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March 21, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
48:57
The five most dangerous dietary supplements
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Welcome to the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
This is a special report here on talknetwork.com.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
If you're not familiar with my work, I'll give you a brief background so that you know that I know what I'm talking about.
I've been a longtime advocate of the nutritional supplement slash dietary supplement industry.
I'm a certified organic superfood and dietary supplement manufacturer.
We are GMP compliant with the FDA. I run a million dollar plus laboratory that we constructed and built ourselves.
I'm the science lab director.
I do the analysis for heavy metals contamination of foods and superfoods and environmental samples as well.
Well, we can test soils and water and grass and tree leaves and animal dung or whatever we want to test.
So I've got a long history of advocating dietary supplements.
I'm also the founder of naturalnews.com and the creator of alternativenews.com and the person behind many, many other websites out there that focus on nutrition.
And yet, even I have seen some things in the industry that really raise some red flags for me.
And that's what I'm going to talk about here, the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
Obviously, this is my opinion.
There might be people that disagree with this opinion.
And I'm not going to be naming specific brand names here.
I'm going to talk about categories or types of dietary supplements that I think are the most dangerous.
I'll give you my reasoning for each of these and also some of the elemental analysis that I've achieved in my laboratory.
My lab, by the way, currently uses an Agilent 7700X ICP-MS instrument.
We can test down to single-digit parts per billion concentrations of most elements, including lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury, even elements with radioactive isotopes such as cesium, iodine, strontium, uranium, and many others.
I've patented, well, I'm sorry, the patent pending still, two supplements, One's called Cesium Eliminator that binds with radioactive cesium in the digestive tract.
I've also developed another one called Heavy Metals Defense, which uses ion exchange to bind with lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals during digestion.
So I have a lot of experience and a lot of unique research on this matter.
I was the first person to document tungsten in brown rice.
Protein from China, and I was also invited onto the Dr.
Oz show about a year ago to talk about heavy metals in certain foods such as cacao.
What else did we talk about?
Brown rice protein.
Let's see.
There was an herbal supplement, ginkgo, that we found high lead in as well, and a few other things like that.
So, with that out of the way, that's my background briefly.
Here are the five most dangerous dietary supplements, in my opinion.
And again, this is my opinion.
If you take supplements or if you avoid supplements, I think you should always work with a qualified naturopathic physician or complementary health doctor who understands nutrition, most importantly.
Most GPs don't even understand nutrition.
They don't learn it in med school.
So, you know, just your average doctor really isn't qualified to talk about nutrition.
They don't know anything about it.
They really don't.
So you've got to go to somebody who's actually studied nutrition.
And there are a lot of complementary, you know, CAM doctors, CAM, or naturopaths who have studied that.
So here we go.
The five most dangerous dietary supplements, in my opinion.
Number one would be The category of supplements that deliver cheap, inorganic minerals.
Now, the worst offender here is calcium pills.
Cheap calcium pills are made from calcium carbonate.
Now, calcium carbonate is an inorganic mineral, which means it's not organically, we could say, ready for assimilation in the human body.
It hasn't been modified chemically or structurally through plant uptake and made into a bioavailable organic form.
Now, this is not the same thing as organic like pesticides.
This is different.
This is the chemical term organic versus inorganic.
Now, calcium carbonate is the cheapest form of calcium.
You find it in a lot of calcium pills sold at pharmacies and grocery stores and even online.
Amazon.com sells a lot of cheap calcium supplements.
They're made from grinding up limestone or oyster shells or other cheap, again, rock-based forms of calcium.
If you look at the scientific literature on these cheap calcium pills, they're associated with quite a substantial increased risk of heart or adverse heart events, including heart attacks or heart failure, things like that.
Why is that?
Two reasons.
Number one, calcium carbonate, again, is an inorganic mineral.
You should not be drinking this.
You should not be eating this, in my opinion.
This is the calcium that's added to almond milk and other milks, like nut milks that you find at the grocery store that are very popular.
They combine calcium carbonate with carrageenan as a thickening agent and a few almonds, not even very many, Basically, they're just mixing water, ground-up rocks, and carrageenan thickener, and they're calling it almond milk.
I think it poses a risk to consumers.
That's my opinion.
And so I've been warning people away from almond milk because of that.
But the other reason is that most calcium supplements, and I've tested these in the lab, are contaminated with certain concentrations of lead.
And again, this is the cheap, low-grade calcium supplements like calcium carbonate.
The reason calcium supplements are often contaminated with lead, and I test for atomic masses 206, 207, and 208, if I'm remembering that correctly.
I think those are lead masses that we check for.
Lead has a strong affinity for calcium.
In fact, if you consume lead and it goes into your blood, your body will deposit lead in your bones, similar to the way it deposits calcium.
And you can actually then sort of trap, well, literally trap lead in your skeletal system for most of your life.
And then a lot of times when women, they get older and they reach menopause and they begin to break down bone density mass in their body, they will actually release lead from the skeletal system and they will suffer lead poisoning already.
Often decades after their lead exposure took place.
So there's kind of a re-poisoning that can happen as that lead comes out of your skeletal system.
A lot of people don't know that.
They have no idea.
So the reason calcium supplements or cheap minerals are bad for you, again, is because they're not really digestible.
I think they can lead to the calcification of arteries.
I think they can contribute to calcification of the kidneys.
They can contribute to kidney stones.
And then there are other minerals as well, like cheap forms of magnesium.
The cheapest being magnesium oxide, which you might as well call magnesium rust.
You know, you probably wouldn't lick a rusty piece of steel and try to eat the rust, would you?
I mean, it's iron oxide.
Would you consider that to be a source of iron?
I don't think so.
And yet, guess what they put in Wheaties cereal?
If you look at the iron-fortified breakfast cereals, guess what?
If you put it under a microscope, and I've done this, and I've used magnets, and I've posted these videos, you'll find that there are little shreds of iron oxide in cereals.
And they call that iron fortification.
They just shred a bunch of iron, throw it in the box.
It's ridiculous.
That's not iron fortification.
That's like dumping heavy metals into children's breakfast cereals.
That's ridiculous, right?
But a lot of people eat this stuff.
So if you're taking cheap calcium pills or getting cheap magnesium oxide pills, or if you're eating iron-fortified breakfast cereals with little iron bits in them, or if you're drinking almond milk with calcium carbonate in it, you're getting these really crappy, low-grade, cheap or inorganic forms of these minerals, which are sometimes metals, and I think that that is bad for you.
That's my view.
Alright, so that's category number one, cheap, inorganic minerals.
Let's go to category number two.
I won't have time to finish this in this segment, but I'll continue in the next.
So, again, the list here, the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
Category two, in my opinion, is detox supplements.
You know, I've had increasing awareness of problems with many types of extreme detox supplements, and some of them, like zeolites, I have recently talked about and published laboratory data showing that these ultra-fine powdered, sort of micronized zeolite substances contain Very high levels of lead anywhere from,
well, I've seen recently 27 parts per million, I've seen 35 parts per million, I've seen 40-something parts per million.
Yeah, I'm not talking PPB here.
I'm talking parts per million.
I know my units.
These things are off the chart.
My instrument detects in parts per billion, so these are numbers like 47,000 parts per billion, which is, of course, 47 plus parts per million.
So, these have very, very high levels of lead, and the aluminum is way off the charts.
Now, I'm talking like 30,000 parts per million aluminum.
I know, like you've never even heard that number.
You know, usually you're talking about lead and something like mushrooms, it might be, you know, four parts per million or something.
Well, the aluminum in zeolites is often 30,000 parts per million.
Which, if you think about it, is actually 30 parts per thousand, right?
If you convert the units.
So 30 parts per thousand, we don't even normally talk about parts per thousand because that's so large for metals like that.
So anyway, I've got concerns about micronized, crushed up zeolites and the amount of lead and aluminum they contain, especially when so many people are taking them with the promise that zeolites are going to remove these metals from their body.
So much aluminum and lead if your goal is to remove aluminum and lead.
And I looked at one of the widely touted so-called studies or clinical trials.
It involved 20 people who were fed a bunch of zeolites and then they began urinating out aluminum and lead.
Well...
And from that, the author concluded that, yeah, zeolites chelate metals and eliminate them from the body.
Well, that's like saying, you know, if you eat mercury, you're going to eliminate mercury.
That's not rocket science and that's not a detox.
It just means your body's trying to get rid of this stuff.
So why would you eat it?
And this isn't the only category, by the way, of detox supplements that concern me.
I'm also concerned about a lot of detox supplements that try to create some kind of a crazy healing crisis in your body where they want you to have all these purging effects.
You're supposed to have the cramping and diarrhea and vomiting and you're supposed to feel sick and they call it a healing crisis.
Oh, you know, this is part of your healing, you're detoxing.
Maybe not.
Maybe the supplements are just making you feel sick.
I'm a big believer that when you take nutritional supplements, well, number one, your body's detoxing every day all the time anyway.
All you've got to do is change your diet, change your lifestyle, stop poisoning yourself.
Your body will detox itself.
It eliminates toxic substances on its own if it's given the right opportunity to do so.
Oh man, I'm almost out of time here.
So here we go.
I'm going to come back after this break.
I'm going to continue with the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
My name is Mike Adams.
I'm the Health Ranger.
You're listening to TalkNetwork.com.
So stay with me.
I'll be right back after this break with the next segment.
And we're back talking about the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
This is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger.
I'm the lab science director of the Natural News Forensic Food Lab.
I'm the co-founder of TalkNetwork.com, NaturalNews.com, and many other websites.
And yeah, I'm a longtime advocate of nutritional supplements and dietary supplements, good quality ones, of course.
I'm also very concerned about certain types, certain categories of dietary supplements.
And with the DOJ doing a recent crackdown, you know, criminal indictments of this company in Texas called, I think, USP Labs.
And the crazy stuff that company was doing, like buying chemicals from China, labeling them as plant extracts, and apparently 50 people had liver failure, and it was just crazy.
There was a report that there was Prozac in their pills.
Really?
Obviously, there are some bad operators out there, and those people need to be stopped.
Clearly.
So anyway, I thought I would comment on the five most dangerous dietary supplements that I've seen, in my opinion, as someone who really has been in this industry a long time.
And I've been to trade shows year after year.
I've seen most things that are out there.
And I've done a lot of laboratory testing.
I've tested probably more dietary supplements than really any other journalist that writes about nutrition.
I mean, personally tested them myself in the lab for heavy metals contamination.
So I got a lot of A lot of background, a lot of experience to talk about this.
Anyway, we were talking about detox supplements, and this is one of my areas of concern.
Why am I concerned about detox supplements?
Because a lot of people are told that in order to, quote, detox, you have to go through this healing crisis, which they're told is going to be a lot of suffering.
You're going to have diarrhea.
You might vomit.
You're going to purge.
You're going to feel sick.
You might even start shaking or sweating or having a fever or a headache or cramping.
I've heard all these things.
And usually in the industry, people are just told, ah, that's just a healing crisis.
You'll feel better after it's over.
And that's the detox working, you know?
I think that's complete BS. I don't think that detox should be painful.
I don't think that taking something that enhances your health should make you feel sick.
I think that's completely contradictory.
And I think some of these pills, if they're taken in very large quantities, can even be risky, dangerous.
I think that your body knows how to detox itself.
In fact, built into your cellular biology, there is a detox mechanism, multiple detox mechanisms, in fact.
Your cells are detoxing all the time.
Your kidneys are working all the time.
Your liver is working all the time.
Your blood is carrying away cellular waste products and contaminants from your body all the time.
Your liver is actually modifying the molecular structure of chemicals that it finds in your body which are incompatible with human biology.
You know, you have a system of detox.
It's called your body.
All you got to do is stop poisoning it.
Give it good nutrition.
Yes, you do need some forms of sulfur in your diet, for example, to have good detox.
There are some amino acids that can help you with that.
For example, glutathione is a good example of a molecular compound that can help you detox.
There are things that can help you, nutritionally speaking, but you don't need to put yourself through some kind of a crazy healing crisis to feel like you did a detox.
I think that's nuts.
I think you detox every day by drinking clean water and doing some exercise and sweating.
You sweat out toxins.
I think you detox every day by eating fresh greens and clean salads as part of your meal.
I'm not a vegan.
Even though I have been in the past, but I'm not anymore.
So I do eat meats, but I eat clean, you know, free-range animals that haven't been injected with all these crazy hormones and chemicals.
So if you have a clean diet and a clean lifestyle, like the opposite of Charlie Sheen, then you're actually going to be detoxing every day naturally.
You don't have to put yourself through some kind of a crazy crisis.
Now, that's my opinion.
I know I'm going to piss off a lot of people who sell detox supplements.
I don't care.
I don't care.
I just think that they're aggressively pushed.
I think they're risky to many people.
And I think that you don't need to have a crisis to be healthy.
All you got to do is be clean with your food, your water, your medicine, your supplements every single day.
Live a clean lifestyle.
Your body knows how to heal itself.
You have the blueprint of perfect health already built into every cell of your body.
You just have to feed it correctly, give it the building blocks that it needs.
All right, moving on now.
Again, we're talking about the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
So far, we've covered cheap, inorganic minerals like low-grade calcium supplements, and then we've covered detox supplements, many of which are high in lead, by the way.
And I think you shouldn't eat lead if you're trying to get rid of lead.
I know, call me crazy.
Call me crazy, but you probably shouldn't eat lead if you're trying to get rid of lead.
Makes me want to drink some clean water there.
Just talking about that.
Okay, category number three.
Bodybuilding supplements and sports-enhancing supplements that use crazy chemicals and that are always tied to aggressive marketing, like false claims marketing.
This is what the DOJ is going after.
The FDA and the FTC as well.
They're going after this whole category.
They call it high-risk dietary supplements.
Bodybuilding supplements.
For whatever reason, the bodybuilding supplement industry tends to be filled with just the biggest con artists and fraudsters and hucksters imaginable.
They often use chemical ingredients like sucralose sweeteners and artificial colors, chemical coloring agents.
And sometimes they'll even adulterate their products with drugs.
They'll buy pharmaceuticals from China.
We'll get bulk powders of pharmaceuticals or sometimes like caffeine, just powdered caffeine.
And they will mix this into their, you know, so-called bodybuilding product.
And then we'll hire somebody to write this really compelling marketing copy or make these really amazing ads with really sexy, pumped up people with big muscles, awesome, awesome abs and thin waist, you know, and say, yeah, if you take this supplement, you're going to look like this.
Well, obviously, it's complete BS. Number one, looking like that, you know, probably most bodybuilders are not healthy people.
Just for the record, just so you know, their kidneys are often failing.
You know, they're all juicing up on anabolic steroids.
They lead the most unhealthy lifestyle, as you can imagine, because I know some of these people, and they've told me what they go through, kind of salt-loading, In the days before the event, you know, they do salt loading and then salt deprivation.
They do extreme dehydration on the day of the show.
The kidneys are getting hammered like crazy.
They've got chemicals going into their bodies to boost their muscles.
They're...
Their eating habits are outlandish.
They're doing crazy ketogenic diets on and off and cycling this and that.
They are not healthy people.
They may look interesting, but by and large, they're not healthy.
So just the desire to be like them is really an unhealthy desire anyway.
I know it's compelling.
Everybody wants to look like a super athlete.
But, you know, maybe it's just me being an older person now.
You know, I'm not 25 anymore.
I think functional strength is a lot more important.
You know, I'm a survivalist.
I'm a prepper.
I'm a long-range rifle target shooter.
You know, I'll hike up a mountain with, you know, a 60-pound pack and a rifle.
I'll chop wood.
I take care of animals on my farm, donkeys and goats, chickens.
I had to carry a baby goat recently, a couple hundred yards.
No, I'm sorry, a baby donkey that was born.
I had to pick her up and carry her.
I have functional strength.
I'm not going to win any bodybuilding picture contests.
But I've got functional strength.
I know how to do stuff.
I've got the strength to do it in the real world.
I think that's what you should aspire to have is functional strength.
You're going to have fewer injuries.
You're not going to harm your kidneys.
It's better for your body to work out in the real world.
Live on a ranch if you want to work out.
Live on a ranch.
Start moving 50-pound bags of grain around and carrying buckets of water and moving bins for baby chickens and things like that.
You're just going to get functional strength.
Or, heck, just work with farm equipment.
You should try changing hydraulic hoses on a tractor.
Things like that.
Or, hey, how about putting a new tire on a rim?
Of an ATV because your tire got jacked up.
And doing that without the proper tools, there's a workout for you.
Try that one day.
Yeah, you'll get a workout.
Anyway, my point is, this category of dietary supplements, bodybuilding and sports enhancement, should be a big red flag.
If you see ads that say, oh, you're going to get big muscles, you're going to get pumped up, you're going to look like this super huge dude, it's all been photoshopped anyway.
It's not even real.
It's all this artificial, delusional fairytale land.
You're never going to look like that.
And if you even try, you're probably going to hurt your kidneys or your liver or spend a fortune on useless garbage anyway.
Most of those people, the models that they use, are genetically gifted people anyway, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, right?
Genetically gifted frame.
You could work out as much as him or more than him.
You're not going to look like him.
You know, he's genetically gifted to be a huge dude.
And that's like 80% of it, if not more.
So, you know, a pill is not going to change your genetic code and just make you look like some freaking Hulk.
So don't even try.
Okay.
Yeah, we got a little bit more time.
So sports enhancing supplements, be very careful.
I want you to read ingredients.
Always read ingredients labels.
Look out for maltodextrin, which usually comes from genetically modified corn.
Avoid anything with sucralose in it.
Avoid anything with artificial colors.
Watch out for cheap proteins like soy protein, which is often hexane extracted.
Hexane is an explosive chemical solvent.
And a lot of these bodybuilding supplements use cheap soy protein.
It's so cheap.
It's part of animal feed.
It's an animal feed byproduct of soy oil processing.
They can turn that dry meal into soy protein using hexane.
And so if you're eating soy protein, you're eating a genetically modified, cheap...
Just a super cheap source of protein that's so cheap they feed it to pigs usually.
If they didn't sell it to you, they'd be feeding it to pigs.
So I think check your protein bars and protein sources and all that.
You're going to find a lot of soy protein and they're not a good ingredient.
Alright, so that's three categories out of five.
When we come back, I've got to take another break here, but when we come back, we're going to talk about category four.
Again, this is the five most dangerous dietary supplements, in my opinion, and you're listening to TalkNetwork.com.
My name is Mike Adams.
Sorry about talking fast in this segment.
I'm just trying to fit it all in.
There's a lot to cover here, and I want you to be safe with what you're taking.
So anyway, stay with me.
We'll be right back after this break with number four out of the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
Alright, we're back with the five most dangerous dietary supplements on our list.
We're on number four here.
But just to review, the first three were number one, cheap inorganic minerals like calcium carbonate, magnesium oxide.
Number two were the extreme detox supplements, many of which are very high in lead and that cause your body to go into some kind of a healing crisis.
And the people selling you these supplements say, well, that's just a healing crisis.
What if it isn't?
What if it's just hurting your body?
And then number three, bodybuilding supplements, which are mostly BS and full of crazy adulterated chemicals and marketed with wild, exaggerated claims and supermodels with awesome abs that you're never going to have no matter how hard you try.
So don't even try.
You know, have functional strength.
Be healthy.
But I'm telling you, those bodybuilders, those are not healthy people.
If you really knew their dietary habits and what they do, it's not healthy at all.
In fact, even they can't stand it for very long.
Just ask any bodybuilder, by the way, competitive bodybuilders, just to be able to have that extreme low salt and low hydration and low body fat to get on stage, to take the pictures.
Did you know that the second they get off stage, every one of those people are slamming salt water and massive amounts of food?
You know, some of these people will gain 12 pounds in two days after they get off stage.
They're so dehydrated.
They are on the verge of passing out.
Just so you know, because that's not what healthy people look like.
Healthy people actually have some body fat.
I mean, just for the record, so you know.
Okay, moving on to number four.
It's going to be diet pills.
Now, diet pills is one of the categories that was named by the U.S. Department of Justice, the FDA, and the FTC in their recent criminal indictment of a company called USP Labs.
Actually, that was a bodybuilding supplement.
But diet pills are one of the high-risk supplements that they mentioned.
And they specifically mention...
Green coffee bean, which I think is unfair.
Green coffee bean actually has some phytochemicals that can be helpful.
But they are correct on one important aspect of all this, which is that there's no such thing as a pill.
That's going to make you look like an awesome athlete if you're sitting on your ass watching TV all day and have a sedentary lifestyle and you're eating unhealthy, high-calorie foods all the time.
You know, pizzas and donuts and Starbucks lattes, which are really more like ice cream shakes that are coffee-flavored.
They shouldn't even be called coffee.
And again, I'm not trying to be polite here.
I'm not known for beating around the bush.
I just lay it out there.
There are no pills that alone are going to cause you to look athletic and lose a lot of weight.
They just don't exist in a way that works by themselves.
In every case, to achieve lasting, healthful weight loss, you have to combine a supplement.
If you choose to use a supplement, you have to combine it with exercise.
You have to get rid of the sedentary lifestyle.
You have to move your body.
You have to expend calories.
You have to get your heart rate up.
You have to sweat.
And you have to make healthier food choices.
Period.
There's no exception to this other than chemotherapy, which causes you to lose weight for different reasons because you're dying.
Chemotherapy is poison.
Yeah, you're going to lose a lot of muscle mass.
You're going to lose bone mass.
You're going to lose your hair.
You're going to lose your brain function.
You're going to lose heart function.
That's not the kind of weight loss that I think you want.
I mean, if you really want to lose weight, chemotherapy does it for you.
No effort required, but that's not what you're looking for, I hope.
So if you want healthy weight loss, in other words, weight loss that gives you more energy and more health...
It comes down to food.
Look, I've talked to people who weigh...
I've talked to a dude that weighed over 600 pounds.
I'm not even kidding.
He weighed over 600 pounds and he's down to like 240.
And when you talk to people like this, and I've talked to many of them over the years, they tell you the same story.
The same story.
They say, I changed my diet.
I changed what I ate and I started walking.
That's pretty much the story.
It's like...
How did you get to be 600 pounds, if you ask these people?
Well, I was sitting on my couch, I was watching daytime TV, and I was eating, you know, snack chips and ice cream all day.
And I was just sitting on my ass and just eating food like crazy.
And that's how they got to 600 pounds.
You ask, how'd you lose almost 400 pounds?
I changed what I ate, and I started walking.
And usually these stories don't even mention diet pills of any kind.
It's not like they said, oh, I started slamming caffeine ten times a day to boost my metabolism.
No.
It's like I started eating a salad.
I had a fresh apple before every meal.
I drank water instead of high-fructose corn syrup.
I gave up soda.
I just started drinking tea.
And I started taking a five-minute walk a day, and then I started taking a 10-minute walk, and then I did a 15-20-minute walk.
I started walking across the parking lot, parking at the other end of the parking lot, walking across the parking lot.
Instead of going through the drive-thru, I stopped eating at McDonald's.
I stopped eating fried foods.
I started eating fresh foods, you know, just these kinds of common-sense things.
Now there's no harm in a quality plant extract, let's say, that's truly derived from a plant that is not isolated.
You don't want a chemically isolated substance.
You want something that's more full spectrum.
There's no harm in something like, let's say, even like a quality coffee if used in moderation.
That's the thing.
Don't overdo it.
Don't go crazy with it.
But there's no harm in adding coffee to your life if you're doing all these other things.
You're eating well.
You're making good food choices.
You're not a substance abuser, for example.
You're getting exercise.
You're sweating.
You actually have to sweat to detox and so on.
You know, the con artists want you to think you can just take their pill and you've got to pay them $50 a month or $29.95 or whatever and And that you're just going to magically lose weight because they're going to send you these magical pills that are filled with whatever, acai or...
What was the one that Dr.
Oz, he went after that supplement company for?
Garcinia?
Cambogia?
Is that what it was?
Yeah, it was Garcinia, wasn't it?
That was supposed to be the miracle weight loss thing.
Even Dr.
Oz, he won't even talk about weight loss supplements anymore because all these companies, they...
They try to take his face and his name and slap it on their website, acting like he endorsed them when he didn't.
And they're scamming the brand of Dr.
Oz to try to push their scammy supplements, most of which don't even contain the ingredients they say.
I mean, you want to look at scammers and con artists, you know, the weight loss sector of the dietary supplements industry has some of the worst operators imaginable.
Like, for some reason, all the con artists just are sort of, they gravitate toward the weight loss diet pill, miracle diet sector of the industry.
And you'll notice, by the way, that I don't have a weight loss supplement.
Number one, I wouldn't sell stimulants.
I'm not going to sell people caffeine.
I think that's dangerous.
You know, I mean isolated caffeine, like crystalline caffeine.
I think that's a bad idea.
If I sell anything that would promise to help reduce body fat...
I would have to explain that this is only secondary to your food choice and your exercise changing your lifestyle.
You know, I'm not going to go out there and push something as a miracle pill for losing weight when I know the truth is that you have to change what you eat.
And that's probably why the Department of Justice isn't trying to throw me in jail.
If you're a scammer, they're going to come after you, but I wouldn't even do that anyway.
I don't need the threat of the government to force me to do something or not do something.
I have an inner moral compass.
I have ethics.
I have people that depend on me.
Millions of people who depend on my opinions and my assessment of nutritional supplements.
They've come to trust my recommendations.
So, you know, that's a big responsibility and I take it seriously.
So I'm not going to go out and recommend some silly, you know, stimulant pill that might harm people.
That's just highly unethical.
Okay, so we've got one more category here.
I'm going to introduce it here, and then I'll be out of time and we'll carry it over in the next section.
But again, this is the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
We've covered four, the fourth being the diet pills.
The fifth one, this may surprise you, the fifth one is anything, any dietary supplement that Well, there are a few exceptions to this, so I'm going to talk about the exceptions, okay?
But for the most part, any dietary supplement from China, you have to be very, very careful about things from China.
Now, one of the exceptions is goji berries.
Goji berries are grown at high altitude, mountains, you know, Tibetan regions of China, and when they are tested, and we've tested a lot of goji berries, and they can be confirmed to be low in heavy metals, then those can be very clean.
But it's because they're grown in different regions of China.
When you get close to the industrial centers of China, what you have is farmlands that are being systematically contaminated by the industrial fallout, the pollution.
And remember, there are virtually no pollution controls that are enforced in China.
So you have industry in China just billowing out smokestacks of toxic crap all over the country, but especially in the cities.
And this is falling on the farmlands near there.
So you're getting tungsten and lead and cadmium and who knows what else that we haven't even tested for yet.
But you're getting this all in the soils.
Now, you may not know this, but those soils can then be certified, well, not the soils themselves, but the food grown in those soils can be certified organic as long as you don't spray them with pesticides.
So you have organic certifiers operating in China that I think are totally bogus.
I think it's massive fraud.
And one of these days, I'm going to expose it, but I think that this idea that you can have certified organic produce grown on contaminated soils is an absolute fraud.
And this is why so many things that are grown in China, when we bring them to the United States, when I get them, I buy them, I put them in my lab, I test them, high lead.
So many times I'm talking, of course, about tea products, I'm talking about rice protein products, I'm talking about herbs, like ginkgo herbs grown in China, for example.
Medicinal mushrooms are very heavily contaminated with heavy metals because they're good at grabbing onto heavy metals.
They have a strong affinity for certain elements, which is one of the reasons people love to eat clean mushrooms.
But if they're grown in China, you're going to have a problem, probably.
I've seen stuff come out of China that just shocks me And I finally come to find out it's because the soils are heavily contaminated by very dirty industry.
So anyway, I'll talk about this in more detail when we come back in the final segment.
You're listening to a special report, the five most dangerous dietary supplements on TalkNetwork.com.
All right, this is the final segment of the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
Thanks for continuing with me.
This is Mike Adams, the health ranger, the co-founder of TalkNetwork.com, creator of NaturalNews.com, and the lab science director of the Natural News Forensic Food Laboratory, where we run very sensitive instrumentation, Agilent ICP-MS, conducting elemental analysis down to single parts per billion concentration.
In the previous segments of this special report, I've covered the four of the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
And this fifth one is my focus here.
And the fifth one is anything from China.
And there are exceptions, so the word anything needs an asterisk beside it.
So anything, ding, from China.
With the asterisk meaning goji berries can be fine.
Goji berries are grown in different regions and they can be okay.
There are some things you can get from China that are okay, some things.
But by and large, as a general rule, the things that I've tested that are from China tend to be quite heavily contaminated with toxic heavy metals.
And as I started to explain in the previous segment, that's because China has almost no emissions controls on their industrial pollution.
And so their industries are churning out heavy metals like crazy, tungsten, lead, uranium, cadmium, even arsenic.
And copper as well, by the way, which can be toxic in very, very small quantities.
And they're churning this out.
This is going up into the sky, then it falls onto the soils.
And then these soils are used to grow certified organic herbs and vegetables and things that are then dehydrated or powdered or extracted into other ingredients.
China can do this very, very cheaply.
Labor costs are cheap and there are virtually no environmental controls.
So because the certifier, the organic certifier is operating in China, which I think are conducting, engage in outright fraud.
I think they're con artists.
I think it's fraud.
I think it's BS. But they certify these things organic.
Then U.S. companies can import them into the United States.
They can call it certified organic and they can say made in America.
You know how they do that?
It's very simple.
If you buy two ingredients from China, you import them into the United States, and you blend them together in America, then you can put on your bottle made in America.
Actually, you don't even have to do that.
If you import something from China and you simply bottle it in America, then you can put on your bottle made in America.
Got that?
So a lot of consumers are being fooled and tricked and hoodwinked by this, and I exposed the heavy metals that were in the brown rice protein products, sometimes as much as 5,000 parts per billion lead, and pretty high cadmium in some of these, too.
Of some of these products a couple of years ago.
Now, some companies have really cleaned up their product line, and I did test Vega protein recently and found it to be very, very clean.
And I'll be doing some more testing of other products, but I have seen stuff come in from China that is just absolutely shocking, where it's a thousand times, in some cases, a thousand times higher lead than the same product grown in the United States.
Think about that.
A thousand times more lead if it's from China.
Now, that's not across the board.
That's not for everything, but just some things.
The numbers would just shock you.
If you had the same instrument that I had and you ran the same test that I run and you saw these numbers for yourself, you would be shocked and you would never eat food from China.
Again, probably.
I don't.
I mean, except goji berries and maybe a couple of other things.
But for the most part, I really avoid anything from China.
And so many of these U.S. companies, they're so dishonest.
I'm not going to name the names right now.
I'm not trying to embarrass them.
But when I first rolled out the truth about lead being in rice protein from China, One of these U.S. companies, which is real big in the raw food realm, which I think is totally sketchy and very, very cult-oriented.
There's no rational thinking at all, it seems, in that sector.
People just believe everything they're told.
And they have these really nice bottles that are like, you know, this is so awesome, organic, and sacred geometry symbols on it, a high vibration, made in America.
You know, we...
We search the world for the most awesome stuff.
Blah, blah, blah.
It's the same crap garbage from China that everybody else uses.
The packaging and the marketing materials and the promotion is all just hype.
It's just total hype.
It's so deceptive, in my opinion.
Just wild exaggeration.
It's like it's all really designed to mislead people, to make people think this is some magical stuff grown in America, grown in crystal pyramids or something.
No, it's just crap from China that's grown in soils that are contaminated with heavy metals.
So this company then came out and was saying, well, no, these are naturally occurring lead, naturally occurring cadmium.
See, they couldn't argue with my lab results because they sent...
They sent their own product to other labs and they found out that I was reporting accurate numbers.
So they couldn't deny it.
So they just said, oh, it's naturally occurring.
It's all natural.
Natural lead.
Like, really?
That's your excuse?
This is natural lead?
Well, so let me explain how this works.
They say that if you have an industrial factory and is churning out lead in the smokestack, this lead, when it comes out of the smokestack, it's pollution, right?
Everybody would agree, it's pollution.
But they say that when that lead falls on a farm nearby, suddenly, boom, that lead becomes naturally occurring lead.
That's their claim.
Again, just to walk you through this, the lead coming out of the smokestack of the factory, that's pollution.
But when it hits the soil, they claim it's naturally occurring because it's in their product.
Oh, it's naturally occurring lead.
It's unnatural.
No, it isn't.
It's pollution.
It's pollution in the soil, and because it's in the soil, it's now in your food.
And your food's from China, and it's crap.
And you're totally dishonest.
You know, that's the truth.
So, you know, these companies...
I'm not going to name names right now, but I've got another round of testing coming soon with my new expanded laboratory.
We've got a brand new facility that's about to open, and it's amazing.
I'll be shooting video and pictures and everything in there soon.
I'll show you.
But we're going to be testing a lot of products and really scrutinizing the industry pretty heavily.
Not just dietary supplements, but I mean baby food, too.
We're going to test stuff off the shelf at the grocery stores.
There's a lot that consumers still don't know about what they're eating.
Believe me, there's stuff in your food that would completely freak you out if you do the truth.
And so, thank God we have access now as sort of citizen scientists.
That people like myself and others, we can literally buy these instruments.
We can build laboratories.
We can become well-trained and competent in the methodologies.
We can even go for ISO accreditation of our laboratories.
We're working on our 17.025 accreditation, which takes about two years.
It's a big deal.
It's a lot of paperwork.
It's a lot of methodology.
You wouldn't believe what we have to go through to get this.
It's a lot of work, but we have access to do that, so we're doing it.
This is the democratization of science, if you think about it.
This is where food companies can't hide behind false labels anymore, because even citizens like us, independent journalists...
You know, independent investigators or activists, we can get this laboratory instrumentation and we can run the test ourselves and we can report what we're seeing.
And, you know, with ISO accreditation, it means that we are globally accredited as being accurate in what we do, that our methodology is accurate, that we've been audited, that we've been skills tested.
They actually send people to your lab to watch you do something.
You even have to...
To get that kind of accreditation, you even have to pay money to an organization that has a given sample That's sent out to like 20 other labs and all those other labs test it and they report their numbers and then they send it to you and you have to test it and report your numbers.
If your numbers don't match the other 20 labs, then you don't get accredited.
So you have to have agreement with 20 other labs out there.
It may not actually be 20.
It might be, you know, 12 or 25.
I'm not sure the exact number, but it's a lot of labs.
You have to know what you're doing or you don't get accredited.
And so there's a lot of skills testing and accuracy testing.
There's methodology, documentation, quality control.
There's obviously calibration testing during the runs, before the runs, all kinds of documentation.
So we have the ability to do this.
And we're using it to help increase awareness and to help show you the truth about what's in your supplements, what's in your food, what's in your breakfast cereal, what's in your frozen pizza, for that matter.
We'll be testing everything.
And this is the democratization of science.
That's what's beautiful about it.
Science shouldn't be in the hands of just a few powerful corporations or universities or governments.
Because who's lying to you most of the time?
Powerful corporations and governments.
And sometimes universities.
When science is distributed, and it's in the hands of many, many people, and there is a liberty and there's a freedom in it, and you're going to get more accurate results and more transparency.
Because everything that I do, that I publish from my laboratory, whether it's lead and something from China, or pesticides, let's say, and something off the shelf, you...
You or anyone else could reproduce the same results using the same scientific instrumentation.
So it's not like these are opinions.
These are instrument-validated results that can be reproduced.
And they have been over and over again.
So much of what I've published, you know, manufacturers at first, they get pissed off and they threaten to sue me all the time.
We're going to sue you!
Shut you down.
You don't know what you're doing.
And they send the same sample off to other laboratories, and then they come back and say, well, yeah, yeah, okay, you were right.
You know, and then they start arguing something else.
Like, it was natural lead.
Natural lead.
To date, no one has ever proven our lab results to be inaccurate on anything.
They've been challenged every time.
Every time I publish something, I get challenged or threatened every single time.
It's a high-risk business, I guess.
Telling the truth is a risky thing, even in the dietary supplements industry.
With that said, those are the five most dangerous dietary supplements.
Cheap inorganic minerals, aggressive detox supplements, high in lead, bodybuilding supplements with chemicals, crazy diet pills, and stuff from China contaminated with industrial metals.
So watch out for that.
And if you want a quality source of dietary supplements or nutritional supplements and superfoods, Go to the Natural News store.
We test everything, and we reject a lot of stuff that we don't like.
So we have a small store, but it's a store that you can trust, and it's at store.naturalnews.com.
Thanks for listening.
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