All Episodes
Previous Next
March 16, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
20:18
BUSTED! How “natural” product companies LIE about what they’re selling!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello and welcome everybody.
Mike Adams the Health Ranger here and today's news story is about the Honest Company.
Yep, that's Jessica Alba's corporation now valued at 1.7 billion dollars.
She grew that corporation by promising customers that her products contained no SLS and other chemicals that are frequently found in I don't know conventional laundry detergents or conventional diapers and so on and so forth.
Now Hey, last year we actually gave Jessica Alba some recognition, thanking her for succeeding with this concept of clean consumer products, because here in the Forensic Food Lab, which is now cwclabs.com, by the way, throw that out there, we're all about clean food.
That's what all this instrumentation is for.
We test for heavy metals and pesticides and fluoride and all kinds of other things.
Jessica Alba was promising that her company was free of these toxic chemicals like SLS. Turns out they weren't so honest after all.
They made a huge, huge mistake that I'll get into.
The Wall Street Journal did some pretty damn good journalism on this situation.
They purchased some of Jessica Alba's products, The Wall Street Journal basically borrowed a page out of my book.
I buy products off the shelf and test them and then release the results.
So the Wall Street Journal did the same thing.
And when they tested her detergent, laundry, I think it was a laundry detergent product, they found that it had the very chemical that Jessica Alba had been promising was not present in their products, SLS, sodium lauryl sulfate, which is a surfactant.
It's part of a detergent, part of the cleaning action, the chemistry of cleaning.
And so they published that Basically, they busted the Honest Company.
And it turns out that in one of the tests, her detergent, Jessica Alba's detergent, had almost the same concentration of SLS as Tide laundry detergent, which is like...
The most synthetic, toxic chemical garbage you could even think of soaking your clothing in, right?
I mean, don't even think about buying Tide.
But the honest company is supposed to be different, right?
It's supposed to be, well, honest.
But it turns out they honestly have no idea what they're selling.
It turns out, and this is the shocking part, this is what blows my mind as a scientist here running my own laboratory.
This $1.7 billion company Did not do scientific testing of the composition of their own finished products.
Imagine that.
Imagine that.
They're rolling detergent off the factory line.
They're marketing all over the world.
This is free of SLS. This is honest product.
No synthetic chemicals.
Look, there's this cute, hot babe, Jessica Alba.
She's the founder.
She looks good.
Products look good.
Everything's all good.
Buy our products.
And it turns out they weren't even testing it.
They weren't even testing it.
They did no...
It just blows my mind because what we do here in this lab is we test everything that we sell at the Natural News store.
That's why people buy from us.
We're really honest about the composition of what we're selling because we test it and we reject materials that are too contaminated.
We reject third-party products that are too contaminated.
We force third-party companies to reformulate their products before we will carry them because sometimes they have too much lead or too much cadmium or what have you.
We actually tell them reformulate or we won't carry it.
That's how serious we are about the composition of the things that we sell at the Natural News Store.
But Jessica Alba...
Her company just trusted their supplier.
Trusted their supplier.
Oh yeah, their supplier told them it doesn't have any SLS in it, and they believed it like a bunch of suckers, like a bunch of gullible, naive newbies to the whole industry.
Like they've never heard before that, oh, suppliers lie to you.
Like, Like, that never crossed their mind.
What they think, just because Jessica Alba, you know, is a good-looking spokesperson that no one's going to do any science, no one's going to really look at the composition of the products.
Are you kidding me?
You think you're going to be a $1.7 billion company and escape scrutiny from laboratories like the Wall Street Journal had access to or laboratories like mine that can take your product, buy it off the shelf, and test it and go public with that information?
I mean, come on!
People!
People!
Give me a break!
What were they thinking?
What were they thinking?
It's mind-blowing!
It's mind-blowing, especially, there are good companies out there that make great personal care products like AnnMarieGiani.com, working with Kevin Gianni and AnnMarie and her product line.
I know these people.
I know that they work very, very hard, meticulously, at great expense to source and test their raw materials and test their products.
I'm going to be testing some of their products here in the lab, too, just to affirm that and to nail it down for myself, too.
I always like to trust but confirm.
I trusted the Honest Company.
I trusted Jessica Alba.
She looked honest.
She doesn't look like a huckster or a con artist, right?
I trusted her.
Maybe you did, too.
Maybe you bought their products.
Based on that marketing claim that this is free of SLS and free of all these other things.
And it turns out that trust was misplaced.
They weren't doing the science.
And let this be a lesson to all the companies out there that are trying to claim that they're selling clean food or clean dietary supplements or clean personal care products.
You can make those claims, but you better damn well be able to back it up with good, solid science.
There's no shortcut to it because it's people like me and people like the Wall Street Journal and people like the Environmental Working Group, EWG, people, you know, USA Today, you name it, who are going to be meticulously scrutinizing your products, taking them, buying them off the shelf, putting them in labs like this, and testing them.
And here, by the way, at CWC Labs, that's our new name, CWC Labs, we're going to be offering commercial testing very soon for pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, fluoride, identity testing, label compliance, phytochemical concentrations like, for example, curcuminoids in turmeric supplements or catechins in green tea supplements or even cannabidiols in CBD oil, for example.
Many applications.
We're going to be offering that service.
In addition to serving commercial customers, we're going to be buying products off the shelf from an editorial point of view as an investigations operation to do what the Wall Street Journal just did.
And I commend them for doing that.
That's a great move on their part.
Maybe next time they'll contact me to do the testing because we have technology here that is so far beyond the usual laboratory technology.
I don't even have time to get into it, but just briefly...
We can not only test for things that you know you're looking for, the specific molecules, we have a system that creates an entire mass profile of every molecule in every test that can be mined for unknowns.
And we have massive databases of over 25,000 chemicals and pharmaceuticals and recreational drugs and household chemicals, industrial chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, And we can run any sample against that entire database, and we can get quantitation down to single digit parts per billion concentrations on over 25,000 chemicals in virtually any, well, not any sample, but technically any sample that we can get to extract and ionize.
So anyway, it's a lot of samples that we can do that with.
So back to Jessica Alba and her operation.
They've been caught red-handed, and so as the editor of naturalnews.com, I'm not boycotting the Honest Company, but I'm going to recommend a pause recommendation here.
Do not purchase their products until...
They conduct legitimate scientific testing of the composition of their products for every production lot, which is what we do here at the Natural News Store.
We test every production lot.
They need to test every production lot, and they need to post those results publicly.
Now, most companies don't post their results, their testing results, publicly for the simple reason that most companies aren't doing the test.
They're taking shortcuts.
I mean, small companies and large companies like the Honest Company, they're all taking shortcuts.
Very few companies are actually doing the testing that you would expect them to be doing.
Microbiology, heavy metals, absence of chemical additives like Alba's company.
Very few companies are doing that.
And what they're doing instead is they're blinding themselves to the lies of their suppliers.
They are willfully trusting their suppliers, knowing that a lot of their suppliers are lying to them about the composition of what they're actually acquiring.
The truth is that a lot of these for-profit corporations don't want to know the truth about what they're selling.
They don't want to know they're selling lead-contaminated rice protein, for example.
They don't want to know the truth.
There's SLS in their laundry detergent, that there's pesticides in their organic frozen vegetables from China.
They don't want to know.
So they don't really look very hard.
And when they do hire labs, they hire labs that are known for giving...
Let's say negative results or distorted results that are happy for these companies to see.
Oh, not detectable.
Well, yeah, it's because you're using old instrumentation from 1982.
It's not capable of detecting any of that stuff.
No wonder it's not detected.
I've seen lab tests from companies.
They've sent them to me.
They want us to carry their product.
I see their tests, and it's like, non-detectable, non-detectable, non-detectable.
I'm like, are you kidding me?
What kind of junk equipment is that lab using?
What did you do?
Send it back in time to 1976 and get it tested using...
The very first mass spec instrument ever invented or something?
I mean, come on.
Today we have instruments like right here in this lab.
We have instruments that can detect parts per trillion of organic molecules and isotopes of elements and heavy metals and nutritive minerals.
All these things.
I'm talking parts per trillion.
We just did a limit of quantitation test on our ICP back behind me for mercury.
Our limit of quantitation is 50 parts per trillion.
That's.05 parts per billion, which means we can detect mercury below one part per billion, and we can actually quantitate the difference between one part per billion and.5 parts per billion.
That's how sensitive this equipment is here at CWC Labs.
And anybody who knows how to run a lab could have access to this equipment, but a lot of them don't.
They purposely keep old equipment around because that's the result that these food companies and these consumer product companies want to see.
Non-detectable, non-detectable.
Yeah, sure, you might as well just put a blindfold on and run the instruments without even being able to see.
Of course it's non-detectable.
Don't look at the screen.
It's non-detected.
I'll give you a break.
So my message to Jessica Alba's executives at the Honest Company is very simple.
Those of us in the natural products We want to support your company.
We want to promote your company.
We want to be able to test your products and say, look, that's clean.
That is honest.
We want to support you.
But you gotta do the damn science.
You can't just wing it.
You can't take shortcuts.
And you know what?
Your good looks don't earn you any pity when you get caught and busted for selling dishonest products.
You don't get a free pass just because you're the prettiest girl in the room.
Sorry, you know what?
You gotta rely on the science.
That's what people are buying.
They're not buying you, Jessica.
They're buying your product.
So it's the composition of your product that matters.
So get with the program.
Hire a competent laboratory, conduct composition testing on every single production batch, and share those results with the public, and you can restore your credibility and your image, and you can restore the faith of people like myself who are influential in the industry, running NaturalNews.com, running a lab, and so on.
We want to support you, but we're not going to give you a free pass.
In fact, we don't give anybody a free pass.
We don't even give ourselves a free pass.
If I see something in the ICP instrument back there that I don't like, I tell my buyers, reject it.
Flat out reject it.
And there are people who sell raw materials and products all across the country who know that we reject their products.
We have a limit.
We have a very strict limit and we abide by it.
So there are no shortcuts.
There's no free passes.
You either get your act together and start selling truly honest products, or your company is going to crash and burn, you're going to lose your entire customer base, you're going to be exposed by other organizations beside the Wall Street Journal, and eventually you're going to collapse.
So it's very easy to get with the program, you just have to be committed to it.
And I don't apologize for being blunt, perhaps harsh.
You're dealing with the lives of millions of customers.
You have marketed a product based on these promises.
These promises that people believe.
And you are, by doing this, you are hurting the entire natural products industry.
When you get caught cheating, you hurt everybody.
And it's not okay.
And it's not only is the Wall Street Journal exposing you, but labs like mine here, we're going to expose other companies as well who are cutting corners and cheating.
And we do that not out of any desire to attack anybody, but rather a desire to protect others.
The integrity of the natural products industry, which is an industry that I believe has really the best answers for healing and cancer recovery and preventing diabetes, preventing heart disease, protecting the planet, avoiding downstream pollution.
The natural products industry has an amazing abundance of solutions to offer humanity.
But when people in the industry cut corners and get caught, it hurts the reputation of the entire industry.
So the industry needs watchdogs.
And that's kind of my role.
I'm a watchdog.
I'm a whistleblower.
And kind of like what the Wall Street Journal did, I'm doing that at a much bigger level and more tests and more companies and more public announcements.
So And that's what consumers want.
That's what people deserve.
They deserve a watchdog who works within the industry and isn't afraid to tell the truth.
You see, that's the last thing.
And then I'll wrap this up.
You know, As the health ranger, I cannot be intimidated.
I cannot be bought off.
Everybody knows I've been threatened.
I've been slandered.
I've been death-threaded.
Everybody knows I'm armed 24-7.
You know, I got a Glock on my hip right now.
I put it right in my videos.
I don't care.
I cannot be intimidated.
I cannot be bought off because there's no amount of money that can convince me to give up my mission of truth and transparency.
No one can come to me and tell me to fake any results.
If I get a hold of your product and I put it through this lab here and I find something that is a big, big story, that if you've lied, if you've cut corners, if your product is contaminated, I'm going to go public with it.
Period.
There's nothing you can do to stop it.
Not a damn thing.
So people know that and people respect that.
And for that reason, I help This entire industry clean up its act because they know that Health Ranger's out there.
Health Ranger's got a lab.
Health Ranger could be looking at our products one of these days.
And yeah, it's true.
I probably will.
If you're a big brand name, if you have a very successful business, a very popular product line, I'm going to be looking at your product.
And I'm going to be, in fact, touting the benefits of the wonderful products that pass all of these tests that are honest.
I've already talked about Gaia Herbs, for example, and how all of their herbs are extremely low heavy metals, almost zero.
And it's not something that I see in all the other products out there, but Gaia has...
I don't know what their process is.
I don't even know those people.
I just know that when I buy their product and I test it, it's clean.
So...
I want to help promote companies that are honest and clean, and at the same time, my watchdog nature is going to expose those companies that are lying and cheating and deceiving the customer.
So that's how we operate.
That's how we roll.
I hope you found this video useful.
Again, my recommendation right now is stop buying Honest Company products until such time as Jessica Alba and her team of executives, if you want to call them that, decide to discover the magic of laboratory testing and start testing the products that they're selling.
Maybe they will gain some maturity and experience in this marketplace and actually begin acting like adults.
That would be nice for the industry.
I hope they do that.
So thank you for watching.
My name's Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
You can find my book, Food Forensics, at foodforensics.com.
And our lab here is now called cwclabs.com, and we are announcing commercial testing services in a few weeks.
So if you'd like to use our lab, please check out our website, cwclabs.com, for information on the tests that we will offer.
And that's going to be a very exciting time.
I thank you for your support.
I thank you for believing in me and my mission and the work that we do here.
It's very important for this industry and I very much appreciate your support.
Share this video.
▲
Export Selection