March 14, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
18:35
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| Many people have the completely wrong impression of what Whole Foods sells. | |
| They think Whole Foods sells products that are entirely non-GMO, products that are clean, that don't have heavy metals, that don't have pesticides, that don't have glyphosate or herbicides. | |
| That is completely false. | |
| Whole Foods Market, all across the country, sells products to its customers that contain heavy metals, that contain glyphosate, pesticides, herbicides and GMOs. | |
| The company has created a false impression Where many of their customers think that they don't sell any GMOs or they don't sell anything artificial. | |
| They've got a sign out on their store in North Austin that says, nothing artificial ever. | |
| And then inside the store, things that they sell are artificial, including genetically modified organisms that are part of many, many products on the shelves at Whole Foods. | |
| So this claim that they have nothing artificial ever, it's a fraudulent claim. | |
| And much of the marketing of Whole Foods to its customers is really just greenwashing. | |
| It's invoking the terminology and the keywords and the concepts that appeal to health-conscious consumers without actually making good on those assertions and promises. | |
| Whole Foods is a very deceptive company. | |
| Even the name Whole Foods is deeply deceiving to its customers because much of what it sells isn't a whole food. | |
| It's really a processed food or it's a genetically modified food or it's a food that's grown in China with toxic heavy metals in it. | |
| I have personally purchased foods at Whole Foods, and I've tested them in my laboratory, and I've seen all of these things in those foods. | |
| I've seen the heavy metals, I've seen the glyphosate, I've seen the pesticides, I've seen the herbicides, and I haven't even begun looking for things like hormone disruptors yet. | |
| No doubt we'll find many of those things as well. | |
| As a forensic food scientist, I'm the lab science director of CWC Labs. | |
| I'm the author of the number one best-selling science book on Amazon.com called Food Forensics. | |
| I know for a fact that much of what Whole Foods sells at a very high price is no different from foods that are sold at regular grocery stores. | |
| They come from, in many cases, the exact same suppliers. | |
| They're made with the same ingredients. | |
| They contain the same GMOs. | |
| They contain the same herbicides and pesticides. | |
| They're no different except that sometimes they're 50% higher cost. | |
| So what Whole Foods is really creating for its customers is an illusion. | |
| It's a shopping experience. | |
| The illusion of living a healthy lifestyle and having the ambiance, if you will, of a It's an inviting store atmosphere. | |
| It's the illusion of eating healthy when much of what Whole Foods sells is really not healthy, in my opinion, as a nutritionist, as a scientist, as an author. | |
| Much of what Whole Foods sells, in my opinion, contributes to cancer, contributes to diabetes, contributes to heart disease and Alzheimer's and dementia and kidney disorders. | |
| And they don't seem to be very concerned about that. | |
| At Whole Foods Market, values matter. | |
| So the fresh fruits and vegetables we sell support organic and sustainable farming. | |
| Whole Foods is a public company, and they are driven by profit more than ethics or morals. | |
| They're willing to hop on the bandwagon of healthy living and healthy food and create the impression, if you will, that they can weave a tapestry for their customers, but they're not really willing to make good on that in many ways. | |
| For example, I met with a Whole Foods executive A couple of years ago, and I presented to her the evidence that they were selling products on their shelves right out of the store in Austin, Texas that contained really alarming levels of lead and cadmium and mercury. | |
| And they took that information. | |
| We had a discussion. | |
| I laid it out. | |
| I said, this is a public health issue. | |
| This is a corporate integrity issue. | |
| And over the last two years, Whole Foods has done absolutely nothing. | |
| About that. | |
| Right now, Whole Foods continues to sell products that they know are contaminated with lead, that they know contain glyphosate and pesticides, that they know are unlabeled GMOs. | |
| Twenty to thirty percent of Whole Foods products contain GMO ingredients, depending on each store or region. | |
| Genetically engineered foods are everywhere, in the salad bar, packaged foods, meats, and dairy products. | |
| Yet we are not informed of each product because there are hundreds of genetically engineered ingredients. | |
| And now to see Whole Foods really betray the organic movement by, in essence, partnering with Monsanto to push this anti-GMO labeling bill through the U.S. Senate, it's, in many people's minds, it's the ultimate betrayal. | |
| Whole Foods People thought was a place that cared about them, that cared about their health, that cared about honest labeling and transparency and corporate responsibility. | |
| Because that's what they espouse, that's what they claim to offer. | |
| But when you really scrutinize their actions, they betray those values and they betray their customers. | |
| And as a result, more and more people are saying they're not interested in shopping at Whole Foods. | |
| They don't want to reward a corporation that is being so dishonest with them, a corporation that's actually promoting the interests of Monsanto, that is dividing and causing an internal civil war, in fact, in the organic industry, with the Organic Trade Association now denouncing that bill that Whole Foods supported. | |
| With Whole Foods CEO Walter Robb, you have a very devious individual who is able to speak the language of progress or the language of food honesty, food transparency, the language of ecological sustainability. | |
| But when it comes down to the day-to-day actions inside that company, Those actions really violate the same principles that the CEO claims to represent. | |
| There's a disconnect between what Walter Robb says and what Whole Foods does. | |
| And that disconnect is becoming more and more apparent every single day to the millions of people who are currently shopping at Whole Foods but are starting to question why. | |
| Why are we supporting this corporation that frankly is now really aligned with Monsanto? | |
| You know, the one thing that Whole Foods and Monsanto have in common is they both profit from unlabeled GMOs. | |
| And neither one of them wants GMOs to be labeled in a human-readable way because they know that would interfere with their business. | |
| So my advice to consumers who are really health conscious, who care about food integrity, who want to support honest companies is to start looking for alternatives to Whole Foods. | |
| Look at your local health food stores or your local grocers or grocery stores that have an organic section. | |
| Or grow some of your own food if you can. | |
| Or limit your purchases at Whole Foods because you can get much better deals on many of those items somewhere else at a lower price, the exact same product. | |
| It's up to each and every one of us as food consumers to vote with our dollars and hold these corporations accountable. | |
| If we don't send a message to Whole Foods that says we're not going to tolerate your allying with Monsanto and the crushing of Vermont's GMO labeling law, which has now essentially been overruled by the support of Whole Foods, If you don't stop doing these things, | |
| Whole Foods, then we, the consumers, are going to deprive you of our business and our revenue and eventually we're going to put you out of business because we're going to vote in the free marketplace and we're going to, in essence, economically punish you for your deception. | |
| And we're going to, at the same time, economically reward those companies that are telling the truth, that are more honest, that have better corporate ethics, which tend to be smaller companies, by the way. | |
| They tend to be local companies. | |
| I would advise people to go to local farmers markets or join CSAs, Community Supported Agriculture. | |
| Join your local co-ops. | |
| Grow some food. | |
| Go out and meet some farmers and support their local food efforts and cut out the middleman, which is Whole Foods. | |
| You've got to understand that Whole Foods is taking a piece out of every farmer's revenue that if you went to that farmer directly, you could get food more affordably and the farmer could earn more money. | |
| And so Whole Foods is not only the middleman, but they're a deceptive middleman and they are, in many cases, displacing. | |
| American farmers by promoting and carrying products that are grown in places like China, where the products are a lot more polluted and the labor laws are not very strong and the environmental laws are not very strong. | |
| Whole Foods is, in essence, financially supporting environmental destruction because they promote foods that are grown in places like China, where the environmental regulations are not enforced where the environmental regulations are not enforced and labor laws are not enforced and safety for the workers, the agriculture workers, is not enforced. | |
| They're displacing American workers because they're willing to sell these foods from China even when the same exact kind of food is available in the United States. | |
| It can be argued that sometimes you have to go to China because that's the only place you can get something. | |
| But when it's also available in California or Texas or somewhere else in the United States, it seems really unethical to source it from China when you know that those products are contaminated, that the production of those products It compromises the environment in China and causes pollution of the rivers and the oceans and the air in China as well. | |
| But as long as Whole Foods makes profit from it, they don't seem to be bothered by that destruction. | |
| For me personally, as an ethically driven food scientist, I have a real problem with Whole Foods behavior. | |
| And even though I used to be a strong supporter of the company because I believed in their original vision and their mission, today I have to say that it's time to boycott Whole Foods. | |
| And it's time to vote with your dollars for some other food retailer or health food store or natural grocer that is going to stick to the ethics and the morals and the values that we, the organic consumers of America, believe in. | |
| And those values are very clear. | |
| We want honest labeling and full labeling. | |
| We want transparency about country of origin. | |
| We want clean foods. | |
| We want corporations to act in the interest of protecting their customers, even if it means losing a little bit of profit in the process. | |
| We expect companies like Whole Foods to prioritize humanity, nutrition, health, and the planet, the environment, over its corporate profits. | |
| When their board of directors gets together and meets, you can rest assured they're not talking about how they can help people and how they can save the planet and how they can do the right thing. | |
| They're talking about how can they maximize quarterly profits and keep their shareholders happy and maintain control of the board and expand the company and displace their competitors who are actually doing a more ethical job. | |
| Those are the kinds of conversations that are really probably happening inside the Whole Foods board of directors. | |
| Whole Foods is a company that is on the path of self-destruction. | |
| They will destroy themselves if they don't change because we've entered now the age of transparency with efforts all across the board, even my own laboratory, being an independent scientist. | |
| I can walk into Whole Foods and I've done this and buy their products and take them to my lab. | |
| And I can assess the contamination levels of hundreds of pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, industrial chemicals within just a couple of days. | |
| It's not difficult now for independent scientists and independent laboratories to provide the transparency. | |
| That consumers demand, but corporations refuse to voluntarily release. | |
| So Whole Foods really cannot escape scrutiny at this point. | |
| The truth is going to come out about what they're selling, what it contains. | |
| And how they lie about it and how they deceive consumers. | |
| That truth cannot be denied because of independent science, because of the grassroots movement, because of social media, because of independent media. | |
| Whole Foods must either change its ways or it will implode and it will become just another retailer that sells anything. | |
| GMOs, pesticides, processed junk food, garbage that's really driving our nation bankrupt from healthcare costs related to chronic degenerative disease. | |
| One of the big themes of the political left today is to oppose dishonest corporations. | |
| And banks, for example, the big banks are dishonest and they steal from people and they lie to people. | |
| You know, weapons companies, oil companies, these are the typical companies that the informed left will go after. | |
| But I think Whole Foods is about to join that list because Whole Foods is now becoming another Monsanto. | |
| And it's becoming the monster in your neighborhood that pretends to be all about healthy living. | |
| But it really isn't. | |
| It's the same deceptions. | |
| They're just sort of dressed up with the costumes of healthy living and healthy food and corporate responsibility. | |
| But underneath it all, if you peel back the layers, Whole Foods, in my view, functions no differently than a weapons manufacturer, an oil company, a big, corrupt banking system. | |
| They're all about profit, and they're willing to betray their own customers, their own people, their own citizens, as long as it means more quarterly profits for their investors. | |
| Really, should we be surprised? | |
| This is the story of Corporate America gone bad. | |
| And it's just sad. | |
| It's a sad day that it has now infiltrated a company like Whole Foods that was once a lighthouse of hope, of health and happiness for people who were trying to make a difference in their own lives, in their families, in their communities. | |
| And now they feel betrayed at every turn. | |
| Betrayed by their government, betrayed by regulators like the FDA, betrayed by the institutions in which they used to believe, betrayed by academia, universities. | |
| People feel betrayed across the board. | |
| And Whole Foods is now one of the reasons why that betrayal hurts so much to so many people. | |
| Do you know what you're really eating? | |
| Food labels don't tell the whole story. | |
| There can be heavy metals in your food, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals. | |
| And these are the kinds of chemicals and heavy metals that can promote cancer, diabetes, heart disease, liver failure, kidney disorders, infertility, and even Alzheimer's. | |
| I took it upon myself to build this laboratory and then to test hundreds of different foods using state-of-the-art scientific instrumentation. | |
| We then published the results in the book on over 800 foods telling you exactly how much lead and mercury and arsenic they contain and providing warnings about all the other chemicals and additives that go into your food, usually without your knowledge. | |
| If you want the truth about what you're eating or feeding your children, You need to get Food Forensics. | |
| It exposes the truth that both the food companies don't want you to know and the government regulators, the FDA, won't admit. | |
| Food Forensics is the one manual on food and nutrition and health that every grocery store shopper and consumer in America needs to have. | |
| So you can start avoiding the toxic chemicals, avoiding the heavy metals, and start empowering yourself with the kind of knowledge that the food companies We don't want you to have your hands on because you'll stop buying their poison. | |
| Food forensics threatens to change the entire future of the food industry. | |
| These food manufacturers know that if this book succeeds with your help, they will have to clean up their products. | |
| And that, my friends, is one of the best reasons to help support this book and share this information with others. | |
| And if you do that, we're going to write another book. | |
| And another. | |
| We'll have a whole series. | |
| We'll use the best science. | |
| We'll expand this laboratory. | |
| We'll buy more products off the shelf. | |
| We'll expand our staff. | |
| I will do whatever is necessary to bring you absolute transparency about what you are eating and buying and feeding your own children. | |
| I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, the author of Food Forensics. |
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