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March 16, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
11:45
Heavy metals laboratory gear explained by the Health Ranger
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Alright, welcome to Questions and Answers with the Health Ranger.
I'm Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, the Lab Science Director of the CWC Labs that you see behind me here.
And in fact, one of the questions today begins with this thing right here, this face shield.
I've had a lot of people asking me about this, like, what the heck is this for?
Why do you have this?
And what is this?
People are asking.
I'm looking at the monitor.
This is part of a fume hood.
This is where we do our acid work.
We use acids, powerful aggressive acids like nitric acid to digest foods, turn them into liquids because the liquids, all the instruments here only work on liquids.
Not solids.
And so this face shield is what I wear when I am adding acid to the unnode food samples.
Occasionally, a food sample will explode.
And when that happens, you don't want to get nitric acid all over your face.
This face shield is all for that.
Now, I wear glasses, of course, and I wear latex gloves during that procedure.
And actually, we have quite a lot of experience now.
We know what's more likely to blow up.
Blow up is maybe the wrong term.
Let's say rapidly oxidize.
How about that?
That's really what's going on chemically.
But one time, I remember something really surprised us, and it was a very concentrated turmeric resin.
And it went, it was like a volcanic eruption, and it blasted acid and turmeric resin all over the inside of the fume hood.
It took hours to clean it up, and it made a mess.
There are some things, like a lot of lipids, a lot of fish oils, for example, you have to be very, very cautious when you're adding nitric acid to them.
So we have a lot of safety procedures, and we have a couple of different eyewash stations.
We have a shower here.
Yes, an emergency shower.
You run to the shower, you pull the cord, and you just get bathed in water.
Freaking cold water, it turns out, and you can wash yourself off if you get acid on you.
So we've not had any such...
Accidents.
We're requiring a shower or an eye wash, but that's what this is for.
We are dealing with harsh acids here.
We're dealing with hydrochloric acid, sometimes hydrofluoric acid, but usually nitric acid, but other solvents like...
Well, acetone, for example, methanol, for example.
Other things like that, acetonitrile, a common solvent that we would use for liquid chromatography.
And you do have to take some safety precautions.
So that's what we have here.
Then some people have asked, what is this?
What's this light doing here?
And yes, it works.
See, there it is.
This light is because one of the steps that we do here is in our 50 ml vials.
Here's one.
In our 50 ml vials, this is where we put our food samples into, and we are adding volume after digestion to 50 ml.
And then you take the mass of the food that you put in, and You look at the 50 milliliters volume and from that you can calculate the dilution factor which the MassHunter software uses to calculate the resulting parts per billion concentrations of the heavy metals.
Now to do that, to bring it up to 50 mils, we have to be able to shine a light.
This is what we do.
We actually shine a light through the side here like this.
Does that show up?
Let me get this out of the way.
We shine a light through the side.
There we go.
And it helps us see the volume level of the liquid more accurately.
And so that's just a visual aid for us to be able to do our jobs more effectively.
We have a lot of tools like that.
And also the fume hood, of course, is designed so that When you turn on the blower, it pulls air through the fume hood and exhausts it out of the building.
So it's calibrated to assure us of a very specific velocity of what's called laminar airflow, that the air is moving at a certain velocity, a number of feet per second through there, to make sure that if we're doing some work, that acid fumes aren't going to come back out and hit us.
Which is bad.
I mean, every once in a while, I've had a little whiff of nitric acid in water, or even hydrochloric in water, and it's not good.
Not good.
It'll burn your sinuses right out, man, if you get into that too much.
Remember, this stuff dissolves minerals and food, not quite rocks.
You need more hydrofluoric acid to digest rocks, but this stuff is very, very harsh.
If you get it on your skin, it'll just eat your skin.
It eats right through your clothing.
That's why all the pants that I wear these days have holes in them.
Oh, that chart back there on that fume hood, that's a chart of medicinal herbs.
We've got a number of different interesting charts around the laboratory.
Maybe I'll show them to you one day.
We've got the periodic table in earth and sky with pictures and images of all the elements.
That's a pretty cool table.
We've got a lot of different reference tables.
And what else is in the picture that people are asking me about?
The microscope back here.
I've posted another video showing you that microscope.
It's a pretty cool system.
It's a video We can take video and still images of what we're seeing on the microscope and that allows us to diagnose hardware problems with the instrumentation that we're using here.
For example, if something gets clogged, like a nebulizer gets clogged up with, let's say, a strawberry particle.
Which happens.
Strawberry fibers tend to do that.
We can go put it under the microscope and we can find the strawberry fiber inside the nebulizer and we can clean it out.
Or we can use methanol with a reverse plunger and get it out of there and put it back into service.
We can look at the skimmer cones and sample cones on the ICP. We look at all kinds of things.
So that's real useful.
Anyway, I guess that's about it.
We have a sonicator over here, actually.
There, back there.
That is an ultrasonic cleaner for the sample cone on the ICP. So we have a very light detergent.
In water, and we sonicate that to clean the mineral buildup off of the sample cone.
That's how we keep the ICP running.
And I'm looking at the monitor like, what else?
These bottles here, these are just external standards that we're using to make our serial dilutions for the production run.
This right here, this is a bottle of...
Of nitric acid that has been used.
And I'm not going to open this because that would be extremely toxic.
But there's actually right now, there is an acid gas inside here.
And that's kind of what turns it yellow.
And if you were to open this, it would be very bad.
We don't open these unless you're under the fume hood.
This is for disposal.
Currently, we are collecting these and saving them until we have enough to call a waste disposal company to take care of that acid and that glass.
Those are some of the things we do here at the laboratory and some of the things that you see in the scene.
That apparent box there, that's a centrifuge.
So we use that during our pesticide extraction of food samples.
We use Agilent Catcher's extraction system, that system, and it requires centrifuging, sometimes 50 mil vials, but sometimes much smaller vials, 12 mil vials, for example.
That's what that system is for.
That's really...
Oh, and that whole section over there, if you're wondering what those monitors there, that's our organic chemistry section, and I'll show you that later.
That's where we're running our LCMS time-of-flight system, which is...
A very capable mass spec instrument that can detect organic molecules at parts per billion, well actually sub parts per billion concentrations.
So it's a very cool system.
Super excited to have that up and running and just...
Just amazed that this technology even exists, by the way.
And I'm just so happy to be able to sit here and run these instruments and do this science and report these things to you and answer your questions and do all these things.
It's really an amazing privilege to be here, to be able to do this.
I feel really blessed every day that I can do this.
And you think about it, to promote clean food using the tools of science, That's amazing.
Because, you know, a lot of people in the clean food industry, they're often slandered by being called anti-science.
And yet, here we are using the best tools of science and all the established scientific methods, methodologies, EPA, AOAC, FDA, you name it, to conduct clean food testing, to promote clean food.
So not only are we at the leading edge of science, we represent the future of the science of food and nutrition, the kind of things that we're doing.
Clean food starts here.
You know, the old system, the mainstream media, governments, academia, they don't care about clean food.
They're all run by, you know, biotech companies and the Cokes and Pepsis of the world, the Nabiscos of the world and the Nestle corporations of the world.
They're not into clean food.
It's us, you know, it's the citizens.
That's why this is called citizen science.
We're the ones that really are passionate about clean food.
And how passionate are we?
So passionate that we built this lab and put in the thousands of hours of investment, of time, to learn how to be scientists and use this instrumentation and get the results and report the results and do cutting-edge science for the public, in the public interest.
That's what's happening here.
It's amazing.
I'm just thrilled to be a part of it.
Every single day I wake up and I think about it.
I get to come here and I get to be part of making history for food science.
That's just incredible.
It's incredible.
It's like a dream come true.
It's just amazing.
So thank you for your support.
Couldn't do it without you.
I'll do my best to answer your questions in future videos.
Thank you for watching.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
Check out my book at foodforensics.com and my lab website, the new name, the new website is cwclabs.com and soon we will be announcing commercial testing services.
So if you have a food company or whatever company or even if you're just an individual and you want to know what's in your food, you can hire us to test the foods for you for heavy metals, pesticides, fluoride, all kinds of other chemicals as well.
We'll do the commercial testing coming soon.
Thank you for your support.
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