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March 12, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
14:47
Heavy metals found in popular breakfast cereals? See lab test results
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Are you eating toxic heavy metals in your breakfast cereals?
That's the question that we're going to answer here in today's screencast.
Hi, my name is Mike Adams.
I'm the Health Ranger.
I'm the Lab Director of the Natural News Forensic Food Lab where we publish all kinds of results for foods including Check it out.
Cereals, yeah.
Now the website for this is labs.naturalnews.com and we've just published over 20 different cereals.
This is only part of them.
This is the list of kind of healthy cereals or healthier.
And then over here in the junk foods category is the other cereals that are total junk, in my opinion.
Fruit Loops and Captain Crunch, Frosted Flakes, you know, Total, which I think is a total joke.
Mini-wheats, you know, frosted mini-wheats, I mean, honey nut checks and things like that.
Junk cereals is the way I would describe them.
Anyway, we tested all these cereals for heavy metals, including, by the way, aluminum, cesium, which has a radioactive isotope, cesium-137, and uranium, which also has a radioactive isotope.
And aluminum, of course, is linked to dementia and Alzheimer's.
Arsenic is linked to cancer.
Copper is linked to schizophrenia and mental insanity.
Cadmium is linked to kidney failure, skin disorders, and a hardening of the arteries.
Mercury is linked to neurological disorders and infertility problems, and many others, actually.
and lead is linked to low IQ, causes you to become stupid.
Not a good thing.
But there is good news in all of this.
We compiled a list of all the cereals.
We added up their arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury in parts per billion and made this chart for your viewing convenience.
How's that?
Honey Bunches of Oats from Post had the lowest level of all of these metals at seven parts per billion, which is really so low that I would consider that to be zero.
In fact, here's the good news in all of this.
No matter what cereals you eat, if you eat cereal, they're all really low.
And the cereals with the highest levels were actually this brand, Enjoy Life, at least the ones that we tested.
Crunchy rice and crunchy flax had almost 0.2 and a little bit over 0.2 parts per million of those total metals, arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury.
Now, all these cereals have some amount of aluminum that's higher than that, but we didn't include that in this number because all the aluminum levels were still relatively...
Well, not in a range that it would be alarming to me, personally.
But you might ask, why is crunchy rice and crunchy flax, why does it have higher numbers?
The answer is probably the rice source.
We've been finding a lot of elevated levels in rice across the board, including some rice proteins and various rice products.
Because of where they're grown, they're grown in a lot of water, and if the water is contaminated, then the rice plants will tend to soak up levels of heavy metals.
But in any case, these numbers here,.2, I wouldn't consider these to be really huge in terms of an overall metal level.
In fact, I would say overall, this is good news, that these cereals are relatively clean in terms of heavy metals.
But, you may wonder, well, going back to the chart, you may wonder, hey, why is this like Fruit Loops on the top of the chart?
Are you recommending we eat Fruit Loops?
No.
Let me explain.
Let's go back here to the junk foods category.
Now, if you look at Fruit Loops, you're going to see, like most processed, refined cereals, most of these numbers are zero.
And the copper and aluminum are really low.
Why is that?
It's because Froot Loops, like most of these junk cereals, is highly refined, highly processed.
So it's got almost nothing in it that is of nutritive value.
In fact, it's lacking zinc.
It's lacking magnesium compared to other cereals.
It's lacking selenium.
It's lacking everything, including the heavy metals.
So just because you see a bunch of numbers being zero, Doesn't mean that the cereal itself is safe to eat.
For example, a lot of these cereals are made from GMOs, genetically modified organisms.
For example, let's take Kellogg's corn pops.
They might as well call it GMO pops, right?
It's got GMO corn in there, but it doesn't have very much here in terms of heavy metals.
So you have to remember that you've got to look at your cereals from multiple angles.
There's GMOs, there's heavy metals, and then there's also pesticides.
Yeah, what kind of pesticides are in these cereals?
That's the question.
We're not testing for pesticides currently in this lab.
So you take, let's say, a Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats, even though the metals look relatively low, It may have high levels of pesticides in it.
I'm not saying it does.
I don't know.
We haven't done that test.
But that's something that you would need to watch out for.
It surely doesn't have strawberries in it, even though it shows strawberries and it's called Strawberry Delight.
This box, actually, if I'm remembering this correctly, there are no strawberries in the box.
And in fact, if you go to this cereal, which I think is pulled off the market now, Total Blueberry Pomegranate.
I'm the one who actually exposed this in an investigative journalism article that it contains no blueberries and no pomegranates.
So this was a fraudulently labeled cereal that I think they took off the market after I exposed them for General Mills being very, very deceptive.
So in any case, there are a lot of things to watch out for.
Now you can go to labs.naturalnews.com, our forensic food lab, to get this information.
And we're posting more all the time, including other categories.
We're posting for protein products, superfood, grasses, snacks, candy bars, all kinds of things.
There's something else I want to show you.
Oh, well, actually, see?
Look at that.
We've got Doritos and Coca-Cola and Cheetos and chopped clams, you know, and a lot of other things in here.
Sake-ika squid.
Yeah, popular item, huh?
Check this out.
Now if you go in here and you look at cereals that I would consider to be more healthy cereals, like, let's take Nature's Path, Whole O's cereal.
Nature's Path is my favorite cereal company because their entire product line is certified organic and all non-GMO. That's pretty cool.
I think they're the only company that's like that.
So you can buy Nature's Path and you can always know that it's relatively good, clean cereal.
But now you look at these numbers and you might say, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second here.
What's this aluminum doing?
44 parts per million aluminum and a little higher copper.
Well, guess what?
It doesn't release much of that aluminum during digestion.
How do I know?
Scroll down to the metals retention factor.
Yeah, because the aluminum retained by the food is actually 72.9%.
And I know that because I'm the inventor of the methodology to test this, the metals retention factor methodology.
I created this and the metals capturing capacity.
And I measured this.
I actually ran the lab test on this cereal and found that it holds on to almost 73%.
Of its aluminum.
And if you want to know how that works, You can click on that link and you can read about the metals retention factor, and you can see some of the laboratory equipment that I use.
The atomic spectroscopy, the high-level analytical chemistry, and those types of things, if you want to learn the details.
In any case, you're going to find this to be true across many of the more holistic cereals.
So let's actually go look at another one.
Coconut granola cereal, also from Nature's Path.
Actually, it looks pretty clean, doesn't it?
That's good.
Let's try Uncle Sam cereal.
Alright, here we go.
Uncle Sam.
Pretty darn clean across the board.
Doesn't have much of an MRF. Look at that microscopic photo.
It looks like little bugs, but it's not.
That's actually just the rolled...
What is that?
Rolled barley and rye and things like that?
Let's look at post-raisin bran.
Post Raisin Bran.
It's got about almost 5 parts per million copper.
But otherwise, pretty darn clean.
Puffin's Peanut Butter Cereal.
Pretty darn clean.
Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
Well, you would expect this to be clean.
And also, it doesn't really have much of a metals retention factor either.
Because there's just not much else in it.
So it looks like the Flax Plus is winning.
Oh, hey, how about this?
Let's see what Ezekiel 4.9 does.
Ezeko 49, pretty darn clean.
See, across the board, they're all clean.
Not much of a metals retention factor in that.
And by the way, if you want to see what I'm comparing this to, check this out over here.
You see this Pocari cacao powder?
Let's click on that.
And you're going to see some numbers.
Look at that.
Lead, 500 parts per billion.
Cadmium, almost 1,000.
Copper, over 31.
Aluminum, 17.
See what I'm talking about?
This is some of what is out there.
Look at this wheatgrass powder.
See, lead, almost 400.
Arsenic, almost 900.
Low cadmium, that's good.
Aluminum of 280 parts per million.
See, 280,000 parts per billion.
So, there's stuff out there.
And if you start looking at seafoods, you're going to find some interesting things, too.
Look at this, arsenic.
Almost 60 parts per million arsenic in Wakami lakes.
Very interesting.
Ha!
Yeah, a lot of interesting things to check out here.
So, anyway, I encourage you to go check these out at labs.naturalnews.com.
Oh, we found a really clean barley product right here, just barley.
Check this out.
Look how clean that is.
The numbers are pretty low across the board.
And the aluminum, you might think, that's high at 37 parts per million, but check it out.
Retention is 84%.
Same thing with arsenic, 84%.
You may wonder why I don't have copper retention in here.
We're adding that, so it's coming.
We didn't have it in our external standard for this test yet, but we're adding it in.
So there's a lot of stuff.
I mean, look at the kelp granules that people use to kind of flavor their...
They're meals.
Look at that.
400 parts per million aluminum, almost.
84 parts per million arsenic.
Some of that's probably organic arsenic, though, and not all inorganic.
I mean, some of these numbers are a lot higher than other numbers, so you need to check this out.
But getting back to the cereals, the good news is these cereals are not heavily contaminated.
In fact, their numbers are among the lowest we've ever seen.
Now, some people have asked me already, hey, why are you focusing on these cereals that we're not even eating?
The truth is that cereals are one of the most popular product categories for groceries across the board.
Americans eat a lot of cereal.
And, you know, there's healthy cereals that healthy people eat and there's junk cereals that mostly kids eat.
It got me wondering, are they really clean?
And the answer is, for the most part, from the point of view of heavy metals, they are.
So that's one worry you can cross off your list.
You don't have to worry about these cereals being heavily contaminated with metals.
They're really not.
And if I were you, well, I can't tell you what to do, but...
What I do is, I don't even eat that much cereal, but when I do, I eat it from nature's path.
Because I trust that company.
They're really clean.
They don't use GMOs.
It's all organic.
So that's what I would do.
I would go eat that.
And be careful about...
Like this company here, Barbara's, you might think, oh, it's all non-GMO, organic.
But it's not.
It's not.
This is actually, Barbara's uses GMOs in their cereals.
So even though they're kind of positioned as a natural, 100% natural crunchy corn cereal, they still use GMOs.
Or at least, I'm not aware that they've announced stopping using them, so I guess they still use them.
And Kix is...
It's kind of promoted as a healthy mainstream cereal, you know, for the kind of mainstream people who don't know much about nutrition.
Kid tested, mother approved, yeah, full of GMOs, right?
So, no added colors, no added flavors, no artificial preservatives, but it doesn't say no GMO. So, there you go.
And there's the microscopic image of the genetically modified Kix product.
Sphere ball or whatever it happens to be.
In any case, enjoy this information, feel confident about your cereals, and there's a lot more stuff coming.
Like this category right here, proteins right now, we just have muscle milk, but we're going to have all kinds of vegan proteins in here soon.
And even whey protein and hemp protein, all kinds of proteins.
So that's coming soon and a lot of other materials, raw materials and products.
Oh, and by the way, right now, you do have to enter your email address to get in here.
You just have to basically register your email.
And we had a little glitch where it was asking too often for some reason, but we're fixing that.
So once you enter it, it's supposed to not do that again for many, many months, a long time.
So if it's doing that, don't worry, just enter your email again for now and we're fixing that.
But, uh, we've got a lot of people using this now.
A lot of people are really enjoying this information and learning a lot from it.
So thanks for watching.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the director of the lab, the creator of this whole system here, in fact.
And, uh, I appreciate you sharing this video and spreading the word.
My aim is to help you eat healthier.
So that you can avoid heavy metals in your foods.
And if you're pregnant or planning on getting pregnant, then you really need to make this website a resource so that you can avoid toxic heavy metals for your baby.
You want to have a healthy baby with no future risk of diabetes or a lowered risk anyway?
Lowered risk of heart disease and mental disorders and all these other disorders?
Clean up your diet.
That's the key.
And this website, the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, can really help you do that.
So the web address here is, well, let me just show you the address.
It is labs.naturalnews.com.
That's how you get to this labs website.
And thank you for watching.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
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