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March 22, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
26:37
Heavy metals in raw vegan proteins: detailed comparison charts
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We've just republished rice protein heavy metals data in a new improved format that hopefully should be more meaningful to people.
Let me actually show you.
Actually, where is that?
Here we go.
Click on this chart and you'll see the results.
Now I'm sharing this with you along with an explanation of a summary of our grassroots actions and victories last week.
Here it is.
This chart so far has these results in it.
We are going to be updating this.
Part of what we do here is as we acquire newer products, because the shifts are already underway in the industry, so as we get New products that come onto the market that are improvements from the existing products, we actually will replace the old data with the new data.
So you will see this data improve, I believe, over time.
I guess if it gets worse, then we'll post that too, but I don't expect it to get worse because, well, the whole industry has now come around and is improving their raw material sourcing.
Result works, and this is at labs.naturalnews.com where you can find all of this.
We had issues with, well, let me show you kind of the old format here.
Here's an old format of data, an old page, and we will actually no longer be posting individual pages like this, but let me explain exactly why.
Here's the thing.
These numbers, some people found numbers difficult to deal with, for whatever reason.
I'm not going to go into why I think that is, but parts per billion was, for some reason, a lot of people said that they didn't know what that meant.
So, they wanted parts per million.
So, in the new chart, we have in fact gone to parts per million.
Instead of 535 parts per billion, we're now showing 0.535 parts per million, which I think is actually more difficult to look at because it's got a decimal point and another digit in front of it.
But I guess some people think that's easier.
So, you know, whatever.
That's fine.
The other thing is that you'll notice that on this individual page, this is just one product and it doesn't show you, well, how does...
Maine coast kelp granules compared to other kelp products.
And I think that's a very good suggestion that people were telling me.
They were saying, well, we'd like to see these in groups, really, so we can kind of see, you know, of all the kelp granules, how much cadmium is in this one versus another one.
How do we really make comparisons?
So that's what we did.
So as you can see here, lead concentrations in, this is the category, proteins vegan.
And as you can see at the top of the list is...
Well, first of all, let me show you how this works.
We show the highest concentration in this entire group is 0.535 ppm.
And then we show you the average concentration, which happens to be 0.213 in this case.
And then we show you the products and the lot numbers.
We couldn't find a lot number on this hemp protein, by the way, which is why it's not there.
But all these others have their lot numbers, and we show you lead from low...
From the lowest in this group to the highest in this group with a visual representation.
Ah, isn't that nice?
So instead of trying to sort of visualize what these numbers mean, we now show you visually exactly how they relate to the others.
So you could say, oh, well, look, living protein from living fuel is actually the concentrations are considerably below average.
Which is good, in my opinion.
And the hemp proteins are even more below average.
Hemp, by the way, in every test I've ever done on hemp products, they have always been clean.
So, you know, yay for hemp.
That's why I'm eating more hemp.
I don't know about you, but I'm eating more hemp.
And I think we should be growing that stuff in the USA. What do you think?
Let me explain it this way.
We have to do a different chart for each element in this case.
There's a chart for lead, there's a chart for cadmium, there's a chart for mercury, there's a chart for arsenic, there's a chart for copper, and then aluminum, and then finally the last one, which is a nutritive element, is zinc.
I think most people will agree that zinc is something that you'd want more of.
Even though zinc is a, quote, heavy metal or could be called a heavy metal just based on the table of elements, it is a nutritive element that most people are deficient in.
So we really want to see higher levels of zinc.
And isn't it interesting that what's got the highest level of zinc is Nutiva and living protein from living fuel.
Two of the relatively cleaner products also had the highest levels of zinc.
I find that very fascinating.
And then zinc also tends to block copper.
Oh, and we've added these element pictures from the table of elements here.
But copper, you'll notice that The hemp protein from Nutiva is the highest in copper, but it's also the highest in zinc.
So the zinc level is in fact so much higher.
We're talking about what?
Almost 170 something parts per million.
Compared to the copper level of 34 parts per million, let's say, that the zinc is going to outcompete copper for absorption into your body.
So this is actually yet another reason to eat Nutiva hemp protein, which is just again and again, it has been so impressive in so many ways.
And no, Nutiva didn't pay me to say that.
I just present the data here.
I don't make up these numbers.
I don't make up these bars.
I don't sit around sketching what I wish they looked like.
No, this is what they actually look like.
And by the way, No one has yet talked about this number here, which is mercury concentrations.
And you'll notice that compared to the other metals, these are very, very low, 0.043.
But if you do some research on mercury, you'll also notice that you want mercury to be many, many times lower.
So which proteins are the lowest in mercury?
Well, Once again, the hemp protein from Ruth's and sproutine from Sprout Living showed the lowest in our testing.
Isn't that interesting?
So you can look at this chart.
Now, I know some people accused us or criticized us of sort of taking down the old charts, which we did, so I suppose at some level it's a fair criticism, but we took them down to replace them with With this, which we think is a lot more meaningful, and this is based on user suggestions.
And I apologize that it took us a couple of days to make this happen, but actually dynamically calculating and rendering these charts is somewhat complicated, and we had to write the code, you know, to do this.
So back to the article, let me explain some of the big announcements this week.
Okay, so Starting from the beginning, earlier in the week, we released exclusive breaking news on tungsten, cadmium, and lead in rice protein products.
Our grassroots activists took action and raised their voices and raised their concerns.
Two of the largest companies in this space, Garden of Life and Sun Warrior, then were able to sit down with us and discuss a possible agreement that's in the best interest of consumers.
We reached a solution, which is announced here.
This is a historical agreement that has these specific limits.
Lead limit to, you know, 250 ppb and so on and so forth.
Notice the mercury is very low and the tungsten is very low.
And, in fact, let me show you this.
I think we posted an infographic on tungsten levels.
Yes, we did.
Here's the...
Target of tungsten right here, 50 parts per billion.
You see that little orange line there?
That's the target.
These are the current existing levels of tungsten in rice protein products.
I did not put brand names here because I'm not out to Just keep bashing these companies that have agreed to change their ways.
I want to encourage them to stay on that path and do the right thing.
And I commend them for doing that, by the way.
And they are sticking to their side of the agreement.
So this is more of a public information to let you know that this is what's out there in a general sense.
And this is where we are heading in terms of targets.
Now there's a lot of disagreement about tungsten.
What is it?
Is it safe to eat?
How much is safe to eat?
This or that.
I'll talk about that in just a minute.
But anyway, we did reach this agreement.
This is an historical agreement, the first ever in the food industry.
So I thank you for your grassroots activism.
Now, I just want to be clear for the record.
There's no money that ever changed hands in any of this.
Money was not ever even talked about.
This was just purely an authentic grassroots activism.
I have been told By people in the industry that there's some other lab in the industry that they would describe as kind of running an extortion racket, where kind of if you pay them off, they don't report bad numbers for you.
I don't know if that's true.
I don't have any firsthand experience with whoever they're talking about, but I've heard that from two sources now that makes me wonder if some of that's going on, but I can assure you it's not going on here.
Not a chance.
In fact, we spent a lot of money to get these results.
I mean, you can imagine if you start testing, I mean, first of all, you got to buy all these products.
You know, I don't get these for free.
I got to buy all these products and multiple, I mean, not just what you see here, but others that you don't even see that are still in the testing queue.
I mean, thousands and thousands of dollars on products and then you got to run multiple tests on every single batch and not just one test, but three tests.
We run three tests on each product to get accurate numbers.
So now you're starting to talk, you know, if you realize if you send this out to a lab, you could pay like 200 bucks a test.
So that's $600 in testing per product.
So that's, you know, four, what is that?
Twelve, 600 times 12, that's over $7,000 in testing just to be able to bring you this information.
Now, it didn't cost us that much out of pocket because we're using our own in-house lab.
But then again, we had to pay for the lab.
So that's, you know, a million dollars.
So this is not cheap to do, believe me.
And that's probably why no one else is doing it.
I mean, who else?
In fact, this is my comment here.
How rare is it that a publisher like Natural News actually works in the interest of the community with no profit motive?
So, I mean, think about it, seriously.
Almost everybody that you can think of in the industry is spending all their time, money, and effort promoting their own profits, their own products, their own sales.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I'm not against that.
I'm just saying that how many companies out there go out of their way to do something for the good of the entire industry or for the good of the consumers.
That's a really short list.
You know, it's not that many people doing that.
I know Food Babe just had a victory over on Subway with, uh, what was that?
That yoga mat chemical ingredient.
They've agreed to remove that.
So awesome for Food Babe.
Good job.
And I know, like, Ronnie Cummins at Organic Consumers, he does a lot of great work, and of course Jeffrey Smith at the IRT, and there are, you know, lots of others, Cornucopia, Mark Castell over there, Environmental Working Group.
There are some examples, but it's a very short list, so I hope you realize that this is not, you know, One of the reasons that you don't see this information very often is because very few people are actually working in the public interest.
Most people just take care of themselves, their own profits, and they don't worry about the public.
So in any case, Here's a discussion of what's new in the new charts.
We've already talked about that.
Let's see.
Okay, tungsten.
Quick discussion on tungsten.
It is my opinion, and I think most scientists would agree with me, that tungsten is an emerging environmental contaminant.
And I've only seen it in food products coming out of China and Asia.
So this would be a good time, I believe, for consumers to ask their rice protein companies, what is the country of origin of their rice protein?
And I know people are asking that and actually not getting the answers that they want on that.
So I think it's good to keep asking.
In my opinion, as someone who studies this quite extensively, and I believe I've actually conducted more tests on more superfoods than any other food researcher or scientist in the world.
I mean, no one has done this much testing on superfoods.
And no one has ever found tungsten until I did.
So, you know, I'm not trying to toot my own horn on it.
I'm just saying that no one was really testing for tungsten.
No one was aware of tungsten.
So I'm aware that some of these companies are saying that tungsten is safe because the FDA doesn't have any limits on it.
Well, that's not really a logical argument.
It's just because it's so new.
That no one has really documented in a federal government agency whether it has a certain amount of risk or what concentrations would be acceptable and so on and so forth.
So you can expect a lot more research on that in the months ahead.
But I think that we've already raised the alarm that these companies are working diligently to remove tungsten from their raw materials.
Now that they know it's there, they can...
Well, they've already been conducting laboratory tests and they're going to work with their suppliers.
To remove it.
So that's a very good thing.
That's good.
And by the way, what's really fascinating in all this too is that no one ever challenged these findings.
Again, this chart is the heavy metal tungsten in rice protein, and we found them up to over 10,000 parts per billion, which is 10 ppm, essentially, 10.2.
No one ever challenged these findings because they are factually true.
So I want you to be very aware of that.
There were some early accusations that, oh, this was all invented data, that this chart, that the data that went into this chart, you know, early on, some of the trolls, I guess, were saying, oh, it couldn't possibly be true, you know.
Mike is running a random number generator and just publishing random numbers.
Because that's how I spend my time.
Just creating massive liability for myself.
Publishing random numbers instead of factual numbers.
Give me a break.
These numbers are real.
And in fact, they've been confirmed by several different sources.
All in all, I want to thank you for your incredible support.
I also want to thank the companies that have sat down with us to reach this industry accord.
I want to thank them for their leadership and their courage in doing that.
Now, you might argue, well, it didn't take much courage.
You know, we, the people, kind of forced them to come to the table.
I mean, I've heard that argument out there.
But I think it actually did take some courage on their part.
I think they could have taken the option of just denying all this, which actually their Facebook person initially did that because they didn't know what they were talking about.
They could have taken the option.
I'm talking about the upper level of these companies, the executives and so on.
They could have said, well, this is not true and we're going to sue Mike Adams and we're going to shut him down and we're going to file court injunctions and this and that.
Well, they would never have won that because every time they would have threatened us with a lawsuit, we would have gone public with that.
Every time that they denied it, we would have published more results.
And sooner or later, all the lab results would have come out from more people.
They would have been caught red-handed, not just having this stuff in their product, but then making it worse by lying to their customers, which then they would have lost all trust, and then their whole business would have collapsed, and they would have all lost billions of dollars.
Fortunately, they didn't choose that route.
They actually did the responsible thing And sat down and said, how can we do things better?
And that's commendable because not many companies are really willing to do that, in my experience.
Certainly pharmaceutical companies are never willing to do that.
They're more like, how do we make this more toxic?
So we can have more side effects, so we can treat more people with more repeat visits in more hospitals.
That's the big pharma profit model.
You know, like, you take a diabetes drug, it destroys your liver, then you're on a liver drug, destroys your kidneys, both maybe, and then you're on a kidney drug, destroys your brain function, then you're on an Alzheimer's drug, you know, that thing.
Well, the natural product companies are not in that business model.
They want to give you good, clean food.
All the rice protein companies that are out there, they want to deliver good protein to you.
They're not in the business of making you sick.
That's not part of their business model.
They want to provide clean, authentic, nutritious food.
And so, of course, they're interested.
When something like this happens and they see that there's a way to improve their products, they're going to take that option as they did.
And that's why we were able to reach this solution, you know, with your help, with your polite pressure.
Yeah, that's what I'll call it.
Your polite pressure over on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere else.
But in any case, Oh, look, well, I've just posted this story.
Someone shared it.
Okay, so in any case, this is what's happening.
Check out the new chart at labs.naturalnews.com.
And I do want you to know that we are going to be publishing charts like this for other products, other groups of products.
In fact, as the story mentions here at the bottom, here's what's coming up soon.
Cacao products.
Yeah, do a little roundup.
And by the way, all cacao, it seems, has cadmium in it and lead.
Now whether it's high enough for you to be concerned is your choice, but pretty much all cacao has cadmium and lead.
And most coffee does as well.
Coffee, half of the high you get from coffee is from drinking cadmium, I think.
Liquid mineral supplements we'll be testing.
We've already started those tests.
There's a lot of great liquid mineral supplements out there, but because they lack all fiber, there's no way for your body to block absorption of any kind of contaminants that might be present in some supplements.
So I think it's important to put this out there.
And then grasses and greens powders is coming up.
We've already completed the testing on all of those and we're just compiling results right now and we are seeing lead in greens and grasses.
And there's a couple of herbs that we're seeing some really high lead levels, but Some of those herbs have a pretty good metals retention factor and they don't tend to release all that lead.
So there's some interesting facts about that that we'll be putting out.
In any case, we're doing our best.
Oh, I do want to finally address, there was some criticism here.
There were a few readers who weren't happy that we removed our original article as part of this agreement.
And I've thought about this with a lot of consideration, and I think if I were in those readers' shoes, I would possibly agree with them that I wouldn't be happy that Natural News removed the original article.
So I'm trying to think about this, if there's a better way that you think we can handle this in the future.
We're totally open to suggestions.
I did make that concession as part of this agreement to reach these limits.
I agreed to remove those articles and to focus on moving forward.
I understand there's some fair criticism about that.
Some people don't like the fact that we did that.
Some people love the fact that we did that.
I wish there were a better way and I'm open to ideas.
So I'm thinking in the future, maybe we'll just focus on petitions and we won't remove anything would be the way I would like to proceed.
I'm going to keep thinking about this.
I'm going to read your comments and I'm going to hope that we can find a better way to approach this.
The thing is, you know, there's not a rule book really on how to do this.
In many ways, we are inventing this as we move forward because no one's done this before.
You know, no one's ever reached this, you know, like a voluntary limit for a food industry.
Never been done.
Ever.
So there's not like a map on how to do this.
We are creating this as we move forward.
You and me together.
So if there's a better way we can do it next time, I'm all open to that.
And I'll try my best to do this in a way that is going to be as acceptable as possible to natural news readers while also getting the results that we want.
Remember, you've got to remember, this is about getting...
Results from the industry because we want to see these numbers go down.
We'd like to see everybody down here kind of in this range.
Maybe, well, the average is 0.213 ppm in this case.
We'd like to see everybody under 0.213 for sure.
So that's where we're, we're trying to get results here.
We're not, this isn't just entertainment in case you haven't noticed.
This is about like making real changes.
And to make real changes, you got to get companies to agree to do these things because the FDA is probably not going to make them do it.
This is going to be accomplished only by voluntary change and by grassroots pressure.
That's how this is happening.
So, as we want to see these numbers lower and lower and lower, You know, we're going to have to apply some grassroots activism, but we're also going to have to sit down and negotiate probably with these companies.
And hey, if somebody out there is like a master Jedi negotiator and wants to do it instead of me, You know, come on board.
I welcome you.
I don't want this job.
I'm not doing this because I'd get a kick out of it.
It's actually kind of stressful.
So, if you could do Jedi mind tricks, you know, come on board.
I welcome you.
Let me know.
You could be the negotiator, you know?
I don't see anybody, like, volunteering to take this over.
You know, I mean, there's some criticism out there.
There's a few trolls, but I don't see any of them running their own tests.
Do you?
No.
Nah.
Nobody's doing this.
You gotta wonder about that, too.
I mean, there's a lot of people selling these products.
And have they ever tested them?
Well, no.
I think I'm the only one in the world who has ever tested the stuff that we sell.
All the stuff that we sell.
Every single product.
Because if you go, here we go, if you go to our Natural News store, everything we sell here, every single thing is tested for heavy metals and it has to meet very strict limits, limits which are actually low, oops, wrong article, limits which are lower than the rice protein limits that we've set out lower than the.250 that's set there.
Everything that we sell Dang it, where'd it go?
Here it is.
Everything that we sell is lower than that, and most of it considerably lower.
So we actually test all our stuff.
I mean, have you heard of any other, is there another online retailer that tests all their products?
Doesn't exist, folks.
Doesn't exist.
So I know many of you realize how remarkable it is that we're testing everything and that we're doing this research and that we're paying for all of this.
We're spending enormous amounts of money to make this happen.
But it just goes to show you that we are authentic.
I do what I believe in.
And as many companies have now come to realize, I can't be threatened into silence.
I can't be oppressed.
I'm not going to stay silent about this.
I guess I can be convinced to take down an article and replace it with an agreement, a voluntary agreement, but I don't think that's bad news.
I think that's actually good news.
That's about as far as I will go.
I'll make a few editorial concessions in the interest of the greater good for clean products and healthy people.
So that's about it.
But I'm not, you know, I can't be silenced.
So forget about that.
You know, no one's ever going to silence me on these issues.
All right.
Well, thanks for listening.
Check out more news at naturalnews.com.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and I thank you for all your grassroots support.
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