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March 16, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
25:57
ICP-MS demonstration - live run at CWC Labs / Mike Adams
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So I've had a lot of people ask me what's actually happening during an ICP-MS run, and I thought I would show you.
I've set up a new screen here with a close-up of the sample loop.
And the beginning of the plasma torch, the nebulizer, spray chamber, and so on.
You can see the auto sampler here.
That's the ICP-MS instrument over there, obviously.
And this is the screen with the calibration run.
Because people ask me, well, how do you really test for heavy metals?
I thought I would kind of walk you through this during an actual live run.
Right now we are testing, what is that, about 18 samples for our online store, the Natural News store.
We're looking at the lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, and many other things.
So what's actually happening is the vials that look yellow here are...
The reason they're yellow is because that's nitric acid that has been cooked as part of the digestion process to turn solids into liquids.
Now, the ICP-MS instrument does not analyze solids.
It only analyzes liquid.
And this is true among many scientific instruments.
The liquid has to Well, you have to create the liquid out of the solid first.
And in order to do that, you use harsh acids like nitric acid or hydrochloric acid or sometimes hydrofluoric acid, although we try to stay away from HF as much as possible.
Anyway, then the auto-sampler there is picking up each sample, and it's taking it up through...
Suction, essentially, and injecting it into the ICP-MS as a liquid.
Now, get ready, because I'm going to draw your attention.
You see that loop where the air is moving through with the liquid?
It's a circle right there.
Right now it's solid, but watch that.
Here comes some bubbles.
You're going to see it go to a sample.
Well, here comes an external standard.
And watch as that loop fills with liquid.
Here it comes.
There, there.
It's all solid liquid.
That is the load up.
Now that's going to reverse the flow, and you're going to see an air bubble come out up there.
Here it comes.
There.
Can you see that air bubble?
That is showing that liquid being injected through this right here, which is the nebulizer.
So that liquid is being injected into the system right now, and here on the software we can actually look at the counts per second of what we're seeing.
Let's say we want to look at lead.
We'll go to 208 over here.
We can actually see the counts per second, which is this column, and we can see the calibration curve over here, which shows us how good our curve is, and this curve looks very very good.
With an R value of 1.0000.
So that's essentially our coefficient of the curve that has been fit to the points.
And you can't get better than 1.0000 unless you add more zeros.
Okay, so that was actually taking a full quant blank right there.
Lead shows up at.01 parts per billion with a count of 480.89 on the detector.
That means that the detector has witnessed 480 atoms of lead striking that detector during that sample.
At the same time, It saw some mercury, by the way.
It saw 2,793 counts of mercury.
This is not parts per billion or parts per million or anything like that.
These are raw counts on the detector.
The reason it saw that much mercury is because there's carryover from the mercury standards that we ran before, which are all these numbers here.
That's why you're seeing that, 2,793.
Or.25 parts per billion is what it calculated that to mean.
Now the reason I have this screen up, I want you to watch, there's this rinse light and then there's a home light.
I guess you can't see the home light, but you can see the rinse light.
That tells you that the ejection system is in a rinse cycle and it's actually rinsing the liquid and putting it over to waste, which is this red tube.
The red tube here is waste.
This tube here is what comes in from the sample probe.
If you actually watch this carefully, you can see what's happening with quite a lot of precision.
Right now it's in the detection mode.
It's injecting the sample and the ICP is actually scanning for the different mass to charge ratios.
Of all these different elements.
Now it's done.
It's going into the first rinse.
And you see that the rinse light is on right here.
See?
It's in rinse mode.
And there's a lot of waste going out on that red line.
Now it's going into another rinse.
And then it'll do a third rinse before it injects the next sample.
That was an acid blank sample in order to wash out memory effects of mercury and other elements.
There's the second rinse.
Everything's running perfectly.
It's humming along just like it should.
This is a very good run.
Alright, now we're taking up a sample.
Watch the sample loop.
It will get filled with that sample once again.
Here it goes.
Two, three.
A little air bubble in there, but that's no problem.
You can see that air bubble moving.
That won't ever make it to the nebulizer, so it's really not a problem.
So now again, it's injecting and it will go into analysis mode.
What's interesting about the ICP-MS is that it does a mass-to-charge ratio scan among virtually the entire periodic table of elements.
It can scan for all of these elements at the same time.
Well, almost at the same time.
Maybe in thousands of a second difference.
But this is why I've got so many different elements up here in this chart.
I'm looking at arsenic, strontium, two isotopes of cadmium, 111 and 114.
I'm looking at cesium, 133, which is the stable isotope of cesium.
I'm looking at mercury at three isotopes, 200, 201, and 202.
I'm looking at lead.
Oh, look at this.
Here we go.
This is a raw protein.
From China, organic raw protein, lead.
129,000 counts of lead on the detector which gives you a lead concentration of 378 parts per billion.
Now that's not unexpected.
We actually run this raw protein every time we do a batch because It lets us know that we're seeing reliable, reproducible numbers as part of our calibration standards, the standards of checks, and quality control.
This rice protein happens to be Garden of Life protein from the year 2014.
This is not a current product.
I think their current product is significantly less lead But this is what they used to sell.
378 parts per billion lead.
Garden of Life.
Organic.
In fact, this is it right here.
This is exactly what we're running right now.
I don't know if you can see that.
Right there, from 2014.
So this is their old product, and they've taken a lot of steps since then to improve their composition.
But we use it as almost what's called a CRM, a certified reference material, because we have that whole big jug of it, and it always tests high in lead.
Here's what else is interesting.
Check out the mercury numbers on that.
Mercury, raw protein, 105 parts per billion, mercury 201, and 197 parts per billion, mercury 202.
And 272 parts per billion, mercury 200.
Now what's interesting is that a lot of this isn't actually necessarily mercury.
This is also tungsten as well as some level of mercury.
Anyway, that's no concern to current customers because that's not the product that's being sold today on the shelves.
But boy, it had a lot of cadmium in it too.
1.9 parts per million cadmium.
And a little bit of arsenic here as well.
So anyway, as we move on in this run, as you see, the auto-sampler is cycling through the samples, and it's doing quality checks, consistency checks.
I'm always looking at the calibration curves.
So for example, I can bring up cadmium here, and I can look at the calibration curve over here and look at the numbers that I'm supposed to be getting.
So I'm supposed to have 4.8 24, 120, 600, and 3000.
And what I have that's actually calculated is 4.73, 23.28, 119.39, 623.51, and 2995.33.
Now this 600, showing 623.51, is at the low end of the analog detection range on the pulse analog detector, which uses a photon multiplier PMT, a photon multiplier tube.
Sometimes, if you have an issue, With the low end range of the analog, you can simply click this checkbox over here, and you can reject that point on your calibration curve if you know it's an outlier.
And then you can reprocess the batch, and it will interpolate between 120 and 3000, and then it'll bring you right back on track for calibrations.
There's a lot to running this.
It's not just fire and forget or just push a button and walk away.
Not at all.
You've got to keep an eye on it.
You can also zoom in here on the calibration curve and I can actually look at the calibration points and make sure that they are linear.
And if it's not fitting correctly, depending on the element, you might find better results with what's called a quadratic curve fit.
You can choose that here.
Oops.
I have to remove blank offset.
Go to Ignore.
And I can do a quadratic curve.
But in this case, the quadratic curve...
Wow, actually, look at that.
The quadratic curve has caused 600 to fall right in the line at 601.05.
So in this case, the quadratic curve resulted in a really great fit here at the 600 parts per billion concentration.
But now I'm a little bit off at 4.8 parts per billion.
So usually I don't end up using quadratic curves because linear curves with a blank offset, zero, actually work better.
And remember that all this time we're dealing with parts per billion, which is one one-thousandth of a part per million.
We are dealing with such very fine accuracy and low detection limits.
I mean, very, very sensitive instrumentation here that most labs don't even worry about anything this detailed at all.
They just go, is it two parts per million or five parts per million?
That's all they care about.
They don't even get below one part per million.
We're dealing with parts per billion here.
So here's something interesting.
This material, Q2052, this is a material that we are looking at to possibly use in our own food manufacturing.
And if you look at the lead, it is extremely low, essentially under 50 parts per billion, which makes it an A++ rating.
That's very, very low lead.
Virtually undetectable by most instruments.
Mercury is flat out zero, zero, zero.
Or less than zero, as this instrument likes to say.
When it's absolutely certain it can't find even one atom of it, it says it's less than zero.
Cadmium is only 20 parts per billion, as you can see.
And arsenic is only 61.
Now, I don't know what this material is.
We have a coded system.
It's Q2052. So whatever it is, it passes because that's very, very clean.
Again, compare that to the raw protein that we tested just a few minutes ago, which was 378 parts per million lead and had all these mercury isotopes in it as well.
So, you know...
These numbers help us make decisions at the Natural News store about what to purchase and what to reject in terms of our manufacturing.
The reason I want to share all this with you is because I haven't ever really given anybody a tour of the MassHunter software.
And I just got this screen set up to be able to show you in a little more detail, and also so I can monitor it, to look at the uptake tubing, the rotary valve, the sample injection, and some of the things that are going on there.
It's also nice for you to be able to see the auto sampler and to take a look at how that operates.
It's a very rapid system.
Right now the cycle time is only about 90 seconds from sample to sample.
We're on a whole new column there, as you can see.
Position 2201.
And so this is how it works.
We go through.
We watch the calibration curves.
We make sure that all the chemistry is correct, the mathematics are correct, all the plumbing is good.
Before this, we've done a bunch of tuning of the system.
We've done a pulse analog tune.
We've done axis resolution tune, plasma tune.
We've done a user tune.
All those things, even before we began this run, and it took us...
Let's see...
I don't know, what is that?
Twelve, fifteen?
Fifteen samples before we even got into...
Testing the food.
So all of these are calibration standards here.
And then all of these are like unknown foods or materials or whatever we're testing, or water.
This is the exact same system that we're going to be using here shortly to test for lead in the water all across America.
Right over there I've got a big stack of water vials that everybody has sent me.
Thank you very much if you've sent water.
We're going to be testing it right here on this instrument in this exact same way.
Using essentially the same standards, the same solutions, the same setup, exactly this, except we're looking for lead in that case.
But not only lead, we're going to be looking for lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, copper, nickel, even uranium.
We look at uranium-238.
We look at cesium-133.
We look at zinc and copper.
And I didn't like that calibration number on the copper, but that's I didn't tune this for copper.
In this run, not a big deal.
But we look for a lot of different elements in these runs.
And to get this kind of good data...
I mean, believe me, any scientist out there that runs ICP instrumentation would look at this calibration curve and they would just go, wow, that is freaking awesome.
I mean, with an R coefficient of 1.0000, detection limit of 0.03 parts per billion, that is 30 parts per trillion detection limit right now on this system in real time for cesium.
That's what it's telling me.
You can actually look at any element.
You can get a detection limit number.
Let's go to Mercury.
This is telling me our detection limit is 38 parts per trillion.
That is freaking amazing.
This is some amazing science that's going on here that Agilent invented, that different chemists from around the country have taught me how to use, and that I've been now exploring and pursuing for almost two and a half years to become an expert in this system.
By the way, if you want to use our analytical food testing services, we're launching cwclabs.com pretty soon, and we'll be offering this same service commercially to anyone who wants to know what's in their food.
It'll be open to the public, it'll be open to food companies, dietary supplement manufacturers, companies that are interested in label compliance, state agencies that want to test their water without waiting six months.
For the results to come back from the EPA or the FDA or your state water quality agency or what have you.
Anybody that wants to test water, food, environmental samples for heavy metals, they'll be able to use our services and get very good, very accurate, super high-tech answers on that extremely quickly using this exact system with me actually running the system.
So you've got really one of the best ICP experts in the country right here with me running the system.
I've put several thousand hours into this, and maybe that's obvious by listening to what I'm doing.
Maybe it's not.
I don't know.
But any scientist that works in a lab would instantly recognize this process and understand that we know what we're doing here when it comes to this system.
So right now we're just in a kind of a watch-and-see-what-happens mode.
Here's something interesting.
One sample had lead of 86 parts per billion, and the next sample had.44.
So, gosh, I'm kind of curious what those two things are.
And sometimes we're testing third-party products.
So this might be a third-party product, and we might not like these numbers, depending on the overall composition and what it is.
You can look at our standards at LowHeavyMetalsVerified.org.
You can look at our standards there, and that's what we apply to all of our foods.
So this is how it happens.
It is not a simple process.
It requires really Probably at least a thousand hours of experience to be able to do this well and to be able to troubleshoot problems and to set up everything correctly, to do all the plumbing correctly, to do all the chemistry, all the external standards set up correctly, instrument maintenance, all that.
This is not something to just leap into in a weekend course, that's for sure.
It just doesn't work that way.
But it's very rewarding for me.
I love food science.
I love food.
Bringing technology to real food and nutrition.
I love natural medicine.
I love holistic healing.
I love environmental protection.
I love helping companies create clean food and encouraging companies to have cleaner food, just like we did Garden of Life.
I mean, if you think about it, this company right here, They cleaned up their product line because of our work, because of what we did here.
And that's what sounded the alarm.
And then Garden of Life responded in a very responsible way to provide a better quality product to consumers.
But if we had not brought attention to that, it's very doubtful that they would have been aware of that problem back in 2014.
So, you know, I want to thank Garden of Life for responding, and at the same time, I will tell you that we're going to be, well, we've already purchased some Garden of Life from 2016, and we'll be testing that here soon, and actually doing a video about that.
To talk about how much they've improved their composition over the last couple of years.
That'll be a very interesting video.
Sadly, I don't have a sample of that in this run, otherwise we could look at it right now, but that's for another day.
In any case, from here on, it's the same pattern over and over again.
So you've seen how it works.
I hope it's been educational and interesting.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the health ranger.
I'm the lab science director of cwclabs.com.
And check out my new book.
It's called Food Forensics.
You can find that at foodforensics.com or amazon.com or Barnes& Noble or...
This summer, it's going to be in bookstores everywhere, so check out foodforensics.com, and you're going to love that new book.
We've got a lot of exciting announcements and news coming up here on the science front, food transparency, food investigations, food research, plus some breakthrough new products that we are announcing because of all of this research, what this has allowed us to do in terms of creating ultra-clean food products to offer to the marketplace.
Before I let you go, one last thing.
Ask yourself this question.
How many other food manufacturers or dietary supplement companies, how many of them have this?
How many of them have this whole lab?
How many of them will sit down on camera with you and explain what they're doing and how they pursue quality control?
The answer is zero.
We are the only company in the world that brings this level of science and quality control and almost fanatical dedication to food transparency to everything that we do.
We're the only ones that I'm aware of who do that, and it's because I'm incredibly passionate about clean food.
And I'm very capable of doing the science.
And I have all the right motivations to bring people healthy food that will help them heal rather than food that harms people, which is what they get from many other companies or processed food factories or what have you.
This is my passion.
And that's why I'm sharing this with you.
That's why I'm showing you behind the scenes total transparency with our science, our methodologies, our operations, and what goes into the food that we sell.
So if you want to eat the cleanest food in the world, the cleanest superfoods, the cleanest chlorella, the cleanest turmeric, the cleanest everything, Go to store.naturalnews.com.
Every single thing that we sell there has been validated here first.
This is exactly how it's done.
And that's why I'm here doing this.
Because, again, there's 18 more samples to either reject or accept, depending on what they tell us.
And, you know, I just heard that the Honest company with...
What's her name?
Jessica Alba.
Alba just got caught...
With I think SLS and some of her products.
And you know why?
You know why they got caught?
I think the Wall Street Journal did a big expose on her company.
The reason they got caught is because they didn't do their own testing.
They trusted their supplier and their supplier lied to them.
Gee, who would have ever thought that, that a supplier would lie to you?
Well, suppliers lie all the time.
I don't trust any suppliers.
That's why I do this, because I don't trust anybody in the food industry except ourselves.
I trust the science to give us the right answers on what's in the food.
I don't trust resellers.
I don't trust importers.
I don't trust other retailers.
I don't trust gurus.
I don't trust anybody on Amazon.com for damn sure.
I don't trust anybody in the industry because I've seen so many cover-ups and so many lies and deceptions over and over and over again.
And just like this honest company just got caught because they don't do their own science.
That's their own damn fault if you ask me.
They should be doing their science like we're doing it.
This is how I protect my reputation is to do the research, validate the products before we put them on sale online.
That's the only process that I trust.
And I think that's why so many people trust us, to provide them with clean food and superfoods and dietary supplements.
So anyway, I hope this has been educational.
Again, my name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
And please share.
I know this isn't the most exciting video.
Maybe we should throw, like, pictures of Jessica Alba on the screen to just make it exciting.
Jessica Alba in a swimsuit.
Jessica Alba modeling.
Then it would be interesting, huh?
Is that right?
Well, sorry, we're not going to go there.
We actually, we provide actual clean products, not bogus fake clean products.
That she has been providing.
How about that?
Alright, take care everybody.
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