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March 16, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
10:13
Are heavy metals “naturally occurring” or toxic pollution?
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Hi, everybody.
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, here with a demonstration and answering a question.
A lot of people ask this question.
They say, well, isn't lead and aren't these other heavy metals, aren't they naturally occurring in foods and herbs?
And the answer is, well, no, not really.
Let me explain why.
Now, this, and by the way, that's the excuse made by everybody whose products are contaminated with high levels of lead.
They always say, oh, it doesn't matter.
It's naturally occurring.
B.S. Let's imagine that this is a farmland, okay?
Let's say this is farmland.
I know it's yellow.
This is actually a sulfur pad for absorbing acid from the acid digestion over there.
But let's say this is farmland, and let's say this is a factory.
These are pipettes for...
Mixing acids and so on.
I'm going to make smokestacks out of these pipettes.
This is a factory with smokestacks.
Let me get all this out of the way.
So this is your cropland.
Now, before the factory existed, the cropland was relatively pristine.
Low lead, low cadmium, low mercury, everything.
But now this factory comes along, especially in China where they have virtually no emission standards.
The factory comes along and it starts churning out all these toxic heavy metals out of the smokestacks.
Just imagine billowing smoke here.
Well, the smoke has lead in it and mercury, especially coal-fired power plants have mercury as well.
All this toxic stuff goes into the air.
And when it comes out of the smokestack, everybody agrees, well, that's pollution, right?
If you see a factory and there's a bunch of smoke coming out the top, you say, well, that's pollution, right?
And if you analyze the chemical composition of what's coming out, you'd say these are pollutants.
But when these go up into the air, then they start to precipitate down.
They fall onto the soils.
Now what's funny about these heavy metals denialists, you have to call them, people who say all this lead is naturally occurring, when all this pollution goes up into the air and then falls down onto the soil, the minute it hits the soil, they say it's natural.
Right, right.
So it's pollution here, it's pollution all up in here, it's pollution in the sky, and it's pollution when it's falling, but then when it hits the dirt, it's natural.
This is what they say.
This is why they're totally full of bunk, or worse.
So then the plants are grown on the soil that's contaminated by the factory, and then the plants have high lead.
And then I take them into my instrument, which you see there in the back, the one with the vent on it, the big snaking vent.
That's the ICP-MS, and that can detect all the heavy metals.
And then I see it.
I see it, and especially if this is China we're talking about here, then they've got this farm that's certified organic right here, and they've got this factory right next to it.
And guess what?
Organic certification doesn't require any limits on heavy metals.
There's no testing for heavy metals required.
They can certify this farm organic and you can buy organic rice protein or organic broccoli or organic anything from China and it can be loaded with heavy metals.
Organic mushrooms loaded with heavy metals because it was grown right next to a factory.
Now, at least in the United States, in California, for example, they're pretty strict about this.
They won't allow a factory to pollute all that right next to a farm.
I mean, there are more emissions controls on the factory, so it's not going to have the same thing.
And that's why when I test foods that come out of California, they're very clean.
In terms of heavy metals.
Now, you know, sure, they use pesticides and herbicides on.
That's a different thing.
That's organic chemistry.
Right now, I'm talking about inorganic chemistry, heavy metals on the crops.
So, The bottom line truth is that if you're buying organic and you think it's free from heavy metals, then you're kidding yourself.
Now organic has its advantages, by the way.
I recommend you buy organic.
I'm pro-organic.
Organic is non-GMO. Organic doesn't have the pesticides and herbicides.
And that's great.
That's why you should buy organic.
But organic doesn't mean that it's free from lead.
Not by a long shot.
In fact, it can have deadly levels of lead and mercury in it and it can still be certified organic because the USDA, which is an anti-science organization, is not interested in the science of food composition and food safety for their organic label.
Pretty sad, isn't it?
I've been pushing for a heavy metal standard for organics, and I think both the USDA and the FDA need to establish heavy metals limits in the United States, which they have so far failed to do.
Once again, putting them many, many years behind Europe.
Europe has very strict standards, limits on heavy metals in food.
Canada has better limits than the United States, which has virtually no limits whatsoever.
So bottom line is, don't believe denialists who say, oh, it's all naturally occurring.
That's complete bunk.
I mean, yeah, you could say a very, very low level, maybe...
You know, 20 parts per billion or something, you could argue that that could be in the composition of the soil from day one, even before the Industrial Revolution.
But what we're seeing now is much, much higher than that, where plants are having 500 parts per billion lead in a rice protein, for example.
We're seeing lead in grasses that is just at huge levels.
Oh, the other thing I forgot to mention.
So, even in North America, it's like, suppose this is an orchard.
Now, we have a big orchard and there's trees planted all over the place.
For decades and decades, they sprayed lead arsenate all on these trees.
Well, lead arsenate is obviously made of lead and arsenic, right?
The name, lead arsenate.
Lead arsenate kills insects, kills living things.
Well, where did that lead go?
Did it disappear after they sprayed it?
No!
It went right into the soil.
And it persists in the soil because you can't destroy lead.
It doesn't go away.
I mean, some pesticides break down after a period of time.
Organic molecules will break down.
Lead doesn't break down unless you're inside an exploding star or something.
Then you can have transmutation.
You can have nuclear processes that will alter lead.
But aside from a massive explosion of a star, you're not going to change lead into something else on your orchard.
So the lead is still there from the 1920s and the 1930s and the 1940s, and the arsenic is still there too.
And this is why we're still seeing lead and arsenic in some areas of even North America.
Now, of course, every plant that takes the lead out of the soil and then feeds it to you, well, that's removing lead from the soil.
In effect, the orchards are engaged in bioremediation.
They are removing lead.
They're kind of mining the lead out using their roots, and then that lead is going into you, the consumer, going to the grocery stores.
So little by little, they are taking the lead out over time.
But that's only because they're feeding it to you.
You see?
Not really a good system, is it?
So what would be the answer to this, by the way?
It's simpler than you think.
You use mycelial mass, or mushrooms.
If you were to stop planting crops on this field and you were to put mushrooms all over it and plant mushrooms, they would pull up most of the lead in one season.
And then you'd harvest those mushrooms and you'd get rid of them somewhere else.
You don't feed them to people.
The mushrooms attract heavy metals with such strong affinity that they can be used to clean up contaminated soils.
That's what we need to be doing in America to get rid of the lead that's still there.
And especially in China, they're adding, remember in China, they're adding more lead every single day to the fields.
It's just more lead coming down every single day.
So if you're buying foods, supplements, superfoods, vitamins, anything from China, Watch out.
You could be eating a lot of lead, cadmium, mercury, tungsten, arsenic, and other toxic heavy metals that are not naturally occurring.
They are pollution going on to the farm fields.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the Health Ranger.
You can look at my results, scientific testing results of foods, at labs.naturalnews.com.
And I apologize for all the background noise.
That's a water treatment system producing trace-grade analytical water for our lab.
This is a working lab, not a studio.
Well, maybe it's both since we're filming here, but it's a working lab, so there's all kinds of noises, a vacuum pump running back there.
So I apologize for the noise, but I hope that explanation helps.
Anybody who says, oh, all the lead in their plants is naturally occurring is...
They're ignorant.
They have no idea what they're talking about.
They don't know.
So if you want to talk about lead in foods, I'm your guy.
I know what's in it.
I've tested thousands of different foods.
I've studied the sources of lead.
I've looked at lead concentrations across everything.
Almost everything.
Food, supplements, beverages, you name it.
And it is out there.
Especially in foods from China, it's very common.
Alright, thanks for watching.
You can check out my website, naturalnews.com or listen to my podcast at healthrangerreport.com And finally, the answer to this quiz is I ate some pie and it was delicious.
Why is that I? Because the square root of negative one is an imaginary number.
That's I. So anyway, I'll try to give you some different t-shirts as we geek out here together at the lab.
Thanks for watching.
Take care.
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