All Episodes
Previous Next
March 19, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
09:47
Can you trust ORGANIC?
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
We know how to make America healthy again.
We know how to save billions of dollars a year in health care costs.
The Health Ranger Report.
There's just no political willingness to allow the truth to be stated.
It's time for the Health Ranger Report.
And now, from naturalnews.com, here's Mike Adams.
Here's a question I get from people very frequently.
Can you trust organic?
What does organic really mean?
And do I trust organic?
You know, I'm very much a skeptic of, you know, clean food claims because I run a forensic food laboratory.
I'm the author of Food Forensics.
You know, I do heavy metals tests and pesticide tests and so on.
And so people ask me, like, do you trust organic?
Does that mean anything?
And here's the rational, very informed answer.
For the most part, yes.
Organic is a good program.
Again, for the most part, I'm going to talk about the exceptions here in a little bit, but it's a good program.
It's better to buy organic than not organic.
And when I say organic, I mean USDA certified organic if you're purchasing in the United States.
It is a good program.
It does involve auditing.
There are organic certifiers that go out and audit the companies and make sure that what they're buying and selling under the organic label matches up.
They make sure that the documentation is in line, the certificates are legit, and so on.
However, I don't personally trust organic from China.
And maybe a few other countries.
In other words, if it's organic in the United States, I absolutely trust it.
If it's organic from Canada, I absolutely trust it.
If it's organic from most European nations, I also trust it.
Because Europe has very strict standards.
And Europeans tend to be rule followers.
So if you're buying organic from Spain, let's say, or Germany, or the UK, you can probably trust that.
It's probably legit.
But if you're buying organic from China...
To me, I think that's basically worthless.
I think that a lot of organic coming out of China is fraudulent.
Because I know the Chinese culture.
Remember, I speak Chinese.
You know, I've lived in Taiwan for a couple of years.
I've toured throughout Southeast Asia and Hong Kong and Malaysia and so on.
And in China, the culture, you know, mainland China is like extreme leftist.
They're very untrustworthy, just like extreme leftists in the United States.
They have no ethics.
They hate religion.
They hate values and morals.
This is a common thread between communist China and communist left-wing America.
They hate They absolutely despise ethics or morality or anything smacking of honesty.
They will swindle you.
They will cheat, lie, steal, defraud you.
They'll fake the science.
They'll counterfeit the certificates, whatever it takes.
They'll do bait and switch all the time.
If you're trying to buy something from China as a raw material, let's say you want to buy 5,000 kilos of pomegranate powder.
And you get a sample of the pomegranate powder, and the sample checks out.
Oh, the sample's all good.
And then so you place the order for the 5,000 kilos, and the 5,000 kilos that they sell you that they claim is organic turns out to not be organic, contaminated with pesticides, herbicides, heavy metals, and maltodextrin, by the way.
This is another little game they play in China.
And this is why usually we avoid most ingredients from China, because you can't trust them.
They're dishonest.
It's part of the culture.
And that's not true of the culture in places like Korea or Japan.
Like Japan, you can get very good honest products there.
You can get honest products out of Thailand or Taiwan or other Asian countries.
Like mainland China is the most dishonest place.
So no, I don't trust organic from China.
Because I think it's just a big counterfeiting operation in terms of the paperwork.
Now, the other thing is that USDA organic in the United States, even as good as it is, it does not cover heavy metals.
So you can sell legally, you can have certified organic products in the United States that can be heavily contaminated with toxic heavy metals such as mercury or lead.
And USDA doesn't test for heavy metals, and they don't require limits on heavy metals, and they don't require any certification of heavy metals testing.
So don't confuse organic with meaning clean foods.
It doesn't mean that.
Organic is a very narrow definition.
It's very specific.
It means that the food was produced without the use of added chemical pesticides and herbicides.
It doesn't mean that it was grown in a clean field.
The food could be grown and harvested in a field right next to a smokestack from a factory churning out lead all day into the air and that lead is falling on the crops and those crops are certified organic because nobody sprayed pesticides on them.
You see what I mean?
So no, organic doesn't cover heavy metals.
Now, after testing thousands of products over so many years in my laboratory, I can tell you, like, if you tell me a product, like, what is it, you know, wheatgrass or rice protein or, you know, an herb or whatever, I can almost tell you right away how much lead you're going to find in it or how much mercury or cadmium or arsenic or whatever, just because I've seen so many numbers over so many years.
And the good news is that most food grown in the United States does not have a lead problem.
There are a few exceptions, but for the most part, if you buy food grown in America, you're not going to have a problem with mercury or lead.
You get these problems in places like China or India or, you know, sometimes other countries where they have processing problems or contamination problems or what have you.
So if you buy rice grown in Texas or rice grown in California, you're going to be fine.
You buy rice grown in China, forget it.
Or you buy rice-based infant formula products that are made from rice in China, you're just poisoning that child, basically.
That's the truth.
I'm not going to hold back.
I'm not going to lie to you or censor this information.
The public needs to know this.
So this is why I think we need country of origin labeling requirements on all our food.
So you can look at a food product and you can know where these ingredients come from.
Is this from America or Canada or is it from China?
If it's from China, you know, I'd be very skeptical about it.
Because I think we used to have food origin labeling requirements, but I think they were dropped under Obama.
I'm not 100% sure about that, but that's what I recall about it.
I'll have to double check that.
In any case, if you don't know the origin of it, you know, be very skeptical of it.
And the other thing is, you know, finally, if you just buy a lot of fresh, like fresh food, you know, fresh produce, I've never really seen a heavy metals problem in any kind of fresh produce.
So if you just want to follow like a raw food diet or do a bunch of juicing and just get, you know, celery and parsley and pears and apples and beetroot and potatoes and just fresh produce stuff, you're not going to run into a heavy metals problem.
There, you just want to buy organic, get away from the pesticides and the herbicides, and the fact that it's fresh produce means you're probably not going to have a heavy metals issue.
So that's the clean way to go about it.
It's when you get into processed foods, like the rice protein from China is a big problem, where you get into certain types of concentrated foods.
Like you take a turmeric root that's contaminated with lead, and then you If you concentrate it in certain types of extracts that pull out lead as well, then you can get more lead in the extract than you had in the original root in terms of concentration.
Parts per million or parts per billion concentrations.
Extracts have their place, but You got to make sure that what's going into the extract is clean in the first place.
Otherwise, you're going to get dirtier food coming out of it.
These are just some things to think about.
It's kind of sharing notes with you here as a food scientist and a whistleblower who knows this industry far better than I ever wanted to.
It's like sometimes you learn too much, it becomes a little bit disgusting.
It's like, oh, I wish I hadn't known that.
But now that I do know it, I can't, you know, keep it from you.
I have to share it with you.
But the good news is, you know, buy food that's grown in America or Canada, wherever you are, unless you're in China.
But buy local food and fresh produce.
You're going to be, you're going to avoid like 99% of the problems.
Like local, fresh, organic.
There's your answer right there.
Maybe I could have shortened the whole podcast to that.
Like, three words, local, fresh, organic.
Bye!
Alright.
But now you know the reasoning behind it, in any case.
Thank you for listening.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger for HealthRangerReport.com.
Learn more at HealthRangerReport.com.
Support our films for humanity. - Visit HealthRangerStore.com.
▲
Export Selection