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March 20, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
49:01
The lamest excuses for heavy metals in dietary supplements
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Welcome to the lamest excuses for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
My name is Mike Adams, the health ranger.
I'm the science lab director of the Natural News Forensic Food Laboratory.
And yes, I test for heavy metals and dietary supplements and other foods and environmental samples, water, soil, things like that.
And I've become pretty well known, I suppose.
Famous or infamous, depending on your point of view, for accurately detecting lead and cadmium and arsenic and mercury in certain dietary products and publishing those results online.
Some of them you can see published at labs.naturalnews.com.
That my citizen science effort is undergoing a major expansion and it's almost complete.
I have a massive new laboratory facility.
Construction is now complete.
It has been a year and a half in planning and construction.
We're adding new instrumentation.
We already have an Agilent ICP-MS instrument, the 7700X, and we're adding more.
We're adding an HPLC for organic chemistry and an ion chromatography instrument for detecting halogens and some other instruments as well that I'll get to later.
But we're building a massive new laboratory in the public interest.
This is what's so great about citizen science is that we can conduct research Analysis really on off-the-shelf foods or dietary supplements or superfoods or anything, even fertilizers for example.
Calcium pills, you know, whatever we want.
We can analyze those and we can publish these numbers in the public interest.
And there are two reasons why I do this.
One is because I want to accentuate and reward the cleanliness of companies who have very, very low levels of heavy metals in their products.
But secondly, I also want to show products that have higher levels of heavy metals so that consumers can make an informed decision.
And because we're not funded by the government, we're not tied to any university, we're not part of a medical journal or controlled by a big corporation like Nestle, for example, would never let Nestle be, you know, give us money.
Because of that, we're independent.
And so we test things that we want to test and that you request, that our readers and customers are asking for.
And that's how we decide what to test.
And then we publish these numbers and guess what happens?
Every time I publish numbers, it upsets somebody in the industry.
and often dietary supplement companies and they have the lamest excuses you've ever heard for the high heavy metals that I often find in their dietary supplements they're so lame they're so pathetic and this is why I was really excited recently when the Department of Justice came down with some criminal indictments against executives of a dietary supplement company that Seems to have been involved in some just really beyond unethical,
I mean serious criminal activity that put lives at risk.
I mean it was such fraud.
They would import toxic chemicals from China, put them in pills.
Call them natural plant extracts when they weren't.
Sell them with false marketing claims.
And gosh, there was even a liver failure outbreak in Hawaii because of this company.
I mean, the stuff they did was insane.
So I'm glad to see the Department of Justice cracking down on the worst offenders out there.
And, you know, just for the record, the DOJ did not say the entire industry is bad.
And I'm not saying that either.
In fact, most of the dietary supplement industry is very ethical, very positive.
But there are some bad actors out there and there are some contaminated products.
There are products with high levels of heavy metals.
And that is, you know, I'm completely opposed to that.
I want dietary supplements to be safe.
I want the industry to be something that people can trust.
I want consumers to be safe.
I want their health to be protected and enhanced by these products, not compromised by them.
So I conduct this science, I publish the results, and then I hear these lame excuses for heavy metals.
And so here, I'm going to lay it out for you.
I'll list the lamest excuses that I've ever heard And that have been argued by these companies, and I'll share them with you, and then you can decide how lame these are, really.
All right?
So, and just to set the background, again, the instrument I'm using is inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry, or what's called a mass spec instrument.
It's made by Agilent.
This is the same instrument you'd find in a high-level laboratory at a university.
It's the same instrument used by the FDA to test whatever they're testing.
So this is a, you know, very, very legitimate instrument.
Just the instrument alone costs around $300,000 by the time you add the add-ons and the options that you need to make it work.
And the lab, the first lab I built was over a million dollars.
The second lab I'm building now will be over two million by the time it's done.
And, you know, I don't get any thanks for this, by the way.
I get mostly threats.
So everybody likes to threaten me.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do that.
I don't think so.
Alright, so here we go.
Lame excuse reason number one.
Here's what I hear.
When I release results and a company doesn't like them, the first thing they say is, oh, the health ranger doesn't really have a lab.
How could he?
That's impossible.
You have to be a PhD to run those instruments.
You have to be a university to afford those instruments.
He's making it up.
He doesn't even have a lab.
It's all a green screen.
Yeah, it must be green screen.
He's just playing with vials on a countertop.
He doesn't even know.
Blah, blah, blah.
So this is excuse number one, which is really hilarious.
Because not only have I filmed exactly the process of ICP-MS analysis, I have multiple times on video and on radio, I've walked through the entire process of sample preparation, digestion, normalization, concentration calculation, or dilution calculations.
I can talk to anybody in ICP-MS in any lab in the world.
I can run those instruments.
I can walk into a university and I can run their elemental analysis laboratory, or at least the ICP-MS part of that.
I don't know a lot of other instruments, but the ICP-MS I know backwards and forwards.
I can solve the plumbing problems.
I can clean the nebulizer, clean the sample cones.
I can solve the rotary pump clogging in the injection system.
You name it.
I know this instrument inside and out.
I've spent I don't know how many hundreds of hours on it.
And I've filmed it and I've talked about it.
And better yet, every result that we have produced and published has been confirmed.
There isn't a single case where someone has been able to demonstrate that the numbers we published were wildly off-base or false or made up or anything.
It just hasn't happened.
It has been from day one.
Everything that we're publishing is confirmed by other laboratories.
Usually what happens is I'll publish the numbers and it shows somebody's product, oh, five parts per million of, let's say, cadmium in this cacao sample.
And a company will call me...
Or they'll contact me screaming and threatening, blah, blah, blah.
You're so wrong.
We don't have cadmium in it.
We're going to send this to another lab and we're going to prove you wrong, blah, blah, blah.
And so they send it to another lab and the other lab comes back.
Oh yeah, that's pretty much the right number.
And then they call me back off and, where's this lead or cadmium coming from?
Where's it coming from?
How do we reduce it?
You know, so at first they're just threatening an accusatory and then they realize we're correct.
And then they start asking for solutions.
And in my mind, I'm thinking, you've been selling this to people for how many years?
You didn't even test it?
Really?
Are you that lame?
Are you that pathetic?
You wouldn't even test your own product.
You don't even know what you're selling.
And most of them don't.
I gotta tell you, just flat out, you know, bluntly stated, most of these people that are selling superfoods or dietary supplements, they have no freaking idea what's in it.
They don't test.
They don't want to test.
They don't want to know.
They just want you to buy it.
And it's just like, don't ask, don't tell policy, basically.
That's what it is.
And that's unethical.
That's irresponsible.
Especially when the testing's widely available.
You can send this stuff over to Eurofins.
They'll test it for you.
You know, geez.
At least you should know what you're selling, people.
Alright, so anyway, the truth is, we do have a lab.
In fact, I mean, the Agilent people know me by name.
I know the Agilent lab techs.
I know the trainers, the chemistry experts, because I worked with them all.
I mean, they know me.
They know the serial number of my instrument.
You know, it's all on the record.
This isn't even debatable.
It's just, you know, the thing of trying to say...
That I don't have a lab is basically the same thing where you just call somebody a racist because you don't want to debate with them.
You don't like what they're saying.
So you just say, racist!
And that's it.
It's just designed to shut down the conversation and end the debate.
So that doesn't really work.
All right.
Next lame excuse.
Lame excuse number two is this one.
You're going to hear this a lot.
This is the second thing they go to.
Okay, they say.
Yeah, there must be high lead in our product.
There's five parts per million or ten parts per million lead, but it's naturally occurring.
This is what they say.
It's naturally occurring lead.
So by saying this, they're trying to say that it must be okay.
It was naturally occurring.
It was in the soil, now it's in the plant.
It's naturally occurring.
Natural lead, natural cadmium, it's all natural.
Well, think about it.
By this logic, if you drill a well and your water is contaminated with arsenic from the rocks in the ground and you drink arsenic water all day long, by their logic, that's good for you because it's naturally occurring arsenic.
You see, what's naturally in your well water.
Isn't that amazing?
Did you know a lot of wells in Asia are contaminated with high levels of fluoride?
Oh no, but according to these people, it's naturally occurring fluoride.
You should be totally okay with it.
Drink more fluoride and have fluorosis till your teeth turn black and your bones all crack.
Yeah, it's naturally occurring fluoride, you know, according to these people.
But even then, I mean, of course it's a ridiculous argument.
A poison is naturally occurring, therefore it's good for you.
What, are you going to go out and just eat every toxic mushroom?
You know, the mushrooms that destroy your liver, they're naturally occurring.
You're just going to go out in the woods and just, you're going to make yourself some, I don't know, spaghetti with mushrooms by just using every crazy wild mushroom you spot?
Even the red spotted ones that will kill you, that's naturally occurring.
So you're going to eat that too?
Ah, well you can have your mushroom soup or spaghetti with your lead dietary supplement too.
It's all naturally occurring.
Yeah, well I guess death is natural too.
So if you die, that's natural.
It's all part of the natural cycle of life and death.
So yeah, hey, if you eat it and you're poisoned and you die, it's totally natural, naturally occurring death.
I mean, these people are freaking morons.
So this idea is naturally occurring.
I'm going to explain this more in part two here.
So stay with me.
I'll be back after this break.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, on TalkNetwork.com with a special report, The Lamest Excuses for Heavy Metals in Dietary Supplements.
I'll be right back.
All right, welcome back to part two of the lamest excuses for heavy metals in dietary supplements.
You know, I'm sick of people selling dietary supplements that are loaded with toxic heavy metals, and I've made it one of my missions to expose all this, and that's why I spent so far now $3 million in total approaching it, building private science laboratories, conducting citizen science and testing products for toxic heavy metals.
You can see some of those results at labs.naturalnews.com.
And we'll have actually more websites up soon with more results of different products.
So anyway, lame excuse number two is what we're covering, which is when these companies get caught with high lead or high cadmium or sometimes high mercury in their products, they usually say, oh, it's all naturally occurring lead, man.
It's natural, natural.
And thereby, they're implying that it's okay because it's naturally occurring.
And as I said in the last segment, well, that means if you drill a well and there's arsenic in your well water, you should drink it because it's natural arsenic, right?
Or if you walk in the forest and you see toxic mushrooms, you should eat those too because they're naturally occurring mushrooms.
And then I guess death is naturally occurring.
So...
But here's the real story on this.
If you look at the history of pesticide use in the United States and around the world, there was a very toxic substance that was sprayed all over the crops all throughout the 20th century.
Not all of it, but a lot of it.
And this insecticide is called lead arsenate.
Lead arsenate, as you might guess, is made of lead and arsenic.
And yeah, it killed a lot of insects, man.
You spray that on a fruit tree, it's going to kill everything living on that tree.
The problem with lead and arsenic is that they don't just evaporate into the air.
A lot of this lead, I mean some lead can evaporate if you combust it in an engine for example.
We used to have leaded gasoline.
Remember that?
Well that actually is part of the problem.
For many, many decades we were spraying crops with lead arsenate and we were burning gasoline with added lead in it.
What did this create?
This created massive lead pollution that then deposited itself on all of the farmlands across North America and everywhere else in the world that these two products were used.
So we have a lead contamination era of human history where massive amount of lead was deposited in the soils used to grow food.
Not too bright, is it?
Right.
But according to these people, these dietary supplement lame excuse makers, the minute this lead falls out of the air and hits the soil, it's now naturally occurring.
Okay, so just to be clear, if you take lead and you put it in your gasoline and you burn it in your car and that lead comes out of your tailpipe, that's called pollution, right?
Those are emissions.
Or if you have a smelting operation, a giant smokestack billowing dirty black smoke up into the sky and there's lead in it, Or cadmium, then that's called pollution, right?
Those are emissions.
That's pollution.
But according to these people, these lame excuse makers, the minute that this lead or cadmium or mercury, the minute it settles on the soil, now, all of a sudden, magically, it's naturally occurring.
You got that?
So there's a magic wand moment in all of this where all this pollution hits the ground and it's just suddenly, boom, wave of magic wand.
It's naturally occurring.
So it doesn't matter if it's in our green grass powder product or if it's in our medicinal mushroom product or if it's in our zeolites or if it's in our whatever.
It doesn't matter because it's all naturally occurring.
So if you believe that pollution becomes inert the moment it touches the soil, then you probably believe the earth is flat.
I mean, some people actually do.
I've been contacted by people who say, the earth is flat, dammit, you should be talking about this.
I don't think so.
I'm a long-range target shooter, you know, sniper.
And we actually have to adjust our holds based on whether we're shooting west versus east because of the rotation of the planet.
So I'm pretty sure that the earth is moving, otherwise we would miss our targets all the time.
Okay, anyway, the Coriolis effect and all that.
So, this idea that it's all naturally occurring is complete idiocy.
Now, think about something else.
If you grow rice in California, like the Lundberg family grows a lot of rice.
It's called Lundberg brand rice.
And I've tested all kinds of Lundberg rice.
And I was looking for lead, and I was looking for arsenic, and I was looking for cadmium.
I even looked for tungsten, which overlays the atomic masses of mercury at 200 and 202.
I didn't find any of these metals in Lundberg rice grown in California.
I mean, not anything substantial, maybe like really, really low parts per billion, which we generally consider functional zero to be anything below like 20 parts per billion.
And that's kind of the range that you might see in something like that.
Well, if you grow the exact same rice in China, guess what you see?
You can see easily 500 times higher levels of metals.
You can see a lot of lead.
You can see a lot of cadmium.
You can see sometimes a little bit of mercury.
Why is that?
It's the same rice, right?
It's the same rice.
Well, if this is naturally occurring in all the rice, then wouldn't it be all the same no matter where you grow it?
Right?
But it's not.
It depends on the soil you grow it in.
And that makes instant sense because the plant is taking up minerals and metals and elements from the soil.
So if the lead is in the soil and the plant uptakes that soil, then the lead goes into the plant.
This is not rocket science.
This is basic botany.
This is simple.
This is high school chemistry here.
So if you grow rice in heavily contaminated soils that have been inundated with industrial metals like lead, you're going to get rice with lead in it.
This is not rocket science.
On the other hand, if you grow rice in very pristine, clean soils, like in California, the very, very heavy emissions controls these days, and a lot of the pollution of the past has been diluted or already taken up by earlier crops, Right?
So, like, whatever was planted in California in the 1970s and 1980s kind of took up most of the lead.
You already ate that lead.
So what they're growing in California in 2015 really doesn't have hardly any lead in it for the most part.
So now you have clean.
You have clean rice, you know, in terms of heavy metals anyway.
So this is important to understand.
You've got to understand the basic chemistry of this.
If you have toxic heavy metals in the soil, and if they're deposited there by industrial pollution and vehicular pollution and other forms of pollution, that's not naturally occurring lead.
Sorry, doesn't pass the science sniff test.
All right.
Lame excuses for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
This is our topic today.
We've covered two so far.
Now we're going to go to the third lame excuse.
And this excuse sounds like this.
A dietary supplement maker will often say, well, one part per million is so small.
It doesn't even count, man.
It's a part per million.
Do you know how tiny that is?
Do you know how small that is?
It's a part per million.
This is their logic.
Well, lack of logic.
Alright, so let's explore this.
If you buy paint today...
You probably know that paint has been lead-free since, I don't know, somewhere around, what, 1978?
And you know why paint is lead-free?
You know why?
Because children would eat the paint flecks, and they would get lead poisoning, and it would reduce their IQs.
It would cause brain damage.
Do you know what the parts per million of lead was in paints?
Any idea?
Well, it's somewhere between 1 and 10, depending on the paint, depending on the formulation.
But let's say it's 5.
You could have 5 parts per million of lead in paint.
A child eats that paint, they become brain damaged, and all of a sudden, little Johnny can't do math no more.
I'm not making fun of the kids that were damaged by this, by the way.
They're victims of it.
They're victims of the lead industry, which was inundating paint and gasoline and pesticides, lots of things.
Lead was worshipped as a miracle heavy metal for many decades until we found out, oh, this stuff kills you.
This stuff gives you heart problems.
This stuff gives you skeletal problems.
This stuff damages your brain, harms children, toxic stuff.
Well, it turns out that lead can be very damaging even at very low concentrations.
In other words, parts per million concentrations.
This idea that something can't be toxic at a part per million is utterly ridiculous.
Remember, the dietary supplement industry caters to the same people...
Who correctly state that glyphosate, in other words Roundup herbicide, can be toxic to the body at parts per trillion concentrations.
So right there they are saying something can be bad for you even in parts per trillion concentrations.
How does a part per trillion compare to a part per million?
Well, there are one million parts per trillion in one part per million.
In other words, a part per trillion is a million times smaller, or one millionth of a part per million.
In other words, 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, which is one one-thousandth of a part per million.
Now we're doing unit conversion classes here.
Anyway, so you can have a part per million is called a microgram, a part per billion is called a nanogram, and a part per trillion is called a picogram.
And there are a thousand picograms in one nanogram, and a thousand nanograms in one microgram, and a thousand micrograms in one milligram, and a thousand milligrams in one gram, a thousand grams in one kilogram.
Just to lay all this out, the point is that different substances are toxic at different concentrations You cannot make a blanket statement that just says just because it's small that it's therefore safe.
That's not true.
Ricin can be toxic to you.
It's a deadly poison in parts per billion concentrations.
There are all kinds of chemicals and metals even that are highly toxic at parts per billion concentrations.
So this is absurd, this idea that just because it's a part per million that it doesn't count.
Give me a break.
It doesn't work that way.
And even if that were true, there are a lot of times where you have a dietary supplement that compares to another dietary supplement, mostly the same ingredients, but one of them has 10 times as much lead as the other.
So even speaking from a relative risk point of view, wouldn't you want the one that has the lower heavy metals rather than the higher heavy metals?
So you can also talk about this in relative terms.
And I don't know anyone who wants to eat more lead.
I don't want anyone who wants to eat more mercury.
People want less of this stuff, and they realize how toxic and polluted the world is, and they want less exposure to these toxic substances, not more exposure.
Alright, so you're listening to The Lamest Excuses for Heavy Metals in Dietary Supplements.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, here for TalkNetwork.com.
I'll be back after this break with Part 3.
All right, welcome back to part three of the lamest excuses for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the health ranger.
The consumers love my work on exposing heavy metals in superfoods and dietary supplements.
The people in the industry who own those companies hate my guts and threaten me.
And there is a reason why I carry a pistol in the lab.
And I have a 12 gauge under the counter too.
Yeah, I think I'm the only guy that runs an ICP-MS instrument right next to a 12-gauge shotgun.
And, you know, there's a very specific reason for that.
It's not an accident.
No, I'm joking.
I don't have a 12-gauge next to the instrument.
I keep it far, far away from the instrument not to pollute it.
In other words, I'm not joking about having a 12-gauge in the lab.
I'm joking about having it right next to the instrument.
Okay, so let's go on.
We've covered three out of the six points here.
The lamest excuses for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
Lame excuse number four.
This is a good one.
I hear this from companies.
Every time, again, every time I publish numbers, somebody gets pissed off.
Somebody threatens me.
Somebody screams at me.
How dare you?
And they say these lame excuses.
So number four is, there's lead in everything!
And they say, there's lead in everything!
Okay, really?
That's your reason?
There's lead in everything?
Seriously, this is their reason.
They say, well, there's lead in green beans.
Okay, there might be like, I don't know, 10 parts per billion lead in green beans, but your product has a thousand times higher concentration.
See, I love debating with people who are scientifically illiterate, because I don't know if love's the right word, but it's so easy to beat them, because they don't understand anything about the physical world.
They don't even know what the table of elements is.
They don't understand numbers.
You know, what's an integer?
They don't know.
They have no idea.
They don't know what a part per million even means.
Millions of something.
It's parts.
It's pieces and parts.
They have no idea.
So when they say, there's lead in everything, they don't even really have any clue what they're talking about because it really is a question of concentration, right?
You notice that the EPA has lead limits for public drinking water.
The EPA doesn't say...
There's a little bit of lead in everything, so massive amounts of lead must be okay, right?
They'll say that.
Why don't they say that?
Because that would be stupid.
You wouldn't say, okay, there's a little bit of hexane in soy protein, because hexane is the solvent used to extract soy protein.
A little bit of hexane in soy protein.
And I had a soy protein bar yesterday, so I got a little bit of hexane.
That must mean it's okay to drink hexane for breakfast.
Right?
No one would say that.
Why?
Because it's stupid.
I want to say retarded, but every time I say that, people give me flack about that.
Their child is actually retarded, and they think I'm insulting.
I'm not insulting your child, okay?
I'm really not.
If you think about my work, this is about reducing.
Children who have brain damage.
I'm trying to get the lead out of their food and out of their supplements.
If you think about it, I'm working hard to try to stop mental retardation from happening.
And yet, in this work, I'm often faced with people who appear to be mentally retarded who are questioning these results.
So, you know, there's some irony for you right there.
Anyway, they say there's lead in everything.
Well, here's the truth.
I've tested a lot of things.
A lot of things, thousands of things.
Different foods, different supplements, different beverages, drinks, teas, everything, you name it.
And there's really not very much lead in everything.
There's hardly any in most things.
I get excited when I see high lead numbers.
It gives me a little thrill, you know?
I don't know, maybe that tells you how much of a geek I am, but I get turned on, you know, when I see high numbers.
Like, wow, this is freaking awesome.
You know, this is amazing.
Let's test this again.
Let's take another look.
I get off on that stuff.
That's just me totally geeking out.
But when I see high lead, it's surprising.
You know, it's because you just don't see it that often.
For most foods, like you take Froot Loops, let's say.
You take Froot Loops.
You think there's lead in Froot Loops?
You know, it's a junk cereal, garbage nutrition.
You think there's lead in it?
Nope.
There's almost no lead in Froot Loops.
In fact, I found that if you test all these refined cereals, refined foods, the junk foods, the junkiest junk foods of all have almost no lead.
Why is that?
Because they're so heavily refined that everything's taken out of them.
Even the good minerals.
Even the good nutrients.
Everything.
They don't have any fiber.
They're just empty carbohydrate calories.
That's it.
Sugars.
They don't have any lead.
Virtually none.
So this idea that there's lead in everything really doesn't pass muster.
It's not true.
I mean, maybe you could say there's a part per trillion of lead in everything, but a part per trillion for lead is not a concern.
Even a part per billion of lead is not a concern.
My limit, by the way, of what I will consume or sell to the public is 0.5 parts per million of lead.
In other words, 250 parts per billion.
That's my limit.
Anything under that I consider to be relatively low lead.
Anything above that I consider to be too high for my taste.
The thing is, the FDA hasn't set a standard on lead, so there's no official number of what should be the limit.
I mean, California has Prop 65, but that was written for water.
And I think those lead limits are in many ways too strict on foods and supplements, by the way.
So I don't agree with everything in Prop 65.
So I've set my lead limit at 0.25 parts per million.
And the EU has limits that are very similar to that, but their limits vary based on the type of food or type of beverage that you're dealing with.
They have lower limits for beverages and higher limits for certain types of foods, and then even higher limits for seafood because the ocean is totally polluted.
So they have higher contamination limits for seafood, which I find kind of pathetically hilarious.
It's just basically admitting if you drag that out of the ocean, it's going to have a lot of lead in it and mercury.
Actually, arsenic is huge also for ocean fish.
Anyway, enough of that.
Let's move on to lame excuse number five.
And I hope I'm making this as entertaining as possible while also educating you or, you know, inspiring maybe, I don't know, sharing information with you that you find useful.
I enjoy not only doing this work but even explaining this work.
I find very fun and fascinating and I've made it part of my life's goal to just completely make fun of everything that exists in the world because it's such a joke.
But point number five, here we go, the lamest excuse for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
Number five, they say, well, the lead passes right through you, man.
It doesn't even count.
Lead just goes right through you.
That's what they say.
Now, in the case, the special case of granular zeolites, that is large zeolite particles, this is true for that.
If you eat sand, mostly made of silica, obviously, if you eat sand, you don't digest sand.
You don't break it apart.
It really does pass right through you.
Like, have you ever eaten a penny?
I've known people who did that.
I've never done that.
People are eating pennies and crap and change, you know?
They've been doing that.
Some people call that the Federal Reserve, but...
The penny does not dissolve in your body.
Why?
Because your gastric acid is not strong enough to tear that penny apart and break it down into its molecular constituents.
Well, granulated zeolites are just like that.
If you eat them, you're just going to poop them out.
You're like a zeolite transfer tube.
But I have an issue, and I sounded the alarm on this, that a lot of zeolites are sold today as powdered.
They're called micronized.
They're powdered, very finely ground particles.
And a lot of the companies market them by saying, you should eat these every day, 15 grams.
That's the serving size.
You should eat this every day.
And they say, in some of their marketing materials, they say this goes into your blood and it pulls heavy metals out of your body, and then you eliminate the heavy metals.
And this is the zeolite narrative.
And so I tested zeolites in the lab and I found, holy cow, these things have so much lead in them.
Like, I'm just going to give you a wide range here that I've seen, anywhere from 10 parts per million to over 100 parts per million.
But most of them fall in the range of 20, 30, 40 something parts per million.
That's a lot of lead.
That's like a thousand times more lead than you would find in a typical, I don't know, powdered mushroom product.
You might find, let's say, 50 parts per billion lead in a mushroom product.
You multiply that by a thousand, that's what you get in some zeolite products.
These micronized zeolites.
So you're eating lead.
You're eating just a really high concentration of lead compared to other supplements.
Well, the zeolite company is saying, well, this passes right through you.
And you ask them why, they say, because zeolites absorb lead.
And that's why they have lead, because they absorb lead.
And I'm like, well, don't people take zeolites to get rid of lead?
And they say, yeah, you take zeolites, it gets rid of the lead.
And we have tests that show people take zeolites, they start urinating out lead and aluminum.
And I'm like, but zeolites are made with, I mean, they're composed of lead and aluminum.
We're like, yeah.
And when we eat them, you eliminate them.
And I'm like, well, yeah, you're eating the lead, you're eating the aluminum, and then you're urinating it out.
That doesn't prove that you're detoxing.
All that proves is that your body's eliminating the stuff you just ate.
There's nothing magical about this.
This is your body trying to get rid of a toxin.
It doesn't want lead in your body.
So it's eliminating it through urine and other, maybe feces.
So anyway, I find that zeolite logic is all circular logic when it comes to these micronized zeolite powders.
And they say the lead passes right through you.
I don't believe that.
And then there are other companies that just claim this out of nowhere, just, I don't know, pulling it out of a hat or something.
They say, well, okay, we found our product contains lead, but this lead just passed right through you.
Really?
Because the last time I checked, the human digestion system was designed to break down stuff and absorb it into the blood.
And so if you have lead in your coffee, Or lead in your mushroom powder or lead in your green grass juice powder.
And by the way, there's a lot of lead in certain green grasses from China.
Just give you that warning.
Oh, there's a lot of lead in tea products too, like Earl Grey teas often have very high lead.
So if you get all this lead, you know, hey, isn't it going right into your blood?
And what's it doing from there?
You know, isn't this the reason we ban lead paint?
To stop children from eating lead?
Now we have lead in our foods and our dietary supplements.
Shouldn't we be avoiding that?
And they say, no, no, no, it passed right through you.
Well, that's just false.
That's a completely ridiculous claim.
It doesn't pass right through you.
I mean, maybe some small amount of it does.
But normally, if it gets absorbed into your blood, it's going to get deposited in your bones.
You're going to have lead skeleton.
Not a good thing.
Anyway, we're out of time for this segment.
We're going to take a break.
I'll be back in part four.
This is the lamest excuses for heavy metals in dietary supplements.
I'll be right back.
All right, this is part four, the conclusion of our, I hope you find interesting and entertaining, discussion of the lamest excuses for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
And I am, I'm like a dog with a bone on this issue.
I will not let it go.
I am concerned about the public health implications of lead and cadmium and mercury even in dietary supplements.
This concerns me.
Not just in dietary supplements, but superfoods, anything like that.
You wouldn't believe the stuff that we reject at the natural news store because we test everything for heavy metals.
We have to reject constantly supplies of maca, supplies of turmeric powder, turmeric root, almost always contaminated.
We have to reject...
Well, we can't even think about buying mushroom powders from China.
Everything I've seen is contaminated there.
You know, like reishi powders or whatever.
They're just totally contaminated.
Green grass powders from China are just consistently contaminated.
Calcium powders, consistently contaminated with lead.
There's, you know, teas.
Teas are very, very heavily lead contaminated, typically.
There's a lot of stuff that's got a lot of lead in it.
It freaks me out when I see it.
Well, it actually gets me kind of excited.
I don't know.
I like to see the instrument working.
It gets me going.
Again, I'm such a total geek with this stuff.
Friday night, you're out partying.
I'm in the lab.
Having a relationship with the data on the screen, you know what I mean?
I'm like, this is awesome!
You're out dancing with pretty girls or your gay partner, whatever you're doing.
I'm hanging out with the machine going, man, the 25,000 parts per billion.
This is awesome!
That's how much of a geek I am.
Total freaking, you know, heavy metals geek.
Anyway, lame excuse number six for heavy metals and dietary supplements.
This is it.
This is what people say.
Every time I do these tests with the instrumentation, you know, and I use ICP-MS mass spec instrument from Agilent, the 7700X. That's what we've owned for a couple of years now.
And I test these foods and I publish the numbers.
Oh, and that website, by the way, is labs.naturalnews.com where you can find these numbers.
And then these companies complain.
The sixth lame excuse they use is, oh, this lead is magical lead.
Now, they don't say it that way.
They don't say, they don't tell me this lead is magical lead and therefore it doesn't harm you.
What they say is, oh man, they use these crazy terms like this product is, what do they say, energized?
Or synergized?
No, not synergized.
Sorry, that's actually a clean product.
They say it's like some kind of weird vibrational voodoo that they're talking about.
Like, we prayed over this or something, and we put crystals on it.
Usually it has something to do with crystals or magnets or vortexes or what's organ energy?
Yeah, I've heard that term thrown around a lot.
Just like these crazy terms.
We treated our lead with magnets and crystals, man.
Anyway, whatever.
And they say they have good symbols, you know.
They've treated this with the energy of a symbol.
Like, we drew a spiral, man, and then we put the powder on the spiral, and the spiral de-energized the lead.
I've had people tell me that actually the lead in their product got transformed into useful minerals.
I'm like, really?
Really?
You think that you can transform elements by doing your weird voodoo symbol thing?
I'm like, yeah, man!
It's all like we prayed over it.
It's all good now.
Seriously, this is...
I'm not even making this up.
You think I'm making this up?
I'm not.
This is what they do.
I'm not everybody.
This is like the fringe.
The fringe of the industry.
The people who...
They are so far away from reality.
You know, scientific reality, physics, chemistry, and everything.
They're so far away from that.
They have their own mystery universe of made-up shit.
Stuff they believe in.
Let's make shit up.
And then we'll draw symbols out of that stuff.
And then we'll sell some dietary products with lead in it.
This is magical lead.
I'm not even making this up.
You still think I'm making this up?
I'm not.
I swear.
I swear.
I've had these conversations.
So they say, well, lead is a mineral, so it's okay.
Well, cadmium is a mineral, so it's okay.
Well, yeah, look, you can look at the table of elements and you can call them all kinds of things.
You can look at lead and you can say, yeah, that's a metal, that's a mineral, that's an element.
You can look at the transition metals in the middle of the table.
You can, you know, transition elements, you could call them.
Sometimes they're called metals, sometimes minerals, sometimes, you know, calcium can be called a metal.
Did you know that?
You can call calcium a metal.
These words are interchangeable.
It doesn't mean you're transmuting them.
It doesn't mean just because you take lead at an atomic mass of 206, just because you call it a mineral, doesn't turn it into magnesium.
If you could transmute lead, why would you sell dietary supplements?
You should be making gold, man!
You should be churning out gold in your gold factory.
You should buy lead...
Run it over your little symbols and churn out gold.
You'd be wealthier than Bill Gates.
So seriously, if you think your magical hands can transmute lead into gold, then I'll hire you.
I'll hire you to come to my house.
I'll have some lead ready for you there.
Yeah?
Let's see.
If you can do that, you got a job.
Alright?
Because we could use some gold.
Extra gold from time to time.
Hey, you wouldn't even have to mine it anymore.
You just walk up to anything like a fossilized tree.
Put your hand on it.
Shazam!
It's gold.
I guess you're like Midas, right?
You have the Midas touch.
But this is the way some of these people think.
They think they can transmute lead into less harmful lead by, I don't know, praying over...
You can't even really count.
It's not prayer.
It's something else.
Energy healing?
Reiki, maybe?
I mean, hey, I'm trained in Reiki, by the way.
I'm trained in Reiki.
I'm trained in sound healing.
I've explored a lot of modalities.
I'm pretty darn competent in a lot of modalities of healing.
And I understand mind-body medicine.
I understand how that works.
I understand there is a non-physical energetic body.
But I've never seen anybody who can levitate.
I've never seen anybody who can take lead and turn it into something that's not lead.
Hasn't.
Well, I should clarify that.
The sun can do that, you know.
Or let's say exploding stars can do that.
I mean, that's how lead got here, right?
You take the lighter elements and you blow them up.
To simplify the argument.
And you get heavier elements and you repeat with other explosions and you get a more complex universe.
But I've never seen anybody who could just take lead and turn it into something that isn't lead.
If you find somebody like that, send them my way.
We can test that.
Anyway, it doesn't exist.
So this is the lamest excuse for heavy metals in dietary supplements.
Oh, these are magical heavy metals.
Magical agical heavy metals.
They don't even count because they don't even function as heavy metals.
So there is a massive number, a large group of people who think that the power of intention can overrule the laws of physical reality.
A lot of people believe this.
They think that if they take, you know, I don't know, poison?
Here, have a plate full of Fukushima fuel, rich with cesium-137.
And these people think...
That by using the power of intention, that they can transmute cesium-137 into, I don't know, let's downgrade a little bit to cesium-134.
Let's get a little bit lower half-life there.
Or maybe they could transmute it to cesium-133.
Or maybe they could turn it into something entirely zinc.
How about that?
Let's just make it zinc.
Some people believe they can do that.
And I gotta tell you, they're delusional.
This is not happening.
You know?
I don't know how else to say it.
Sometimes you talk to people about a subject and they believe so strongly in this mythology they have that they can't be swayed by anything from the real world, real physical sciences.
You know?
Just basic physics and chemistry.
And they think they can overrule the laws of physics with their intention.
I don't know.
Maybe God can do that.
Maybe, you know, Jesus Christ could do that.
Moses could work.
Okay, maybe there's like a couple of dudes in history that were divinely gifted with superpowers, but you're not one of them, okay?
I'm going to just tell you.
You're not one of them.
I'm not one of them.
If I go out...
And if I'm in a gunfight and somebody is shooting lead bullets at me and I put out my hand like I'm in the Matrix and I say, convert the lead to sponges, believe me, that's not going to work.
You'd be better to duck.
And this is what frustrates me about this, is that people, instead of avoiding the food that contains the lead, they just want to do their magical thing and think that it's all okay to eat it.
Well, I guarantee you that the physics and the chemistry in your body's cells...
It is driven by the laws of physics and chemistry.
It's not driven by your words.
And yeah, I understand mind-body medicine.
I understand the power of the placebo effect.
So I guess in a way you can reorganize your cells, you can re-energize certain cells, but you can't change lead into something that's not lead.
That's my point.
I'm not saying that there's no such thing as mind-body medicine.
There is, obviously.
You can boost your immunity with, you know, like relaxation, for example, and healthy sleep, things like that.
But you can also destroy your immunity with toxic heavy metals, you know, mercury, for example.
So I like to encourage people to...
Have a good attitude.
Be positive about mind-body interactions and have good intention, but also let's not forget the way the laws of chemistry work in your body.
Don't forget about real nutrition.
Don't forget about avoiding toxic substances.
You need to make good, healthy decisions about what you eat, what you swallow.
You got to have clean water.
You need to have good Exercise.
You have to sweat from time to time to eliminate toxins.
You need to remember the basics and don't think you can just overwrite everything in your diet by magical thinking.
I hope I'm clear about that.
I imagine I'm going to get criticized just for saying this stuff too.
Doesn't matter.
Doesn't matter.
I have one of the lowest lead diets anywhere because I test everything that I eat.
And I think I want to help you have a low lead diet as well.
So check out labs.naturalnews.com for results of certain foods that we've already tested.
And there's more testing coming up soon.
Thanks for listening.
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