How to interpret an ICP-MS heavy metals lab report
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Mike Adams.
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And now, from naturalnews.com, here's Mike Adams.
If you're wanting to know how to read and interpret the CWC Labs Heavy Metals Analysis Report, you are listening to the right podcast.
Welcome!
I am, of course, Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, founder and lab science director of CWC Labs.
And since we have been publishing...
Quite a few documents that are sort of raw analysis documents.
We've had a few questions from people about how to interpret these documents.
So that's what this is all about.
A couple things to note.
If you go, if you're looking at a document right now and you go to the table of elements and the concentrations and the masses and so on, it's usually labeled the full quant table.
And that means full quantitation.
It has six columns.
I'd like to describe to you what these columns mean so you can really interpret this.
The columns are element, mass, concentration, units, RSD percentage, and detection, which is really short for detection mode.
Now, this is a report generated by the ICP-MS software.
ICP-MS, by the way, stands for inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.
Sometimes I just call it ICP for short.
Or some people just call it mass spec.
It's a method of obliterating molecules into their elemental components and then measuring the individual elements.
And that's why this technology cannot be used to measure pesticides, because pesticides are complex organic molecules, usually.
And as a result, if you obliterate them, all you get is like hydrogen and oxygen, or nitrogen or phosphorus or whatever it's made of.
You don't get lead.
Unless it's some kind of a pesticide compound like lead arsenate or something.
But most of the pesticides, like glyphosate, for example, doesn't contain any lead, so you can't really measure it with an ICP-MS instrument.
In any case, back to the table.
First column is element.
Now, We measure, in our current setup for ICP-MS analysis, we measure, oh, I don't know, maybe 30 elements or something like that, ranging from magnesium and aluminum all the way to lead and uranium.
And we do three different isotopes of lead and two different isotopes of mercury and two isotopes of cadmium.
But for the other elements, We just do single isotopes, and many of them are mono-isotopic anyway, such as aluminum at mass 27.
So there isn't aluminum at 28, unless it's, I guess, radioactive or something.
But nevertheless, if you look at the elements...
You'll see magnesium, Mg, aluminum, Al, potassium, vanadium, chromium, and so on.
You go on down the table, you get to the bottom part, which is the heavier elements, and there you're going to see mercury, which is Hg, lead, which is Pb, and uranium is the bottom one, uranium-238, which is the stable, non-radioactive isotope of uranium that we use.
We like to measure that in foods and just kind of see what's out there.
So some of the things to really look for in this, the four common heavy metals that you want to watch are mercury, lead, arsenic, and cadmium.
And arsenic is AS, cadmium CD, mercury HG, and lead PB. Those are very important to look for.
I also look for copper toxicity.
Copper is CU. And nickel is NI. Nickel is a toxic metal at certain concentrations as well, so I look for that.
On top of that, you have nutritive minerals that are found in foods such as zinc, ZN, magnesium, MG, chromium, CR, vanadium, V, and so on, or potassium, K. So, strontium, SR, and so on.
You've got some interesting things.
Silver is AG, gold is AU. If you're wondering why they're named this way, most of them are from Latin, by the way.
That's why they don't make sense in terms of English names for the elements.
Nevertheless, Aluminum is a toxic metal, but it's a lighter metal at 27 atomic mass units.
A lot of people are concerned about aluminum today, and I share that concern because of its correlation with Alzheimer's and dementia and other neurodegenerative diseases.
However, the form of aluminum that's in most foods is not the same risk as an inorganic aluminum that you might find from inorganic sources such as zeolites, for example, which is an inorganic rock.
It's like drinking rocks, really.
Whereas aluminum in green beans is usually in a different form, and it's not nearly as dangerous.
However, if you want to remove aluminum from your body, of course, you could take silica from horsetail herb or silica-rich mineral waters, and that will combine with aluminum circulating in your blood to form what are called hydroxyaluminosilicates that can be removed by your kidneys and eliminated through your urine.
But getting back to the table here, you'll notice the table is sorted by the mass units of the elements.
And that's important.
So the lighter elements are at the top, magnesium at 24.
The heavier elements are at the bottom, uranium 238.
And everything in between is, of course, sorted by mass.
Now the next column is concentration, and the column after that is units.
And all the units that we report are PPB. Now, this is important to understand because PPB means parts per billion, and it takes 1,000 PPB to make one part per million, which is 1 PPM. And so, you know, well, 1 PPM, 1 PPB, and then the next level down is 1 PPT, or part per million.
Trillion, which is, of course, one one-thousandth of a part per billion.
So, thank goodness we have the metric system.
Otherwise, we would be lost in all of this.
And a PPB is...
You can extrapolate this to a percentage, but it's a very, very low percentage.
However, these toxic metals are very toxic in very low concentrations.
So...
Typically, PPB detection, the detection limits vary from element to element, but we've done a limit of detection analysis on this instrument for mercury in particular, and we found that it was capable of detecting down to, if I'm remembering this correctly, I think...
I think something like 20 parts per trillion, something in that range.
Very, very tiny amount of mercury.
I'd have to check my reports for the exact number, but it's definitely below one part per billion.
Now, you might notice, by the way, if you look at a table, you might see some numbers where the concentration is reported as less than 0.000.
And you might wonder, how can it be less than zero?
Well, this has to do with the detection system.
Well, how to explain this?
If you go to the first page of the report, you'll see a number called dilution.
This is how much the sample is diluted during digestion or what's called sample prep.
Usually it's oxidized in nitric acid or combination of nitric and hydrochloric acid in order to completely digest the substance that you're trying to test.
And then these acids in liquid form are then pumped into the ICP machine or instrument, a better way to say it.
In any case, the dilution factor, sometimes you'll see a dilution factor of 100 or 120 or 150 or whatever.
When the ICP-MS instrument is running the detection on each element, it's looking at the number of hits on the detector for that specific element.
Without getting too geeky on you here, the ICP-MS instrument actually doesn't directly detect elemental mass.
Instead, it detects the mass-to-charge ratios, usually indicated by m divided by z, where m is mass and z is charge.
And so, since the charge is usually plus 1, a mercury 200 isotope would typically be a 200 divided by 1 mass, which is, of course, 200.
Uh, but you could get doubly charged masses.
For example, you could get, I mean, just theoretically, I'm not saying we have this, but let's say there was some mass at 400 and it was doubly charged.
It would be 400 divided by two, which would look like mercury, but there isn't really any, any mass at 400.
So that's not a concern.
Um, Nevertheless, the below 0.000 means that the detector did not detect even a single hit of that mass to charge ratio.
Even before it does the dilution extrapolation calculation.
So if you see a number that says zero, it means it's basically calculated as zero after considering the dilution factor as well as the comparison to the external standards.
Whereas if it's less than 0.000, it means there was no absolute detection of that mass on the detector.
There is a distinction.
That's why I mentioned that.
But moving on, RSD percentage is relative standard deviation column.
And the RSD column, the lower that number, it means the more reliable your detection quantitation is.
It really is.
So you'd like to see a number there that's smaller, like something, you know, 1.5 is fine, or 2.5, or something like that.
Sometimes, for certain elements, we'll have much, much higher numbers, like iron.
You might see a 4 point something, or other elements, you might see something higher than 10.
And what that typically means is that there wasn't, there really isn't enough data from the detector of the instrument to really lock down the predictable standard deviations of those elements going through the quadruple.
So, or to just, I'm really not trying to get too technical here.
I'm just trying to explain to you how this thing works.
Basically, the lower the number, the better.
The more reliable it is.
All right.
Let's see, the last column is the detection method and you'll see either analog or pulse.
And analog versus pulse.
Well, the extraordinary range of concentration detection in this Agilent ICP-MS instrument depends on the detector being able to operate in two different modes.
One is analog.
Which is used for very high concentrations.
And the other is called pulse, which really means digital.
And digital is for the lower ranges or very sensitive ranges.
For the most part, when you're seeing numbers that are reported At very, very low concentrations, they will be in digital or pulse, and the very, very high concentrations will be analog.
But it's not always the case.
It kind of depends on the element and what's going on.
And the instrument makes a lot of those decisions, of course, on its own.
I don't have to tell the instrument to run in analog or run in pulse, for example.
The instrument really knows how to do that itself based on the element.
Okay, so that's the table.
Essentially, you can take the column that says concentrations, and you can divide those numbers by 1,000 to get parts per million.
And if you want, you can divide those by 1,000 again to get parts per thousand, although nobody really talks about parts per thousand.
But if you were to divide that by 10, you would get parts per hundred, or essentially a percent number.
Does that make sense?
Okay, so a part per million is one one-thousandth of a part per thousand, a part per billion is one one-thousandth of a part per million, and a part per trillion is one one-thousandth Of a part per billion.
Or you could say a part per trillion is one one millionth of a part per million.
That's also true.
Or you could say one part per billion is one one millionth of a part per thousand.
That's not a tongue twister.
That's actually the way the math works on all of this.
Or if you just want to use scientific notation, you know, 2.5 times 10 to the minus 6, for example, is usually an easier way to talk about this.
That's what we do in the lab.
Okay, moving on to avoid this becoming a tongue twister.
The ISTD table, this is called the internal standards.
And the internal standards are very important for any ICP-MS instrument to detect and quantitate because it's these standards.
Which are really specifically chosen elements such as scandium or indium or bismuth and so on.
These elements are known to be non-interfering with the elements you're looking for, which are typically called analytes.
And so these internal standard elements are used as map points to tell the instrument what the different concentrations look like.
So if you're trying to teach the ICP-MS instrument, hey, what does 10 parts per billion look like?
What does one part per million look like?
You know, what do these actually look like?
You have to tell the instrument that by running standards first, where you know the concentrations of the standards, and then the instrument looks at those and it detects how many hits per second for lead or mercury or whatever.
And then you tell the instrument, hey, that means 100.
That means 1,000.
That means a part per million and so on.
So you're telling the instrument what these numbers...
You're telling the instrument what physical reality looks like.
Basically, you're building a map for the instrument so that it can then use that map to quantitate the concentrations of the analytes that you're looking for.
And in order to do this it uses these internal standards and we're using six internal standards at masses 45, 72, 115, 125, 159, and 209.
And what's interesting about that is like bismuth at 209 The 209 is very close to lead at 206, 207, and 208.
And so lead numbers, the quantitation of lead, is interpolated using the internal standard map of bismuth at 209.
Does that make sense?
Because bismuth is very close to the mass of lead.
And mercury is also mapped to the mass of bismuth as well.
So, you know, or if you go down to scandium at 45, well, that's on the low end.
So if we're looking for aluminum at mass 27, aluminum would be mapped to scandium at 45.
And by the way, I really love scandium as an element because it is incredibly stable.
And because it has a very low mass like that, it tends to not interfere with anything at all.
It's really great.
It's a great element.
I'm a scandium fandium.
Okay, that's a bad...
That's a real bad geek joke.
I'm sorry about that.
I apologize for my scandium scandal.
I really, really wish I hadn't gone there.
Nevertheless, if you're looking at the internal standards table, it's showing you that the tune mode is HE. That's not a gender expression of him or her.
It's actually helium, HE. I can see some feminists looking at this like, where's the her?
Where's the her, huh?
How can you say he?
How do you know it's a he?
Maybe it's a he that identifies as a her.
No, it's actually helium.
See, there's a helium scandium scandal in there.
A gender helium scandium scandal.
And then you look at a column called Internal Standard Recovery Percentage, and that shows you the average recovery of that standard in terms of its mapping.
And you want those numbers to be relatively close to 100 when they're very, very high or very, very low.
It can indicate that the sensitivity or the tuning is slightly wonky for that particular element, but that's adjusted for in the final concentrations anyway.
So this machine is self-calibrating in many ways.
There's a lot of tuning.
There's a lot of compensation that you can also do as an analyst if you see an internal standard getting unusually high, which we sometimes see when we're running crazy soil samples.
So a lot of soil samples will contain bismuth So they'll cause an artificially high reading on bismuth 209.
And when that happens, what we can do is we can remap lead to another element, or we can use what's called a virtual internal standard, a VIS, which is a virtual line connecting masses 159 to 209, both of which are internal standards.
And then we can plot lead against the extrapolation point of that virtual standard line that connects those two elements.
So there are a number of ways that we can compensate for any kind of weirdness, strangeness, you know, in different kinds of samples.
One time I was running this sample from this Indian medicine guru person, con artist, whatever, and it was blowing the mercury out so high I thought the instrument had gone berserk.
Turns out he's selling like highly toxic mercury pills to people.
And calling it a detox supplement.
I'm like, really?
Are you just some kind of death merchant or something?
The mercury was so high, it was off our calibration standard.
We actually had to dilute his samples even more to be able to run them in the instrument.
And his damn samples polluted the probe uptake line for like 10 minutes.
We had to flush hydrochloric acid through there just to get all the mercury out because of this freaking Indian medicine guru scam artist.
You know, that's the kind of stuff that we run into all the time.
It's just you wouldn't believe the stories.
In any case, that's basically how you interpret the lab results.
So...
Well, let's see.
Anything else?
Page one.
Let's see.
We have background, subtraction.
I'm not going to explain all that.
The viz fit, that's the virtual internal standard fit, which is linear.
Let's see.
Sample acquisition time, file path, file name.
That's just all obvious stuff.
So there you go.
That's how you interpret heavy metals analysis data from our laboratory, CWC Labs.
Not only do we have ICP-MS instrumentation, we're also running a single quad mass spec as well as a time of flight, kind of a combination liquid chromatography, mass spec time of flight instrument, which is very interesting.
When you start throwing water in there, like well water, And you run that against a database of, like, veterinary drugs, which we do for fun, and just to see how much horse tranquilizer is in everybody's water.
That's always a good Friday at the lab, just, you know, taking bets on the number of chemicals that will pop up in some water sample.
Sometimes that number is 200 plus, by the way.
So, yeah, you're living in a totally contaminated planet, and now we have the science to show you that, and it's kind of freaky.
It's eye-opening.
It's a little bit alarming.
Yeah, seriously.
Nevertheless, there you go.
There you go.
If you want your heavy metals tested, you know, in your food, your hair...
Your water.
Maybe you have a well on your property.
Maybe you are wondering what your municipal water samples are looking like.
You know, you can buy the kit from healthrangerstore.com.
It's a kit for heavy metals testing.
I think it's like $150 or something.
And we send you this vial and a label and everything.
You put your vitamins in there or your water or your food.
Well, your hair, you send it back to us and we run whatever you sent us through ICP-MS and we give you back a report just like the one I described.
And then you get to see how much mercury is in your hair because, trust me, you've got mercury in your hair.
I've got mercury in my hair.
I ran it and I freaked myself out.
I was like, where's all this mercury coming from?
Well, that's for another topic altogether.
But you'll be shocked to find out how much mercury is in your hair.
And what you can do is you can test yourself like six months later after you've been doing a healthier diet and avoiding fish for the most part.
And you'll find that your mercury level goes way, way down in your hair because you're no longer eating mercury from eating so much ocean fish.
By the way, if you're eating ocean fish, you are absolutely eating massive amounts of mercury.
I'll just put that out there in case you don't want to eat mercury.
If you're eating rice protein from China, you are eating lead like crazy too.
Just a couple of notes to let you know Some of the things we see routinely, don't buy magical detox pills from Indian meditation gurus because some of them are selling you mercury pills.
Just some things to keep in mind.
A little bit of nutritional self-defense from a lab scientist who has seen thousands of samples run via ICP-MS and some of the things that I've seen just, again, totally freak me out.
So I'm just passing this along to you.
In the hopes that you can avoid some of the toxic stuff that's out there.
That's my goal.
Man, what a world, right?
What a world.
That doesn't even count all the glyphosate that's on all your food, too.
On top of the lead and the mercury, you've got the glyphosate.
Hey, if you're not buying organic at this point, you're not paying attention, I guess.
But if you're listening to this, you probably are buying organic.
So, you know, good job.
Keep it up.
All right, that's a wrap.
Check out my podcast at healthrangerscience.com.
The laboratory website is cwclabs.com.
And I guess that's it.
Thanks for listening.
Learn more at healthrangerreport.com.
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If you want to support our mission, visit us at healthrangersstore.com for the world's largest selection of lab-verified superfood and nutritional products for healthy living.