It's probably higher than what I would want to eat, but it's not high in the food supply across the board is my point.
So anyway, let me bring up a little notepad here and show you how this works.
If you're going to have a microgram of, let's say, of lead, microgram, lead is pb, that equals one in one million, or one part per million.
Okay, so one nanogram is one in one billion or one ppb and one picogram is one in one trillion or one ppt.
Now most of what we're going to deal with here is ppb or ppm and to convert between these two you just divide by a thousand.
Well I should say you take ppb divided by one thousand equals ppm.
So let's Let's take an actual example here from this chart.
We have, let's say, lead is 164 ppb.
So 164 divided by 1000 is 0.164 ppm.
And what that means is that if you eat one gram of this food, you will consume 0.164 micrograms of lead.
Alright, so these numbers here, the.164 is per gram of food that you consume.
So if you want to actually find out how many micrograms of this lead you are eating, what you have to do is you have to take the take the ppm, which is a concentration, and you multiply that times the number of grams you eat.
That equals the total intake of micrograms.
So let's take this for an example here, this wheatgrass product.
Let's say you are hungry for wheatgrass, and you can't see this right there, but the serving size on this is actually 3 grams, which is one rounded scoop, it says on the back of this label.
So 3 grams.
Let's say you're going to take 3 grams.
so what do you take?
you have your 164 of your lead in parts per billion that is 0.164 part per million times three grams oops three grams equals let's bring up our handy dandy calculator here 0.164 times three is 0.492 0.492 micrograms now what does this mean how much is 0.492 is that a lot or is that a little To understand that
answer, you've got to go to this chart, which we have here.
If you go to labs.naturalnews.com and you click on our heavy metals links, you can get to this chart.
This shows you the limits which have been set on these heavy metals according to the different authorities who have something to say about food.
Probably the most stringent requirement is California Proposition 65, which has a limit of 0.5 micrograms of daily lead intake for one given food or supplement.
It actually doesn't apply to groceries and regular foods, but the law is being applied to dietary supplements, which is kind of weird because a lot of foods are way more contaminated than supplements, believe it or not.
But anyway, if you look at our chart here, we ate our wheatgrass at.164 parts per million, and we had three grams, which is one scoop.
That gives us.492 micrograms.
Well, the California Prop 65 limit...
Is.5 micrograms.
So question, is this product compliant with Prop 65 lead requirements?
The answer is yes, because it only gives you.492 just under the.5 micrograms of lead.
Now, just because it's not over the limit for Prop 65, does that mean you should eat it?
Well, only you can make that choice, but personally, I would try to find a source with less lead.
I like to look for 0.1 or lower.
In other words, 100 parts per billion or lower.
And if I were a pregnant woman, let's say, I wouldn't want to eat anything with lead over like 50 parts per billion because of how lead can affect fetuses when it accumulates over time.
I'm not saying this product is dangerous for pregnant women, but I am saying that if you accumulate enough lead over time, that can very negatively impact the brain development of your baby.
So that's something to keep in mind.
Now, you can do the same kind of math for everything else.
Aluminum.
Here we go.
That's 349 parts per million of aluminum because we got this.
That's parts per billion there, 349,524.
We divide it by 1,000.
That equals, boom, parts per million.
See how that works?
Now, you might say, is that a lot of aluminum?
Well, if you go onto this chart, you'll notice that there's really not much in the way of limits for aluminum, except by the EPA. 50 to 200 micrograms per liter.
Well, how many micrograms have you consumed?
If you eat one gram of the wheatgrass, you will get 349 micrograms of aluminum.
That is over the limit of what the EPA would ask to have in a liter of water.
Now, can you apply food to water?
Not really.
That's not a valid comparison.
And unfortunately, the FDA here has not ever set any limits on aluminum, which is kind of concerning because if you go to Natural News and you search for aluminum, Alzheimer's, you're going to find a lot of results On aluminum and Alzheimer's disease.
Here we go.
Beware of aluminum in deodorant products.
Unexpected sources.
I'm going to click on this one.
Unexpected sources of aluminum.
Here we go.
Food additives, aluminum cookware, and so on and so forth.
If you browse this website, naturalnews.com, you'll see that aluminum is linked to a lot of different things.
Oh, by the way, check this out.
The CDC says...
I'm going to show you this page right here.
The CDC. This is cdc.gov.
says that there's aluminum in vaccines.
Here it is right here.
I know it's slightly off the page, but that's actually the word aluminum.
And it says Additives used in the production of vaccines may include and common substances found in vaccines include aluminum here it is right there boom so you're getting aluminum not just from your food such as this product you're also getting aluminum from vaccines from your cookware and many other sources so you could very easily be vastly exceeding this number 200 micrograms per day easily you could actually have a thousand micrograms Or
much, much more per day.
But only you can decide if that's, you know, too much aluminum.
It's kind of a personal decision.
Now, when it comes to things like mercury, it's good to see that there's zero mercury in this product because mercury is the most toxic, arguably, in this entire list.
And if you go to labs.naturalnews.com and click on videos, I do discuss the toxicity of mercury in those videos.
But mercury is, just to show you briefly, mercury is very toxic to the brain and the developing fetus.
The neurological toxicity is very high for mercury, for all types of mercury, including the methylmercury found in fish as well as the ethylmercury typically used in vaccines, as well as inorganic mercury that you might find in dental fillings, for example.
See, here you go.
How America has been mercury poisoned by an industry in denial.
That's the dentistry holocaust.
That's something you really need to read.
Mercury, toxicity, and autism links.
Many other articles that are very important there.
So, anyway, I hope that helps answer your questions.
You can go to labs.naturalnews.com.
You can cruise around and look at any food you want.
Like, here we go.
Let's go to Ruth's Hemp Protein.
And you can see that it contains only 53 parts per billion lead, which, in my book, is very good.
I would have no concern eating this at all.
You also notice the aluminum is only about 58 parts per million.
Copper is 30 parts per million.
I would like it to be lower, but it's nowhere near any point of alarm, let's say.
Cadmium is low.
Mercury is zero.
Lead is low.
And it's got a pretty good MCC profile, which means it captures other metals.
And I'm the researcher who actually developed this methodology, and I'll be publishing scientific papers on this methodology here soon.
So you'll be able to see my papers in various science journals as we continue with this research.
Anyway, that's really what I wanted to show you.
Using this information, you can calculate your exposure to total lead intake and total cadmium intake based on how much you eat of a food.
This is the formula right here.
The concentration multiplied by the number of grams that you eat is the total intake of micrograms of that heavy metal.
Got that?
That's how you can determine what you're taking in.
So I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you for watching.
If you want to learn more, go to labs.naturalnews.com.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
I'm the editor of naturalnews.com, which was this website here.
Right there.
And you can find a lot of great information every single day about what's safe to eat, what's not safe to eat, many other things.
▲
Export Selection