All Episodes
Previous Next
March 22, 2018 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
33:52
Heavy metals test results released for kelp, kombu, wakame, nori, dulse and other seaweeds
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to the Heavy Metals Lab results for seaweed products.
This includes kelp, kombu, wakame, nori, dulse, and other sea vegetables and seaweeds.
You can find these at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, which is at labs.naturalnews.com.
You can find these data and many more categories.
We have begun publishing large lists Of foods and superfoods showing you the actual heavy metals concentrations that are found in those products.
So for this video, I'm going to explain exactly what these results mean and how this works.
And again, just go to labs.naturalnews.com to check it out.
And my name is Mike Adams.
I'm known as the Health Ranger.
I am known as a food activist, but more recently as a food researcher and scientist.
Focused on atomic spectroscopy and elemental analysis of foods and superfoods.
so let's go through this list now when you start with lead the atomic symbol that is pb of course which comes from latin in case you're curious why is it pb you know why isn't it like ld or something uh it's from latin now you'll notice that this list is sorted for lead by the lowest concentration which in this case happens to be a new zealand wakame it's very very clean remarkably clean It shows zero lead and also extremely low in all the other
heavy metals that we test for, which is very unusual for seaweed, by the way.
I'm actually quite astonished that I'm going to be giving this company an Editor's Choice Award for the incredible cleanliness of their product.
It's just really impressive.
But then down here at the bottom of the list, you have from the Wellpack Company, which I believe is based in China.
And clearly this seaweed, 0.851 parts per million lead.
Oh man, I would never touch that.
So there's a difference, obviously, and that's what this is all about.
If you're going to eat wakame and you don't want lead in your body, you'd probably be better off to eat from New Zealand rather than from China or wherever this brand comes from.
One thing that's important to note about this, too, is that these results actually destroy the entire argument about so-called naturally occurring lead in the soils.
Because every time we release results about lead in foods or superfoods, the manufacturers tend to put out a bunch of announcements very quickly following that, saying, oh, no, this is all just naturally occurring lead.
It's in the soil, don't worry about it, blah, blah, blah.
Well, as this clearly shows, if the water's clean, you get zero lead.
If the water's dirty, you get really high lead.
This is an issue of environmental contamination and pollution.
This is not an issue of, oh, naturally occurring lead in ocean water because otherwise the New Zealand wakame would have high lead if it was the same everywhere.
So clearly it's not.
Obviously, it's kind of common sense.
The higher the levels of pollution in the water, the more lead you're going to get in your seaweed.
It's pretty straightforward.
So there you go.
Now, of course, certain types of seaweed may naturally absorb a little bit more than other types of seaweed.
So you may see variation from kombu and dulse versus nori, for example.
If you grow nori in clean water, and then you grow the same species of nori in polluted water, then the polluted water nori is going to have higher heavy metals.
I hope that's obvious, but some people are still in a state of denial.
Can't help them, except to try to educate.
So, that's what we're doing.
Let's go down to cadmium.
You'll notice in this list, cadmium is not sorted The same way that lead was above.
That's because we've retained the same order here as the lead list.
So if New Zealand wakame was first here in lead, they're going to be first here in cadmium.
Just so that you can find them.
I suppose we could sort this by product.
I don't know, maybe we will.
Open to your suggestions.
In fact, the entire way that we came up with this chart It was based on your suggestions because we used to have one individual page for each product.
We would have a page for kelp granules and a page for kelp help and so on.
But people said, well, we need to see them in the context of being compared to other products in the same category.
And I thought, well, that makes a lot of sense.
So let's go ahead and do that.
And that's how we ended up with this page, which I agree was a great suggestion.
So thank you for that suggestion.
In any case, You notice the cadmium levels here are quite substantial, 1.9791, almost 2 parts per million cadmium.
Now what's interesting is we do tend to find substantial levels of cadmium routinely in sea vegetables and seaweeds.
So this is not unusual, and as you can see from the chart here, quite a few products had these or near these levels of cadmium.
But it's also interesting to note that we've actually found higher levels of cadmium in rice protein products.
I'll just show you real quick here.
Here we go, 2.5 parts per million in a rice protein product right here.
Although most of them were significantly below that, but we have seen cadmium in other things, you know, other than just sea vegetables.
So I think that's pretty instructive to also compare across categories.
Now, scrolling down, let's look at mercury concentrations, and I want you to understand what this is here.
This is 0.0342 parts per million was the max.
That equates to 34 parts per billion.
And the limit that I suggested to the protein industry was to have a limit of 50 parts per billion.
So all of these seaweed products are actually under 50 parts per billion, and most of them measure zero.
Kind of interesting, isn't it?
Because a lot of people think, well, if it's in the ocean, it's got to be loaded with mercury.
We have not actually found that to be the case.
We've found mercury in some things, fish in particular, you know, ocean fish like tuna.
Yeah, there's mercury in a lot of tuna.
But in terms of other things out of the ocean, we have not found...
High levels of mercury.
We've tested shrimp.
We've tested scallops.
We've tested different types of things, lots of seaweeds.
And we've just not seen that high of mercury.
So that's good news.
And at these low concentrations, I would not personally be concerned about mercury in any of these products.
Even this one, kelp powder from Star West looks like.
That mercury, even though the bar looks the longest among this group, it's actually the entire chart is low.
So I would not be concerned about mercury, personally, in anything that I see here.
Let's look at arsenic.
Now you'll notice all of a sudden we're jumping to over a hundred parts per million.
So that's, I mean, think about the scale here.
We're going from 34 parts per billion to a hundred parts per million.
So that's actually about 3,000 times larger.
Just so, you know, in case you want to do the math, this number, you know, 100 parts per million is like 3,000 times bigger than.0342 parts per million.
So arsenic is routinely found in significant concentrations in seaweeds and sea vegetables.
So the results we're seeing here are not at all unusual.
You'll also notice that it's only a couple of products that actually showed the higher arsenic in this chart, the kombu flakes and the kelp granules here from Maine coast.
And yet, and yet, these levels of arsenic here are, we do not differentiate between organic and inorganic arsenic.
So you can't automatically leap to the conclusion that this level Is, you know, dangerous or bad for you, it might be mostly organic arsenic.
You don't really know unless you do arsenic speciation tests, which we have not done for this data set.
So this is really just an early indicator that you may want to investigate further if you're looking at this and you're concerned about arsenic.
Most of the products actually tested kind of in the 20 parts per million or lower range.
And anything under 20 parts per million, in my view, I'm not that concerned about in terms of arsenic itself.
So let's move on.
Copper.
Well, here's something interesting.
You'll notice, well, geez, almost everything is very, very low in copper.
And copper is a heavy metal, by the way, and copper can actually accumulate in your liver and in your brain at high, high, high concentrations.
Well, I can't tell you exactly how many micrograms per day because that depends on your body.
But at very high concentrations, copper makes people crazy and it causes psychosis and things like that.
So a lot of people are seeking to minimize copper intake or, by the way, take zinc.
Get more zinc intake because zinc blocks copper.
Which is kind of interesting because they are right next to each other on the table of elements.
Zinc here and then copper here.
And so when you get more zinc in your body, you are able to block a lot of copper absorption.
And zinc, by the way, also helps you block cadmium absorption and mercury absorption at the same time.
So zinc is really kind of a, I don't know if magical is the right word, but powerful, certainly.
Zinc is a multi-purpose mineral and also a heavy metal.
Zinc, you want zinc to be typically higher because most people are deficient in zinc.
So if you come down here, what's got the high zinc?
It's Kelphelp from NatureVet, which happens to be the same product that contains the higher copper concentrations at 81 parts per million.
Personally, in my opinion, I don't like to see this high of a copper number.
In fact, I've actually never seen this high of a copper number before in any product I've ever tested.
Usually, I would expect these copper numbers to be down in here.
You know, the average here was like 6, so most of these are under 5 ppm.
But the fact that this copper is combined with high zinc...
At over 120 parts per million here, actually kind of balances it out.
So because of the presence of zinc, I would not be as concerned about the copper.
If I saw a product that had this very high copper level absent zinc, Then I would be concerned and cautious and would probably not eat it.
So that's really something to think about.
You always want to think about copper-zinc ratios.
So think about these two side by side.
And always try to boost your zinc intake To a degree.
I mean, obviously don't go crazy with it, but most people are zinc deficient.
So I actually suggest that you work with a naturopath or, let's say, a detox practitioner, expert, holistic physician, you name it.
Somebody who can help you determine what's going on in your body so that you can then adjust your behavior accordingly.
You might say, well, you don't want to eat any copper, so you wouldn't want to eat this.
But this is actually a product for animals, by the way.
It's not intended for human consumption.
So, I don't know.
How does copper affect your dog?
I'm not exactly sure, but...
Probably similar to the way it affects humans.
Now, let's move on to aluminum concentrations in superfoods.
Now, here you'll notice the scale goes really, really high.
So, 900 parts per million of aluminum is found in kelp granules at the main coast.
Now, at first, if you don't understand the concept of metals retention factors, you might be alarmed at this level.
I am not because I've been able to review the metals retention factor test which I conducted for this specific product because I was curious about how much of this aluminum is actually released during digestion.
And as you may know if you've been following some of the developments here at the Natural News Forensic Food Lab, which again is labs.naturalnews.com, gotta plug that.
I'm actually the food scientist who developed the metals retention factor testing methodology and concepts for ICP-MS analysis.
So I tested this with the metals retention factor.
And what I found is that in this particular case, for this product, and I can't say this is true across other products because I haven't done the test, but for this product, virtually no aluminum whatsoever is released.
I'm talking about probably less than 10 parts per million.
It's way down here that actually gets released.
So it turns out that kelp is very good at binding with aluminum.
It holds on to the aluminum that it contains, which is a substantial concentration.
So during normal human digestion, and we use a synthetic gastric acid with a digestion simulation system that I developed at the lab, we're able to simulate human digestion with a gastric acid pH of about 1.0 to typically 1.8, maybe 2.0 at the high end.
Usually it's closer to 1.0 with a potassium chloride and sodium chloride and hydrochloric acid combination in certain ratios.
And then we're able to simulate how much of this is released during human digestion and it turns out it's very small.
So because of that I'm not actually very concerned about this product.
Normally I wouldn't want to eat something with that high of aluminum but because again because it holds on to it it retains it it does not release much of it then that's not a concern.
I have not tested this product sea lettuce flakes For the metals retention factor.
But my educated guess from testing over a thousand products and looking at data for many, many months is that probably the aluminum retention is also very high on this.
So the amount released is probably very low in this range.
Probably less than five parts per million.
Alright, let's move on to zinc.
Now, zinc, again, a nutritive mineral that most people are deficient in.
It's very healthy for most people to consume more zinc.
Zinc happens to have a very wide margin of safety compared to many other minerals like, for example, copper.
Copper is nutritive at very low concentrations.
You need a very small amount of copper to be healthy.
But once you go over that amount, you can become copper toxic very, very quickly.
So it has what we call a narrow margin of efficacy.
Whereas zinc has a much wider margin, orders of magnitude larger in terms of efficacy, and it's much more difficult to become zinc toxic.
You would have to take massive amounts of zinc.
You would almost have to try to, I don't know, Commit suicide by zinc or something, which I've never even heard of that happening.
But copper, again, copper toxicity happens much more quickly compared to zinc in terms of concentrations.
So all of these seaweeds have some substantial quantities of zinc, but I don't think any of them could be considered really good sources of zinc except for probably kelp help.
Which, again, is the product for pets.
And I'm sure pets can benefit from zinc as well, obviously.
So this may be really an outstanding product for pets to take, as long as it's mixed with other foods.
In fact, most pet food, by the way, is very deficient in minerals.
And so, even though we do not show you here with, or as I was saying, what we don't show you here is all the other trace minerals.
We don't show vanadium.
We don't show chromium.
We don't show, I mean, if you look at the table of elements here, lots of different things.
We don't look at iron.
We don't look at, well, nickel.
You probably don't want extra nickel.
Not a good thing.
But we don't really look at all these other trace minerals.
We're trying to get more of a snapshot picture of the most important heavy metals that people are concerned with because these tend to be strong indicators of the level of cleanliness that these products are able to reflect.
So, if you look at, here's what's really cool about all this, by the way.
This product, New Zealand, Wakame, from this company, the Waikaitu?
Waikaitu, maybe?
If you look at their website, here it is.
Waikaitu.
They say our seaweed comes from some of the purest water in the world.
Well, guess what?
It's actually true.
It's pretty amazing.
We live in an awesome place.
Our goal is to create clean, green products that reflect the flavor, beauty, and pristine nature that surrounds us.
You know, it turns out that, look, our wakame comes from some of the cleanest water.
Let me go back to that.
There you go.
It's actually true.
This is really great to see because in this industry, one of the things that I found is that the deeper I dig, the more I find total scams and total fraudulent claims and deceptions and all kinds of things out there where people are pushing products with false marketing claims.
That's very common.
And people are pushing sometimes heavily contaminated products and calling them ultra pure pristine or whatever.
So when I actually find a company who is making a claim about coming from clean water and clean sources and then I test their product and it shows up absolutely pristine, zero detectable lead, then I'm ecstatic about it.
You know, I get excited about clean food, right?
So we're all into different things, but I get excited about really clean food to help enhance the health of people on our planet.
And this company just turns out to be really doing what they say.
I mean, what do you know?
What do you know?
They're not lying.
Wow, it's almost like they deserve, you know, an award.
So I think I'm gonna have to give them an award.
Because, you know, here they are actually telling the truth.
It's so rare.
It's just, it's so rare, man.
It's like, who's actually telling the truth anymore?
I mean, serious.
Oh, here's what their name means.
Check this out.
Y, water.
Kai, food.
And Tu, to anchor ourselves.
Why Kai Tu?
Well, there we go.
I like it.
Pretty cool.
Maybe these are the founders.
If so, they're doing honest work.
I'm so happy to see that.
It really makes this all worthwhile.
And, you know, not to say that there aren't other products on here that are also clean.
I mean, look, kelp granules from Maine Coast showed zero lead.
And by the way, for these charts, zero means under 10 parts per billion.
That's where we actually kind of consider it to be zero.
So it might be one part, two parts, three parts per billion, but effectively, that's zero.
So, you know, there's a lot of products here that are close to zero on cadmium.
The wakame and Eden Foods, Sushi Nori, virtually no cadmium.
Mercury, lots of zeros, which is good.
All these products.
Arsenic, quite a few that are pretty low.
Again, Eden Foods has another product here.
What else do we have here?
Copper, mostly pretty low.
Aluminum, most of them are substantially lower than 100 parts per million, really, if you think about it.
Which is actually pretty good compared to a lot of fresh vegetables and other groceries that you might eat.
And then they supply some amount of zinc.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with what I'm seeing here.
Except for obviously this.
These three down here, I don't like the China Seaweed at.851.
I don't like that at all.
I don't like to see this level here, which it's hard to say exactly what it is.
And this one, I don't personally like it that much.
I like to see lead really below.1.
So for me, if I were going to choose these products, I would tend to eat maybe from this list up.
That's what I would personally choose.
Now, whatever you choose is up to you.
I've had people tell me, lead doesn't matter.
And they can eat this all day long and they think that that's great.
It's kind of funny though because some of those people are the same people who freak out over fluoride in the water, aluminum from chemtrails, glyphosate at parts per trillion concentrations in their cornfields, and BPA and hormones in cow's milk, which are all at like PPB, parts per billion levels, but then they will eat Almost one part per million lead.
And they'll think that that's okay.
So, you know, they freak out about mercury fillings, but they don't think that mercury in their food is a problem.
So I don't quite understand that.
It's really not cognitively consistent.
You know, either cadmium and lead and mercury are problems In all contexts, that should be minimized, or you would have to think that none of them are ever a problem in any context.
I mean, you can't selectively decide that lead is harmless just because you like to eat that snack.
That doesn't actually make any sense.
So anyway, this is the chart, and I hope it's very useful to you.
I also hope, my main hope, oh and by the way here's some frequently asked questions that people are asking.
My main hope in this is that you really think carefully about what you're eating and make informed decisions.
To choose healthier foods and foods that minimize your exposure to any kind of heavy metals that might concern you.
You may have specific health concerns that are unique to you and unique to your genetics and your physiology and your life history and so on.
For example, cadmium, as is shown here, cadmium is linked to kidney issues at high levels.
If you look at the organs which are affected by cadmium at high levels, you know, kidneys are right at the top of the list.
But also skin.
Skin is very famous for showing effects of cadmium if it's too much.
Hey, look at this.
Chlorella protects against cadmium poisoning.
And lipstick has cadmium and lead and aluminum.
Why am I not surprised by that?
Oh, also, if you want to see the chart of what is considered acceptable by the world health authorities, here are limits on these medals by EPA, FDA, USP, WHO, the European Union, and California Prop 65.
There you go.
So Prop 65 says, hey, you shouldn't have more than 4.1 micrograms of cadmium from any one product.
And they don't want you to have more than 0.5 micrograms of lead from any one product.
Well, so what does that mean?
Well, if you go back here and you eat one serving of this furu wakame seaweed from Wellpack, You're exceeding Prop 65 limits because you're already getting more than 0.5 micrograms.
You're getting 0.851 in this case with this lot number.
So these are some things to think about.
You know, you can use this information to minimize your exposure, but still enjoy seaweeds and seafoods, which have many, many benefits, by the way.
That's the thing that this chart doesn't necessarily explain is All of the incredible benefits from the polysaccharides and the complex micronutrients and phytochemicals that are found in seaweed, which have, by the way, traditionally been used by many people in cancer prevention protocols and immune boosting protocols and things like that.
So obviously we can't test for all those different chemicals, at least not using atomic spectroscopy.
We have to use Something more like HPLC instrumentation, which we did not apply in this case.
So there's a lot to be said about some of the other benefits in these products, but my point is you can still enjoy those benefits by choosing products which minimize your exposure to heavy metals that you don't want to take in, in let's say significant quantities.
And the other thing to think about here is that All of these results were actually tested on the same instrument with the same external standards and the same methodologies.
So someone could potentially argue somewhat about is it exactly 0.851?
Well, different labs are going to give you slightly different numbers.
Another lab might be 0.827 or 0.889 or something like that.
Typically, labs can disagree by 10 or sometimes even 20% depending on the methodology.
But the relative concentrations will be very precise from lab to lab.
So if another lab does all of these tests and charts a curve, they will get almost precisely the same curve that we have here.
Even though these numbers might be slightly different on the total scale.
You see what I mean?
The relative concentrations is going to be very, very accurate from lab to lab.
So you can't actually take a number from a lab and say it's always that exact number, 0.851.
It can vary from sample to sample.
It can vary for a number of reasons in a slight way, in a small way, but it's not going to vary by orders of magnitude.
You're not going to send this well-pack product to another lab and have them come back with, instead of 0.851, like 0.0851.
No, that's not going to happen because that's an order of magnitude.
You're not going to see that kind of difference.
It's not like this line could be, you know, down here, one-tenth.
No.
Not going to happen.
And it's not like it's going to be ten times bigger.
You know, it's within this range, is what I'm saying, like right around in here.
And that's true with all of these.
So I hope that's very helpful to you.
I appreciate all your support and really the best way you can support us in this is to share these pages.
You may have noticed that Natural News now is entirely focused on food science research and empowering consumers with this kind of information.
So, to help us in that pursuit, you can just share our pages and encourage others to come here and check out these results.
Now, if you want to see what else we're testing, this is kind of cool.
We've got fruit drinks.
Including Sunny D and Fruit Punch and things like that.
These are all processed drinks and they have very, very low numbers across the board.
Look at the aluminum.
Even 0.571 is the largest.
Which is almost nothing in terms of aluminum.
So these are all very low.
We've got healthy cereals or relatively healthy cereals.
And you can see that most of these numbers are very low.
There's some cadmium.
But look, we're only talking about 0.071 as the highest.
Which is, you know, that's...
These are not...
Cereals tend to be relatively low in heavy metals because they are refined.
Like, see the aluminum?
The highest is 44.
Whole O's from nature's path.
And that level's not very high, and I'm almost certain that this cereal tends to hold on to a lot of that aluminum.
But we've got these results for you to check out.
Grasses.
Superfood grasses like...
Barley grass, just barley, barley grass juice, alfalfa powder, wheat grass, these kinds of things.
And you will find lead in grasses.
So you can see the range.
There's a pretty even range here.
And isn't this interesting?
Now Foods has...
Barley grass with zero lead in it.
Very unusual.
I just don't see that very often.
But you can go through and you can see for yourself what these are.
Now, I will say finally that there are...
Getting back to the sea vegetables.
Oh, you want to see something really funny?
Check out the junk food cereals.
These are like Frosted Mini Wheats and Frosted Flakes and Corn Chex and Captain Crunch and Fruit Loops.
Almost entire junk cereals and virtually have no levels of anything.
Not heavy metals, not nutrients.
They're just very, very low in everything.
I mean, look at that.
Aluminum 27 at the highest.
And most of them are much, much lower.
Wow!
Look at this.
General Mills looks like they have put zinc in their total blueberry pomegranate cereal, which doesn't have blueberries or pomegranates in it.
But it does have zinc.
Isn't that interesting?
Anyway, Finally, getting back to these results, one thing you're going to see as we release more lab results, and we've already been through this with some other product categories, is that every one of these companies, when you ask them about these lab results, they're going to give you essentially the same answer.
And that answer is, oh, these levels are totally safe.
No matter what the level is, they're all going to say, it's totally safe.
So, you know, Wellpack is going to say, well, ours is totally safe.
Just like New Zealand is going to say theirs is totally safe.
You know, no one's going to tell you, yeah, you know, our product is contaminated with pollution.
You shouldn't eat it.
You're not going to get that kind of answer.
So it's almost no use really to contact these companies.
Just vote with your dollars.
Just buy cleaner products.
And the market will change.
And we are providing a very important public service role of providing transparency so that we are publishing the actual composition of their products.
So as more and more people discover this website, these companies will have an incentive to source cleaner and cleaner raw materials.
Or grow their seaweed in a cleaner ocean.
Or maybe you shouldn't harvest wakame off the coast of China.
Only 100 miles from a giant sewage dump site or whatever it happens to be.
Maybe you wouldn't want to harvest seaweed out of the Gulf of Mexico, which is not clean water.
So hopefully these companies will have incentives to do good things and hopefully we'll help support companies like this, Waikaitu in New Zealand, that has this remarkably clean product.
So that's my aim in this, and I appreciate all your help in spreading the word.
Wow, did you see, like, as we were just recording this video, this number jumped up a couple hundred, I think, or at least a hundred.
It keeps jumping.
Let me refresh it again.
What's it now?
Yeah, well, it's up a little bit now.
Okay.
Anyway, yeah, people want to know this information, so thanks for sharing.
And again, if you'd like to learn more, go to labs.naturalnews.com.
My name is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and this is my new mission, is to keep you informed on what's really in the food you're eating.
▲
Export Selection